Quotes of the Year 1999

YEAR IN REVIEW

Quotes of the Year

January 6
"Are we to expect that a President, who with a stiff upper lip and a straight face, can debate the meaning of 'is'-[a] two-letter word-could not dance forever on a seven-letter word like 'censure'?"
-Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., expressing opposition to a censure of President Clinton instead of a full impeachment trial in the Senate.

January 14
"She's a tough chick, cruising around the world as a force for good, presumably. She's a no-holds-barred kind of woman. I'd hate to meet her in a dark alley."
-Lucy Lawless, TV's "Xena, Warrior Princess," on Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

January 18
"It's tough not to snore."
-Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., on sitting through the impeachment trial of President Clinton in the Senate.

January 21
"Progress doesn't win medals. To get the medal you have to finish on time."
-Comptroller General David Walker on agencies' progress in solving the Y2K problem.

February 1
"Despite a half century of unrelenting reform, and in part because of it, the federal government is in danger of becoming a monument to managerial mediocrity."
-Paul Light, in the February issue of Government Executive.

February 4
"See what happens when you let men in the Cabinet?"
-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to HHS Secretary Donna Shalala prior to a Cabinet meeting this week. Albright and Shalala were discussing the situation in Kosovo, while HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman talked about Glickman's new pair of shoes.

February 9
"I am extremely pleased to report that the federal workforce is not a sanctuary for the chronically bad employee."
-OPM Director Janice Lachance.

February 18
"At this time they are intensely concerned about the nature of the problem the nation faces, and see themselves at the forefront of protecting fellow citizens from a major disaster. They may feel like the child with a finger in the dike, while co-workers stroll by and ask, 'What are you so worried about?' "
-From an Office of Personnel Management guide on managing Y2K specialists.

February 24
"When the dust gets settled, we'll find out that I was more right than he was."
-White House Y2K czar John Koskinen on his predictions about federal efforts to deal with the bug, as opposed to the more dire warnings of Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif.

March 1
"It became apparent to the senior leadership that anyone scouring the Web can come up with very sensitive information."
-A DoD spokesman on why the Pentagon has launched an effort to police its Web sites.

March 4
"To my friends on the left, government left unwatched can lead to injustice. To my friends on the right, government is not inherently evil."
-Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., in his farewell address to Congress.

March 5
"I see that one particular employee, who has been paid over $90,000 a year for the last two years to do nothing [has been transferred to] some makeshift job . . . that gives a black eye to the credibility of the whole federal workforce."
-Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., on the Defense Department's decision to give Linda Tripp a position as a public affairs specialist at the Defense Manpower Data Center in Arlington, Va.

March 17
"Remember, even if the competition goes to the contractor, you, as an American taxpayer, win."
-Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Charles "Rob" Nelson to federal employees on the A-76 outsourcing process.

March 24
"The day I made that comment, I was tired from staying up all night inventing the camcorder."
-Vice President Al Gore, on why he told CNN he "invented the Internet."

April 7
"If you asked some career executives about it, I'm sure they would say there are some far-sighted folks who are working on burrowing in now."
-Senior Executives Association President Carol Bonosaro.

April 12
"Happy New Year! It worked!"
-FAA Administrator Jane Garvey after a successful end-to-end test of the readiness of air-traffic control systems for the year 2000.

April 21
"The demise of big government has been greatly exaggerated. I'm actually surprised at how obsolete we aren't."
-Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times, on newspapers' Washington bureaus.

April 23
"If I'm President, I want one thing to be known: If you want to please the boss, one of the things you'd better show is how in your department or agency you've furthered tolerance and racial understanding."
-Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley.

May 5
"TV doesn't have much to say about government, but most of what it has to say is bad."
-S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

May 12
"In the past, no one has dared restructure the department as radically as we are doing today."
-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson on a plan to consolidate all of the agency's security functions in a new high-level office.

May 14
"We're turning our entire government into an ATM machine."
-Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., on the growing percentage of the federal budget consumed by entitlements.

