Tom Fitton Quotes

This change to a higher phase of alert is a signal to governments, to ministries of health and other ministries, to the pharmaceutical industry and the business community that certain actions now should be undertaken with increased urgency and at an accelerated pace.

The CDC and the federal government have already admitted that they have failed to get ahead of the spread of Ebola in Texas, and we aren't going to let that happen in Florida.

It's critically important that people trust you during a public health crisis.

The safety of the people is the first and foremost responsibility of government… We are not as prepared as we should be with our public safety network…. The margin for error is exceedingly and uniquely low.

Governments and local administrative bodies decide to inform the public of their mistakes only when losses have become disproportionately great.

I want every health care professional, every first-responder, every citizen, every visitor to know that in Florida we continue to prepare for the worst. But we pray for the best.

State and local governments in New Jersey are a critical line of defense in the effort to respond to COVID-19.

It's essential that we have a coordinated, well-resourced government response to the coronavirus to keep Kansas communities safe.

I will make no apologies, ever, for protecting the lives and the safety of the American people. We have to give more tools to our folks to be able to do that, not fewer, and then trust those people and oversee them to do it the right way. As president, that is exactly what I'll do.

One of the essential elements of government responsibility is to communicate effectively to the American people, especially in time of a potential terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

Governments in countries across the world have a duty to do everything possible to keep the public safe from terrorist attacks.

Within minutes of the attack, your Department of Public Safety mobilized its Operations Center, headed by a national expert on weapons of mass destruction.

For political and bureaucratic reasons, governments at all levels are telling far less to the public than to insiders about how to prepare for and behave in the initial chaos of a mass-casualty event.

It is our duty to watch over the actions and activities of this government and to insist that, in words as well as in deeds, the interests of our constituency primarily and of the Nation ultimately are served.

When there is an influenza threat, drop everything and focus on risks from influenza pandemics. When SARS spreads, focus on unknown respiratory diseases. This approach helps to quell public concern, but it's a hugely inefficient way to deal with future risks.

If we can provide even a few months of early warning for just one pandemic, the benefits will outweigh all the time and energy we're devoting. Imagine preventing health crises, not just responding to them.

We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk.

An urgent need exists for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential… Our form of government…is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny…CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy.

Public agencies should be criticized.

Anything you say before a pandemic occurs sounds alarmist; anything you say after it occurs is inadequate.

Four years after 9/11 it is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis. It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on a terrorist watch list. It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending, not risk.

You can't fire anybody in Government; everyone blames the system. Look what is happening in NASA. Now we have to truck out these 200-plus audits out of the closet because we had a disaster [the Challenger], and we still can't find someone to fire.

We are the most scrutinized agency of the Federal government and we should be because of the enormous power we have and its potential for abuse

911 rings at the mayor’s office, not at the Justice Department or the White House.

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.