Bureaucratic Structure Quotes

The British civil service ... is a beautifully designed and effective braking mechanism.

I have not had the cabinet here for 6 weeks. I can run the government better without them.

The White House staff [under Richard Nixon] viewed Congress in much the same way that the chairman of the board of a huge corporation regards his regional sales managers.

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

I think in the corridors of power these dangerous kinds of orders are issued in a much more vague way, passed down two or three levels of command before they're given to the assassin.

At the White House, everybody works for the same person. They're all part of the same company. But on Capitol Hill, they're all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. That's a formula for getting news.

In the first place, bureaucracies never become efficient; they're never going to get rid of administrative costs; they're never going to reduce them. That's not the purpose of bureaucracies. It's to increase those things.

The way that things happen in Egypt, the government - or the head of the government - don't get personally involved. They were always goonies and agents and people who do that kind of work for the government either by direct instructions or because they think that they're doing something good or they want to be on the good side of the government.

There is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the ‘bureaucrats’. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers.

Some day, the public might actually revolt against the undemocratic system of seniority that allows Congress to keep the old ways of Washington ingrained into the culture of Congress.

You can't have fifteen people coming together to give the president advice in a Cabinet session. They're all arguing with each other for their own interests and he gets confused. What he decides has to come to him in an orderly way.

Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.

The problem with Microsoft is that it's so committee-driven and slow.

I think we made a mistake in limiting so severely the size of exempt staff. If we want to control policy and run the departments, Ministers need more staff.

The administrative control of the government remains everywhere. You can't have a government within the country and not have control over everything that's happening in the country... Even in the Election Commission there is some extent of administrative control.

The Japanese bureaucracy is unique. It is also very powerful, although it is now the object of so much criticism. Many of Japan's brightest made it a pillar of strength and continuity.

What we called the Civil Service was, in the main, merely a mass of Republican political appointees frozen into office by act of Congress.

Different units of our bureaucracy have different cultures and each thinks that his is the best.

There is an important sense in which government is distinctive from administration. One is perpetual, the other is temporary and changeable. A man may be loyal to his government and yet oppose the particular principles and methods of administration.

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

I would rather propose a bureau somewhat similar to that which we have in the Universal Postal Union.

If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union.

With respect to the FBI, they had problems communicating in a vertical way, within the FBI itself, so that information of importance could get pushed up to those who were decision-makers.