Political Quotes

“In the last year the National Conservation Service has created a new regional bureaucracy. NRCS has local, State, and national offices. That is what they had before. Now they have put a new tier of bureaucracy between the State offices and the national offices. There was a situation in Congress in 1994, partially in 1995, when the Democrats and Republicans said that Washington is too top-heavy in USDA. So what happened? There was no firing of personnel, but all of those top-ranking, high-grade executives in the Department of Agriculture, as part of that reorganization, those personnel were not fired or pink-slipped but they were transferred to regional offices, a new tier of six regional offices for our conservation service. Mr. Chairman, I would urge my colleagues that are concerned with conservation, concerned about the service to farmers and ranchers in this country, to call their conservationists in their area and ask them about the slow-down of paperwork, the slow-down of personnel.”