Administrative Oversight Quotes

Making the bureaucracy accountable to the President in any comprehensive and enduring way is impossible. Making it alert to his preferences is possible in those cases where Presidents put loyal and competent subordinates in charge of making decisions.

Any bureaucracy must be restrained by law.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

When an enlightened ruler controls his ministers, he makes it so that ministers cannot get credit for achievements gained by overstepping the bounds of their offices or make proposals and then fail to match them with actual achievements.

As head of the Karnataka government, it's my responsibility to implement the judgements and directions of the High Court.

It’s a big country; it needs a lot of regulation.

I had learned many years ago in private business never to take responsibility without adequate authority; and the new Secretary of Defense, as budgets were sharply cut, quickly found that out.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Any President can control the agenda.

We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.

We will use new technology to hard-wire the kind of [transparency] reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can’t be undone in the next administration.

The Obama administration is on notice - they will not be allowed to regulate what they have been unable to legislate.

The job of government is to govern. They ought to get on with it.

We are a very big and vast Government, and naturally, every ministry is becoming bigger and bigger. It becomes, therefore, essential that there should be proper coordination.

President Obama and members of his administration constantly express rage and anger over events totally within their control. It's an odd and unsettling fact of American life that so many Americans seem to think that such expressions of frustration should substitute for actual competence.

The License Raj in India was a time when, to set up an industry, you needed a license. Which made the government an omnipresent and sort of all-pervasive authority.

Government regulation is not a dangerous usurpation of your Constitutional rights. It's just a pain in the ass.

A minister is supposed to be there to remind his permanent officials that they work for the rest of us. If, instead, he becomes the cabinet champion and public spokesman for his department, democracy is vitiated.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

Government functions best as a catalyst, not a cure. We need a smarter, more effective government, not a bigger one.

The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam, I'm not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues.

The Home Office is a vast department where business as usual means that something is going wrong and, given the nature of the business, the disasters rarely lack a high profile.

It was [Donald trump] had seen me on the job there, doing other things, and he asked me if I could run the place, and so we had that conversation. But I appreciate that, too.

Those who were closest to Yeltsin behaved as if they were running the government.

Government has much wider dimensions than merely managing an economy.