The New Covenant approach to governing is as different from the old
bureaucratic way as the computer is from the manual typewriter. The old way
of governing around here protected organized interests; we should look out
for the interests of ordinary people. The old way divided us by interests,
constituency or class; the New Covenant way should unite us behind a common
vision of what's best for our country.
The old way dispensed services through large, top-down, inflexible
bureaucracies. The New Covenant way should shift these resources and
decision making from bureaucrats to citizens, injecting choice and
competition and individual responsibility into national policy.
The old way of governing around here actually seemed to reward failure. The
New Covenant way should have built-in incentives to reward success.
The old way was centralized here in Washington. The New Covenant way must
take hold in the communities all across America, and we should help them to
do that.
Our job here is to expand opportunity, not bureaucracy, to empower people
to make the most of their own lives and to enhance our security here at
home and abroad.
We must not ask Government to do what we should do for ourselves. We should
rely on Government as a partner to help us to do more for ourselves and for
each other.
I hope very much that as we debate these specific and exciting matters, we
can go beyond the sterile discussion between the illusion that there is
somehow a program for every problem, on the one hand, and the other
illusion that the Government is the source of every problem that we have.
Our job is to get rid of yesterday's Government so that our own people can
meet today's and tomorrow's needs.
And we ought to do it together.
You know, for years before I became President, I heard others say they
would cut Government and how bad it was. But not much happened.
We actually did it. We cut over a quarter of a trillion dollars in
spending, more than 300 domestic programs, more than 100,000 positions from
the Federal bureaucracy in the last two years alone.
Based on decisions already made, we will have cut a total of more than a
quarter of a million positions from the Federal Government, making it the
smallest it has been since John Kennedy was president, by the time I come
here again next year.
Under the leadership of Vice President Gore, our initiatives have already
saved taxpayers $ 63 billion. The age of the $ 500 hammer and the ashtray
you can break on David Letterman is gone. Deadwood programs like mohair
subsidies are gone. We've streamlined the Agriculture Department by
reducing it by more than 1,200 offices. We've slashed the small-business
loan form from an inch thick to a single page. We've thrown away the
Government's 10,000-page personnel manual.
And the Government is working better in important ways. FEMA, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, has gone from being a disaster to helping
people in disaster.
You can ask the farmers in the Middle West who fought the flood there or
the people in California who've dealt with floods and earthquakes and fires
and they'll tell you that.
Government workers, working hand-in-hand with private business, rebuilt
Southern California's fractured freeways in record time and under budget.
And because the Federal Government moved fast, all but one of the 5,600
schools damaged in the earthquake are back in business.
Now, there are a lot of other things that I could talk about. I want to
just mention one because it'll be discussed here in the next few weeks.
University administrators all over the country have told me that they are
saving weeks and weeks of bureaucratic time now because of our direct
college loan program, which makes college loans cheaper and more affordable
with better repayment terms for students, costs the Government less and
cuts out paperwork and bureaucracy for the Government and for the
universities.
We shouldn't cap that program, we should give every college in America the
opportunity to be a part of it.
Previous Government programs gather dust; the reinventing Government report
is getting results. And we're not through--there's going to be a second
round of reinventing Government.
We propose to cut $ 130 billion in spending by shrinking departments,
extending our freeze on domestic spending, cutting 60 public housing
programs down to 3, getting rid of over a hundred programs we do not need
like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Helium Reserve Program.
And we're working on getting rid of unnecessary regulations and making them
more sensible. The programs and regulations that have outlived their
usefulness should go. We have to cut yesterday's Government to help solve
tomorrow's problems.
And we need to get Government closer to the people it's meant to serve. We
need to help move programs down to the point where states and communities
and private citizens in the private sector can do a better job. If they can
do it, we ought to let them do it. We should get out of the way and let
them do what they can do better.