Wernher von Braun Quotes
In order for us to use the very best judgment possible in spending the taxpayer's money intelligently, we just have to do a certain amount of this research and development work ourselves. We just have to keep our own hands dirty to command the professional respect of the contractor personnel engaged with actual design, shop and testing work.
Bilstein, Roger E. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles. NASA SP-4206, NASA, 1980, p. 143.
He was one of the few Congressman who never engaged in the shady practice of earmarking appropriations for their own districts, states, constituents and lobbyists who contribute to their campaigns. However, like almost all members of Congress, he was very aggressive in seeking and supporting programs for his district.
When opposing the appropriations for the then new Hart Senate Office Building:
President Jefferson in 1803, in the first instance of presidential impoundment, deferred for a few months the building of gunboats for which Congress had appropriated funds. In 1876 the President actually refused to spend the congressionally appropriated funds for river and harbor improvements in the midst of bad economic times:
Announcing his committee's intention to reduce the authority of government officials at HUD after a series of scandals:
This quotation pithily summarizes a common problem in politics of describing budgets. In most years there has been a national inflation. If a new budget is, in actual dollars, the same as the previous years or a little more, but the increase is less than the inflation level, the agency will not be able to provide the same level of services as the previous year. Therefore services will be cut and those who are politically in favor of more money for the program legitimately describe this as a “budget cut”. Opponents of larger funding increases, also legitimately describe the funding as a “budget increase”. One side refers to what the money can buy and the other, to the absolute dollars spent. This is an example of the classical ambiguity of political oratory.
Automated Teller Machine by which banks dispense cash.
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was a German-born American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States.
