Administrative Capacity Quotes

With bad laws and good civil servants it's still possible to govern. But with bad civil servants even the best laws can't help.

It will be a comprehensive response. The ID issue is one of them. It will make sure that Home Affairs has the capacity to reach people and to make sure that the people themselves know that they have got to get these documents and where to go to get them.

The instruments of state prove too big to do the small things and too small to do the big things.

If you don't have the ability to work with local authorities, and confront corruption and tribal issues, then you'll fail.

One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.

His [the President's] office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.

You have acquired so enormous a mass of territory that it will be years before you can settle it or control it, or make it capable of defense or make it amenable to the acts of your administration

The question of our time is rapidly becoming can government get things done?

First, we need to focus government on the things that are required of the State. Second, we need to achieve competence in government so that the State delivers on the things it sets out to do.

If people are able to run the affairs of a village well, eventually they'll be able to run a township, and a county.

The government is fully capable of delivering services. Even complex services.

I would like to see whether my supposed successors can really operate the government without causing a crisis.

There are three qualifications required in those who have to fill the highest offices, - (1) first of all, loyalty to the established constitution; (2) the greatest administrative capacity; (3) virtue and justice of the kind proper to each form of government.

It’s very hard for any administration, and I’ve worked with seven, to focus on any more than one major thing at a time.

While we have appropriated money year after year to expand the agencies the agencies, departments, and the White House staff, we have neglected to staff ourselves adequately to meet our oversight responsibilities.

National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.

Obama and his associates are fantastic campaigners but have little ability or skill to govern.

The United States is unused to Colonial rule and lacks a trained body of colonial administrators and civil servants.

Our battle over the size of the state overlooks a problem that is just as important and that may be easier to muster the collective will to resolve: how effective government is, regardless of its scale.

There are big questions about the sort of skills you need in modern government today. You put politicians in charge of billions of dollars with absolutely no training and very little support system around them. It's an extraordinary thing.

The important decisions of the country are being made by a smaller and smaller group in the White House…. The Executive Branch has lost the ability to use the resources that are there [The Civil Servants].