Bureaucratic Expansion Quotes

Today, the Federal Government is simply trying to do too much.

Government has a legitimate sphere of operation. The problem arises when that sphere continually expands, encompassing areas where government lacks legitimacy.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.

These are people who don't believe the government can possibly get too big. It's not possible for it to get too big. It's not possible for the government to get too powerful. It's not possible. And yet they are worried at the 'New York Times' about what is happening to it under the guidance of the presidency and Mr. Obama.

When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down; when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn't that exactly what's been happening with drugs?

Modernization vastly increased the power of the state. It gave the rulers new tools—the powers of indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

Staff expands to fill the office space available.... The basic obligation of Congress is to the tax payers, not to its own creature comforts.

It is crucial that the House exercises its oversight functions to ensure constitutional accountability of government agencies, especially as the bureaucracies associated with ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank flex their muscles and seek to expand their authority.

I have always thought of government as a kind of organism with an insatiable appetite for money, whose natural state is to grow forever unless you do something to starve it.

I have done it [appointed commissions] regretfully and with the hope that it would be temporary. But after a commission is established you find it always wants to enlarge itself, employ more people, is very busy with Senators and Congressmen to impress upon them the great value of the services of the commission, and even when I talk to people that I appoint to commissions and tell them I would like them to go on to various boards with the idea that they may be abolished, they say they ought to be abolished, but when they have taken their position they very soon seem to change their mind.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

The capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.

For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.

Mission creep is not unique to Congress. It is endemic to all arms of the federal government.

A government should not become too big to fulfill one of its most basic functions: representation.

When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.

Unlike despotisms, modern democracies are not supposed promiscuously to accumulate property and then charge their taxpayers to maintain it. But that is what they do. Governments are always trying to extend their responsibilities and their estates, and it is very hard for parliaments to reign them in.

In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.

There is a flaw in the operation of representative government. The flaw produces the growth of government.