Political Quotes

“As identified during the last amendment, we have debt, we have deficit, we need to look for things in the Department of Defense as well where we can look for efficiencies and expense reductions and still defend the country. Currently in the Department of Defense, we have somewhere approaching 800,000 civilian employees. Let me repeat that. In the Department of Defense today, we have approximately 800,000 full-time, nonuniformed civilian employees. This does not include the roughly 1.5 million men and women in uniform, and it does not include all of the defense contractors. And I would love to tell you how many of those there are, but because we do not audit the Department of Defense, that information is not available so I don't know. So we have 800,000 people not uniformed working in the Department of Defense, not doing any of the stuff done by the contractors. Now, I could go through a long analysis of do we really need one nonuniformed person for every two uniformed people in the Department of Defense. Do we really need that many? But this amendment is very small in its scope and very small in what it intends to do. All it says is let's reduce that 800,000 head count by 1 percent a year for the next 5 years. So all this amendment says is: Next year, can we accomplish the mission of the U.S.…”