On February 11, 2009, Lynn was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 93–4. He took the oath of office on February 12. Lynn cautioned in May 2009 that Congress and the Obama administration should be careful not to make things worse in overhauling the Pentagon's weapons-buying practices. ""We need to keep in mind the importance of not making the system worse in our efforts to achieve reform,"" Lynn said in testimony prepared for the House Armed Services Committee. ""This has happened in the past."" Lynn told lawmakers the Pentagon will hire 20,000 new personnel to manage weapons acquisition as part of sweeping reforms that President Obama and Congress have been pushing for. The proposal to hire 20,000 new employees is "aggressive," Lynn said, but the Pentagon needs program managers, cost estimators, software engineers and systems engineers. He said Pentagon leadership will start bringing the new people in at the beginning of fiscal 2010. ""We are mindful it is going to be an organizational challenge,"" he said. The Pentagon leadership has started a sweeping effort to free up about $100 billion over the next five years to maintain current fighting forces and to modernize weapons systems. Lynn in June 2010 said the goal is to find more savings within the defense budget without cutting the top-line number. Pentagon leaders are eying 2 to 3 percent real growth in the Pentagon's budget for the areas that need it most: force structure and modernization. Two-thirds of the $100 billion cost savings spread out over the next five years will come from trimming overhead on a department-wide basis. That money will be directly transferred into the force structure and modernization accounts, Lynn explained. The rest of the cost savings would come from ""developing efficiencies within those force structure and modernization accounts,"" he added. ""If we're able to reduce overhead accounts where we don't need those increases, shift it to the force structure and modernization accounts, we can get that 2 to 3 percent [real growth] and we can do what we think we need to do in technology refresh, modernization, protecting quality of life and all those critical factors."" Lynn warned that in order to get to the $100 billion in savings the Pentagon leadership and the military services will have to identify ""lower priority programs"" that are not going to be part of future budgets. On January 6, 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates outlined the $100 bn worth of savings planned over the next 5 fiscal years (FY2012-FY2016) designed to be reinvested in military capabilities, plus additional 5-year savings worth $78 bn designed to contribute to deficit reduction.