Quotes About Bureaucracy

We will not let bureaucracy stand in the way of governing.

Well, you could take several stories off the buildings of most U.S. government agencies and we'd all probably be better for it too.

One thing is clear: Our governments have too many laws.

When they discover I have a green card there may be some problems.

There's still is a status-quo group at City Hall who likes things done the old way, behind closed doors.

As an organization grows, layers get added, staff groups swell, rules proliferate, and compliance costs mount. Once a company hits a certain threshold of complexity—around two hundred to three hundred employees, in our experience—bureaucracy starts growing faster than the organization itself.

dismantling bureaucracy means dismantling traditional power structures. As you may have noticed, people with power are typically reluctant to give it up, and often have the means to defend their prerogatives. This is a serious impediment, since there's no way to build a human-centric organization without flattening the pyramid.

It is our bureaucracy-encrusted organizations that are slow witted, not the people inside them.

FIGURE 3-3 Bureaucrats and bureaucratic work as a percentage of the US workforce

Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.

Conservatives commonly characterize liberals in three ways: (1) as lovers of bureaucracy; (2) as defenders of special interests; and (3) as advocating only rights and no responsibilities (the "permissive society").

Since I joined Congress, I've been shocked at how many times we were forced to vote on 1,000-plus-page bills without ample time to read or review what was in the final legislation. It's no wonder Congress doesn't enact good policy.

I was just wondering if I'd ever get a visa to go to the U.S. Probably not.

In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. The word 'government,' for example, is normally pronounced 'gummint'; bureaucracy is 'bureaucacy'; fiscal comes out 'physical,' and one moves not to suspend the rules, but to 'suppend.'

If our most highly qualified General Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organization for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid that that which we have at present.

The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA - thousands standing around.

When teachers try to teach, nurses try to nurse, small businesses try to serve their clients and the police try to arrest criminals, there is always a regulator or three breathing down their necks. Conservatives want to make people's lives easier.

For me, governing starts with people. It doesn't start with bureaucracy. It doesn't start with policy. It starts with people and what people need to thrive.

In countries such as France and Germany, layers of bureaucracy like health boards have been specifically engineered to delay the adoption of new medical products and services, thus lowering spending.

You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen? The Administrative Procedure Act is designed to thwart this sort of maneuver.

We live in a world where the laws are getting so tight that management has changed to micro-management to quantum-management to paralysis.

I've been around the government system and believe me it's built to spend. You've got to change the system, otherwise it's like asking a cultivator to do what a combine does, it just doesn't fit, it won't get it done. You've got to change the system.

Whatever the country, whatever the culture, whatever the time, when you become a big enough organization, you start to collapse and slow down.

Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator