Hillary Rodam Clinton at Obama's Cabinet $100 million there, $100 million here Meeting

Today President Obama held his first cabinet meeting, and made clear that relentlessly cutting out waste was part and parcel of their mission to make the investments necessary for recovery and long-term stability. Speaking to the press afterwards, he began his remarks expressing his pride in his Cabinet and the work they have been doing to start creating jobs again, then turned to the central message of the day: cutting spending.

He emphasized a few key points to the press, all the while Hillary nodded along, affirming every word Obama spoke.

He began by stating he was extremely proud of the intelligence, diversity and work ethic of his cabinet. He then went on to affirm that every single American's tax dollar is being spent wisely in the face of this unprecedented economic crises.

He told the members of the cabinet, "As well as you have already done, you are going to have to do more." He asked them all to at least identify $100 million in cuts to their administrative budgets, which is noted is in addition to the program cuts that are already going to be implemented.

"Many of the agencies have already taken some extraordinary steps to consolidate, streamline, and improve their practices. Just a couple of examples: Veterans Affairs has canceled or delayed 26 conferences, saving nearly $17.8 million, and they're using less expensive alternatives like videoconferencing.

The USDA, under Secretary Vilsack, is working to combine 1,500 employees from seven office locations into a single facility in 2011, which we estimate will save $62 million over a 15-year lease term. Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security estimates that they can save up to $52 million over five years just by purchasing office supplies in bulk...

In the next few weeks we expect to cut up to 100 current programs to free up those dollars in order to put them to use for critical areas like healthcare, education, energy, our foreign policy apparatus which is so important." (as he gestures to Hillary)

He noted that none of these cuts by themselves are going to make a difference, but cumulatively they will make an extraordinary difference because they start to set a tone. They are going to go "line by line, page by page" cutting "a million dollars here, a million dollars there" and "even in Washington that adds up to real money."

After all the fanfare of the first Cabinet meeting, Hillary returned to the State Department for some bilaterals.

She met with Maxime Verhagen, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of The Netherlands today. As an aside...I was on Twitter earlier and I saw a tweet... twit? tweet or twit? ah! you know what I mean! Anyways... I saw that Mazime Veragen tweeted a photo of him and the Secretary on his own Twitter page. How cute! Yes, he DOES indeed have a twitter! http://twitter.com/MaximeVerhagen

Which reminds me... Hillary needs to get on the twitter thing! I know she is incredibly, incredible, crazy busy, sooo I propose this: I can tweet for her! Eh? Eh? State Department, Call me!

Read full remarks and two questions from the press here or watch below:

She also met with Marcos Kyprianou, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus. Read their full remarks here or watch below: