Political Quotes

“What this really does and what we are going to try to do tomorrow is we are going to try to implement the vision for the Education Department that a lot of these people in 1979 said the Education Department should be; that we should streamline the bureaucracy, we should get dollars into the classroom, and we should consolidate Federal education programs. So the vision was right in 1979. The implementation was terrible. So the Education Department in and of itself was not a bad thing because it was addressing, it was supposed to address the right kinds of problems; but what you and I have found as we have gone around the country is that rather than implementing a Department of Education that empowered parents, empowered the local level, streamlined the process and got dollars to the local level, this bureaucracy took on a life of its own and created more programs and more rules and more regulations. One of the things that we found was that the first time that you sent me, the first time that you sent an application to this bureaucracy to process a grant request, it had to go through 487 different steps that took 26 weeks to complete.”