Leonard Boswell Quotes

The 9/11 Commission strongly recommends that the National Intelligence Director be fully in control of the budget, from developing it to implementing it, to ensuring that the National Intelligence Director has the clout to make decisions.

Before we give you billions more, we want to know what you've done with the trillion you've got.

You may think my business is to make appropriations, but it is not. It is to prevent their being made.

The power of the purse is the only real power of government.

It is time for us to insist that we are accountable for the money that we are spending.

By finding waste and abuse in entitlement programs, and eliminating it, we can ensure that the funds that are put into these programs go to the people that need them the most.

There's broad recognition that you really have to put the money where people are going to self-manage.

Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power.

The President should have full opportunity ... of opposing whatever appropriations seemed to him objectionable without imperiling the success of others.

We, in a sense, are taking back Uncle Sam's checkbook.

A unity of the Executive would be necessary in order to promote dispatch; -that a plurality of Persons would never do. When I was in Holland the States general were obliged to give up their power to a French Man to direct their military operations…. However power is always increasing on the part of the Executive

there is often an imbalance between the prerogatives of the executive branch and the capacity of a parliament to truly exercise its regulatory powers over public spending and the budget.

… the less we use our power the greater it will be.

I have learned, if you give a team a budget, then the team tries to maximise the budget so that they get the same next year.

Congress has the constitutional responsibility to control the power of the 'purse'.

It's one thing to get the money apportioned in the budget; the other is to utilise it completely.

We're not getting a good return on investment on all that money we're pumping into the intelligence community. One of the first things I would suggest is that if there's an attack and they fail to stop it or to alert us before it happens, that we ought to start cutting their budget, and for every attack they should lose ten percent of their budget.

They called me Veto Corleone. Because I vetoed 2,500 separate line-items in the budget.

No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Power is generally defined as control over resources and control over access to resources, which often means control over other people because we're thinking about things like financial resources or shelter, or even love and affection, but we also possess resources that we sometimes can't access.

But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work.

Leaders are leaders only as long as they have the respect and loyalty of their followers.

I enjoyed being President.

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think.