The Federal Government's Director of Cyber Security resigned this week and he cited a lack of support and funding as well as an overreliance on the National Security Agency (NSA) for combating threats to our Nation's computer systems.

I think that Senator McCaskill has raised an important point, and it is a point that I had intended to raise as well.

I think it is extremely unfortunate that the omnibus bill has not been revised to take into account the recently appropriated funds in the stimulus bill.

The more eyes that we have on this spending, the better.

In the American Recovery Act, otherwise known as the stimulus bill, there is some very good language and good provisions to put us in a position to protect the taxpayers in the spending of this money.

Waste or fraud in the spending of the $500 billion of stimulus funds will only further erode the American people's confidence in their government.

It becomes difficult, and the problems are obvious as you try to measure this.

The Recovery Act also creates several important oversight mechanisms that the Chairman and I worked hard to ensure were included.

I think if you are looking at re-employing annuitants, we have to take away the huge financial disincentive for them to come back to work.

It is critical. I am very pleased that Maine has the opposite situation of Connecticut.

We remain determined to protect this critical spending from waste, fraud, and mismanagement.

Double-counting types of situations, because the one you were describing, an argument could be made, well, did that second job then kill 50 jobs.

I think there ought to be some flexibility to maybe shift some of the time frames for when the money is spent.

if you take $787 billion, even if it is a 1 percent loss, you are talking about a huge amount of money

Now the challenge is to make sure that the billions of dollars provided by that law achieve the purpose of boosting our economy and saving and creating jobs.

I am fearful that a lot of people will fall for that scam because--and what I think was an error in policy--we did do these one-time checks a year or so ago of $300 or $600 to taxpayers.

Striking the right balance between speed and caution has been a challenging task.

the success of the pilot program, in our view, is also very important to striking the right balance, as Senator Collins was talking about, between accountability and getting the money out quickly.

the intent--indeed, the letter of the stimulus act--requires Federal, State, and local governments, but also private businesses, that are receiving money under the Recovery Act to adhere to the transparency and accountability requirements.

I think a lot of the work that you are doing, while extremely worthwhile, is probably the tip of the iceberg.

It would indeed be unfortunate and ironic if money is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse because States had insufficient funds to hire the necessary contracting officials, auditors, and oversight employees.

These funds must be disbursed quickly to meet the goal of stimulating the economy.

It is going to be a challenge. I will not try to softball that one.

Preventing fraud in the execution of stimulus funding is a key element to the ultimate success of the Recovery Act.

It is extraordinarily important that we track the job creation provisions of this bill so that we know whether or not we were successful in creating or saving 3.5 million jobs.