Political Quotes

“It is not responsible policy, in my opinion, to decide to eliminate a quarter of a million Federal employees and to save $22 billion without first identifying what functions within the Federal Government are expendable, what programs can be consolidated, how are you going to achieve this reduction. Because the fact is that the people who are going to leave Federal employment have no correlation to the functions that are expendable. However, what I think is folly would turn into travesty if we were not to pass this legislation. Because what will happen if we do not pass this legislation is that people in the middle management, higher priced positions are going to wind up bumping people below them. You can have situations where you will have scientists driving fork trucks because they have the opportunity to bump all the way down to the point where you have the last person hired at the lowest salary, and that person is the most vulnerable. They are the ones who are going to lose their jobs, and that, of course, has no correlation to the functions that we can afford to lose within the Federal Government. This bill is a necessity.”