Quotes About Bureaucracy

Defense leaders should be searching for ways to reform out-of-date procurement processes, to collapse layers of Pentagon bureaucracy, and to restrain the growth in personnel and benefits costs. A critical first step in that process should be to conduct a full Pentagon audit to determine how DOD spends taxpayer dollars.

We need to do a top/bottom review of the federal government and for every agency administration bureaucracy that is not called for in the United States Constitution, we have to really ask the question what is its purpose, how many people work there, how much does it cost the taxpayers and what is the value to our society.

We won't accomplish our goals by creating a new federal bureaucracy or by bribing states with their own taxpayers' money.

Schools can do extraordinary things given the chance; teachers can do remarkable things if we eliminate the paperwork that sometimes binds them and give them a chance to really teach in our schools.

I liked teaching, but the bureaucracy of academia and the petty intrigue... It wasn't a good fit. Once I admitted that myself, that I didn't like academia, I was ready to try TV.

In the political system, we are a team; politics and bureaucracy, we are a team. The politicians, bureaucrats and the people, we are a team.

Somebody has to tell the E.P.A. that we don't need you monkeying around and fiddling around and getting in our business with every kind of regulation you can dream up. You're doing nothing more than killing jobs. It's a cemetery for jobs at the E.P.A.

Everything government touches turns to crap.

Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.

The universe never did make sense I suspect it was built on government contract.

Trotsky, in whose writings we find very many valuable observations on Stalin as an individual, took the position that he was important not in his own right but only as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy. As he summed up his view in The Revolution Betrayed, "Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

Hence the abolitionist-minded intelligentsia, along with liberal elements in Russian society and within the bureaucracy, inclined not toward a constitutionalist program, realization of which would only strengthen the political influence of the landowners, but to the idea of a progressive autocracy.

But institutionally authoritarian as it was, the Soviet party-state of the NEP years was a far cry from the dread bureaucratic leviathan conjured up by our image of a "totalitarian system."[490]

President Lyndon Johnson once said, "If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it is a bureaucracy." Don

It is a rare company where the head of a line unit—an operating division—will offer the CEO a dramatic proposal for transforming (or eliminating) his own organization. I never had a line of executives outside my office anywhere I worked who were there on their own initiative to tell me what was wrong with their outfit and how they intended to fix it. I am confident the same is true of most CEOs. Leaders have to understand that a bureaucracy is incapable of reforming itself.

very size and structure of the department assured ponderousness, if not paralysis, because so many different organizations had to be involved in even the smallest decisions.

One tactic of bureaucracies is to so fill the boss's time with meetings that he or she has no time to meddle in their affairs or create problems for them.

I had done it stupid, early in my career at CIA, by trying to impose significant change by edict from the top.

The creed of the Inland Revenue is simple: "If we can bring one little smile to one little face today, then somebody's slipped up somewhere."

Today we know that centralization and big bureaucracies have not, as promised, been the answer for promoting better opportunities for society.

Death should take more care with his paperwork.

Anarchists were opposed to bureaucracy of any kind, and their rallying cry was "Too many committees!

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

The state put a Broad-trained superintendent, Randy Ward, in charge of the Oakland schools ... Ward embraced the small schools but went further; his school reform plan aimed to turn the district into a marketplace of school choice while overhauling the bureaucracy. He closed low-performing schools and opened charter schools. He attracted $26 million in grants from the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Dell Foundation, and corporations based in Oakland.