Political Quotes

“Fine, Mr. President. We will do this as rapidly as we possibly can. What we have is the buyout bill that has been back and forth between the House and Senate a number of times. I could go back and recount the dates and when we passed it and by what margins, and so on, but we are back on the floor filibustering the conference report and losing precious time. Because the longer we wait, the more difficult it is going to be for agencies to really slim down Government, and that is what we are talking about. We are talking about the 252,000 people who are going to be cut out by the administration over the next 5 years, slimming down the civil service rolls. We are talking about doing this not just in taking those people out by the usual attrition of the 12 percent or so of Federal employees who leave the Government every year; we are talking about doing it in a way that will let us address the structure of the civil service force. That is the importance of this, because in the Federal Government we have about one supervisor for every seven employees they manage. In private business and industry, the ratio usually is around 12 or 15 to one on that employee-to-manager ratio. And in labor-intensive businesses, it runs up as high as 20 to 1. We are 7 to 1, the Federal Government. It is wasteful. What we need is to have a program that can give some incentives to get the GS-13's, 14's, and 15's to take some early outs.”