YOU can come up with a better way to the Moon.

This report says the White House preferred option beforehand was to
kill Ares I. They just wanted an independent review panel to give
sufficient justification for it:

Presidential panel presents Obama with major NASA dilemma.
posted by Orlando Sentinel on Aug 14, 2009 6:12:43 PM
By Mark K. Matthews and Robert Block
"WASHINGTON -- When President Barack Obama named a panel to review
NASA’s manned-space program, his aides said privately they were hoping
the group would recommend scrapping NASA’s troubled Ares I rocket
program and finding another, cheaper way to get humans back to the
moon.
But the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee came to a
troubling conclusion this week: NASA’s current budget offers no hope
of sending humans past the international space station for 20 years or
more."
....
"But Obama officials were reluctant to kill the Constellation program
by decree. They preferred that an independent panel come to what they
saw as the only logical conclusion: that Ares I was, as one put it,
“infeasible.”
"But they didn’t expect that NASA’s budget would leave no room for
another rocket capable of flying beyond the space station.
"Even the panel members themselves were surprised.
"Norm Augustine, the retired Lockheed Martin CEO who leads the 10-
member panel, said he was shocked at its inability to find an option
that would fit within NASA’s current manned-space budget that the
committee put at roughly $100 billion through 2020."
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/new...a-dilemma.html

It's that last part that irritates me greatly. You mean for $100
billion dollars specifically for *manned* missions we can't come up
with a way to get to the Moon in 10 years?
According to this page the entire cost of Project Apollo with 6
successful Moon landings cost $135 billion in inflation adjusted
dollars:

Apollo program.
7 Program costs and cancellation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_...d_cancellation

You mean in 40 years we haven't figured out a way to do better than
that?
Remember when the first President Bush back in 1989 proposed manned
missions to Mars at a cost of $500 billion? The huge cost estimates
led people like Robert Zubrin to come up with ways to do it at roughly
1/10th that amount.
We need new people otuside NASA to accomplish the same for Moon
missions.

Bob Clark