David Brooks Quotes

There are only two powers that matter in the bureaucracy of Washington: The power to say ‘Here’s your money,” and the power to say “You’re fired!”

Bureaucrats understand who their real masters are. Their real masters are not their nominal department heads. The real powers are the chairmen on Capitol Hill.

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.

The administrative process is, in essence, our generation’s answer to the inadequacy of the judicial and legislative processes. It represents our efforts to find an answer to those inadequacies by some other method than merely increasing executive power.

Those of you who end up in public service will come to appreciate the difficulty of wielding the extraordinary power of the government effectively and fairly. Much of this power is housed in the many departments and agencies that are charged with carrying out specific functions of government. Those who do not have daily interactions with a government agency may not realize just how much influence bureaucracies wield.

We ought not to forget that the government, through all its departments, judicial as well as others, is administered by delegated and responsible agents; and that the power which really controls, ultimately, all the movements, is not in the agents, but those who elect or appoint them.

What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

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

Yes, Ronald Reagan did sleep through cabinet meetings—and deservedly so. They were incredibly tedious. I know; I was there.

the career bureaucracy can project greater political power on its own, resist more successfully the politician's attempts to assert effective control. What is lost in administrative efficiency through spoils may be gained in political development, especially if party patronage can also be used as a lever to gain control over administration.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

When I embarked in the government, it was with a determination to intermeddle not at all with the legislature.

The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it.

The line has not been exactly drawn which separates those important subjects, which must be entirely regulated by the legislature itself, from those of less interest, in which … power may be given to those who are to act under such general provisions to fill up the details.

I had been in the administration long enough to know that Cabinet rank meant nothing.

The roots of power in the White House are often bourbon and branch water taken with the President at the end of the day.

I am not bound by instructions from the State Department. I am a member of the President's cabinet and take instructions only from him.

When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states; that the states themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices or officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily, and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

Modern administrative government springs from the inadequacy of a simple tripartite form of government to deal with modern problems …. It vests the necessary powers with the administrative authority it creates, not too greatly concerned with the extent to which such action does violence to the traditional tripartite theory of government organization.

This government, unlike the last government, is actually governing.

Governing is about selecting.

The increasing complexity of the Executive Branch is mirrored by the size of the cabinet.

Presidents may go to the seashore or to the mountains. Cabinet officers may go about the country explaining how fortunate the country is in having such an administration, but the machinery at Washington continues to operate under the army of faithful non-commissioned officers, and the great mass of governmental business is uninterrupted.

The question today is not whether the government is too small or too small, but whether or not it works

Any President can control the agenda.