Government Productivity Quotes

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

[Peter] Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. Its the aim of my administration to prove Mr Drucker wrong.

Without computers, the government would be unable to function at the level of effectiveness and efficiency that we have come to expect. . . . Today's government uses computers which are capable of cranking out millions of documents per day without any regard whatsoever for their content, thereby freeing government employees for more important responsibilities, such as not answering their phones.

Congress ... ought to work five days a week to keep legislation from piling up.

For some in Washington, it's become sport to pick on the federal workforce. I think they do so unjustly. The very foundation of a stable America is having a government that functions well. Many countries have dysfunctional governments, because they don't have a good government workforce.

Not many governments are reelected in Canada, against an adversarially hostile media, even when it's a government which has been as productive as yours. ... their power in Canada is as infuriating as it is real.

We don't need more government, we just need the government we have to work smarter and more efficiently.

[Describing Congress:] We generally lounge or squabble the greater part of the session, and crowd into a few days of the last of the term three or four times the business done during as many preceding months.

The idea that every subcommittee of Congress gets to question the [cabinet] Secretaries as often as they want to is an extraordinary waste of time.