Gregg said the Obama administration made a "tactical mistake" on the stimulus bill by allowing it to be written by "House appropriators, and if it were written by Senate appropriators, the same problem would have occurred.''

"It should have been drafted, or at least the philosophy that drove it should have been drafted, by people who were thinking about the larger picture of how you get the economy going." . . .

Appropriators, as Gregg called them, "by definition don't have focus and are only interested usually in the accounts they have jurisdiction over. They all have their small arena of responsibility.

"They don't come from a philosophical standpoint," he said. "They come from a standpoint of 'plussing up' whatever accounts they are responsible for."

Gregg said the result is "an unfocused product where we're spending a lot of money on initiatives which really aren't going to be all that much of a stimulus or are outside of the two-year window or are basically just social spending for the sake of constituency support." . . .

Gregg said he was not opposed to the bill simply because of its huge bottom line.

"The policy drives the number," he said, "and if you could put good policy in place, I would have no problem with the number."