Senator Warner appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" this morning ("Right after Screamin' Jim Cramer, and right before Smokin' Joe Frazier," he joked) to talk about restoring fiscal responsibility as the economic recovery package and the budget are implemented.

On the budget:

I think the President's laid out the right priorities: energy, education, health care, but also deficit reduction.  I was part of the group on the Senate Budget Committee that tried to actually ratchet back some of the President's inital spending to make sure that we can, at the end of the five year period, get down the deficit to under 3 percent of the GDP. We've got to go further. ... Let's put in place a commission to look at entitlement reform.  We've got to take on long-term, systemic spending if we're going to get this deficit under control.  

He said that one way to control the spending in the short-term is by bringing greater efficiency to government:

Let's take the stimulus package, for example.  The administration promised a lot of transparency.  I think the Recovery.gov was a good first step; I think it needs to be more robust.  But look at the areas where we're doing some I think needed spending around things like weatherization, health care IT, smart grid.  We're ramping up things very quickly.  We've got to put some metrics in place to make sure these dollars are spent efficiently.

On this budget going forward, I really hope the administration goes ahead and names that Chief Performance Officer, and whoever it is, let's give them some real juice.  Let them go in there and shake up how we do government spending across the board [and] look for efficiencies.  Part of that is eliminating programs.  But I spent 20 years in business and when I was governor of Virginia we were named the best managed state, because we looked at not only vertical reform, but also horizontal reform. 

Senator Warner shared his ideas for improving efficiency, transparency and accountability in government spending in his first speech on the Senate floor last week.