Government Competence Quotes

Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

One reason you tend to doubt conspiracy theories when you've worked in government is because you know government is not nearly competent enough to carry off elaborate theories

People may not know what tier of government has competence over which policy area but they do draw a distinction between the local and the national.

First, we need to focus government on the things that are required of the State. Second, we need to achieve competence in government so that the State delivers on the things it sets out to do.

We need a different kind of leadership in the White House that understands how to get bureaucracies competent again.

A limited government is much more likely to be a competent government.

The best minds are not in government. If they were, business would hire them away.

Donald Trump's got to do some big changes, because what he was voted on. But when you think about how to do it, it would take massive expertise, which his people, believe me, do not have.

For some in Washington, it's become sport to pick on the federal workforce. I think they do so unjustly. The very foundation of a stable America is having a government that functions well. Many countries have dysfunctional governments, because they don't have a good government workforce.

Trump bragged about hiring only the 'best people' when he was running for president. We're seeing, time and again, the opposite. It's unclear whether the president's definition of 'best people' is different than ours, or if the 'best people' simply aren't interested in working for him.

The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation--religion, education, and the distribution of wealth.

And it makes you wonder—how can a people incapable of selecting their own lightbulbs and toilets possess enough competence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns?

Obama administration didn't have one person who had ever worked in business. Not one Obama cabinet member had ever seriously had a job, run a company, met a payroll in the American economy. And, as such, no way of understanding how business is done, from negotiations to any other aspect of it. In fact, people in Obama's cabinet were arrogant and condescending and looking down on those people as a bunch of shysters and a bunch of cheats and people that kill their customers and they're destroying the planet.

Obama promised a return to competence and confidence and asked the nation to believe again that the government could do big things well. In the end, he got his big thing, a once-in-a-generation revision to the basic social compact, a commitment of health coverage to nearly all Americans. He has yet to prove he can do it well.