Policy Gridlock Quotes

Overall, Congress is dysfunctional, partisan, and polarized, and it isn’t getting anything done. We need commissions to break out of divisive partisanship.

The politicians are all useless individuals. Nobody is reducing the problems in the U.S. or Europe, just putting on a Band-Aid and postponing the problems endlessly.

Our government is the most successful contrivance the world has ever known for preventing things from being done.

Indian economy is suffering from policy paralysis and lack of optimism. I am confident that with right kind of decisions, we can once again generate hope and confidence and turnaround our economy.

They've got a Jobs Council that never meets. A Democratic Senate that doesn't act. A President who doesn't believe and a Vice President who won't stop talking. They just don't get it.

In the absence of specific solutions or evidence that we have people in Washington, D.C., who can make a significant difference... people will cling to those who at least speak to their frustrations.

The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Democrats generally do not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I never like the question about letter grades, but I think Trump is failing. I think that every day there's another set of tweets and another set of controversies, and nothing seems to be getting done that's any good. And there seems to be kind of a policy paralysis in Washington. Even the appointments he's supposed to make as a new president, so I focus most of all on climate, and so my opinion of his time as president is certainly influenced by my opinion of the job he's done on climate. He's tried to move the country in the wrong direction.

Challenges of historic import threaten America's future. Action on the deficit, economy, energy, health care and much more is imperative, yet our legislative institutions fail to act. Congress must be reformed.

Partisan politics and the reorganization of government agencies since my tenure as a Federal health official have made it very difficult to confirm strong leaders in critical positions and to coordinate efforts across agencies.

I experienced first-hand the degeneration of the poldermodel in full force.

Romney and Democratic rival President Obama have led their partisan backers down a trail of lies, negativity and vacuous policies that seem certain to guarantee an angry electorate four more years of gridlock.

In government, the forces of risk-aversion and constant conflict serve to stultify and narrow the range of ideas up for debate.

The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.

Healthcare reform is a paradigmatic case. It is self-evidently necessary and inevitable and has been on the agenda for 35 years, and the political class seems completely unable to respond to it.

Our political system has been bankrupted by the failures of Congress to act in ways that give meaning to the struggles our constituents endure.

I underestimated in this town, the degree to which politics trumps problem solving.

I'm not optimistic about reform in many, if any, policy areas at all. I think we'll make further progress by inventing new things that aren't much regulated yet and outracing bad policy. I look at so many policy areas - regulation, regulatory reform, health care reform - it's all failing, we're not making improvements, we're going backwards.

Health care has gotten really weird politically. We've sort of tied ourselves in knots on this issue in a way that we don't do... for criminal-justice reform or tax policy or climate policy.

Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. ...Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission

Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have all complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one-time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington.

And so whether it's failing to move forward on the Dream Act, failing to move forward on putting teachers back to work, failing to do all the things we could do right now to help the economy and middle class, this Congress is just saying no.

We, as a country, have not seen a significant change in immigration policy in nearly two decades, even though all Americans agree that current immigration policy is outdated and malfunctioning.