June 16
"My guiding principle is government if necessary, but not necessarily government."
-Texas governor and presidential candidate George W. Bush.

June 17
"I will search out every last dime of waste and bureaucratic excess. I know how to do that."
-Vice President Al Gore in a speech announcing his presidential candidacy.

June 25
"This is a debate over the future role of government. There are people who feel that if you can look it up in the phone book and find two or three companies to bid on the work, it should be turned over to private-sector performance."
-Andrew Fortin of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the Federal Activities Inventory
Reform Act.

June 30
"An insubordinate agency is subject to executive branch enforcement of the [executive order] through persuasion and, ultimately, termination of the resisting official."
-The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, ruling that agencies can't be legally forced to bargain with employee unions over "permissive" issues.

July 8
"You name a safety code, the Pentagon doesn't meet it."
-Tom Fontana, a spokesman for the Pentagon renovation program.

July 9
"Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
-Bobby L. Harnage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, on rumors that VA Secretary Togo West might be leaving.

July 12
"An approved period of time in a nonpay and nonwork status that interrupts a basic workday . . . for the purpose of permitting employees to eat or engage in permitted personal activities."
-Office of Personnel Management definition of lunch break.

July 19
"It's 30 years in the future. We'll be out of office. Leave it to the civil servants. They'll still be here."
-Edward David, science adviser to President Nixon, on the reaction of White House officials to his warning of the potential for a Year 2000 computer problem.

July 23
"Computers by themselves cannot launch nuclear weapons."
-Adm. Richard W. Mies, commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, allaying fears of Y2K-induced launches.

July 27
"It's OK to have fun in the Marine Corps."
-Gen. James L. Jones, the new commandant of the Marines.

August 4
"The government's measure of success in dealing with performance problems is not and should not be simply the number of employees it fires."
-From a new Merit Systems Protection Board study of federal performance management.

September 15
"If the only reason that it is being terminated is because it's not self-sustaining, that's not a good enough reason."
-Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., on the Commerce Department's plan to close the National Technical Information Service.

September 16
"The aroma of turkey."
-Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, responding to a reporter's question about what Congress would need as a catalyst to resolve the issues surrounding the fiscal 2000 appropriations bills.

September 23
"They're probably going to take their credit card and go down to Wal-Mart."
-Tom Kentfield, manager of government operations for Polaroid Corp., on his customers' likely reaction to the closure of GSA supply warehouses.

September 30
"You don't have to wear a uniform or go to war to be a patriot. But you should, at some point in your life, seize an opportunity to put the country's interests before your own."
-Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

October 6
"It's as if we had some Cabinet-level agency called the Department of Secrecy that nobody has ever heard of."
-Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists on the $5 billion a year agencies spend classifying documents.

October 7
"Too often, my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself."
-Presidential candidate George W. Bush.

October 12
"Unattractive, uninviting and off-putting."
-The Merit Systems Protection Board, on the typical federal job vacancy announcement.

October 13
"Turning back the clock is not something people do every day."
-GSA Administrator David Barram on the reversal of the agency's decision to close eight supply warehouses.

October 26
"It's particularly galling, given the fact that they want everyone else to suffer, but have put themselves in a position where their pay raise is exempt."
-White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart, on congressional Republicans' call for cuts in government spending.

November 9
"Fed-bashing is a sport here and I refuse to sit by quietly and let it happen as many others are doing."
-Gloria Flora, supervisor of Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, in her resignation statement.

November 16
"We hope that night will be relatively boring."
-Y2K czar John Koskinen on what it will be like in the federal Y2K Information Coordination Center on New Year's Eve.

November 17
"The responsibility to decide on the organizational structure part of GSA is mine."
-GSA Administrator David Barram on negotiations over the fate of eight Federal Supply Service warehouses.

November 19
"If anybody here can say with an honest expression on their face they know what's in that bill, God save them."
-Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R-Minn., on the $385 billion spending package passed by the House Thursday.

November 22
"I expect to see the overthrow of the U.S. government in my lifetime."
-Richard L. Brandt, the senior contributing editor of Upside magazine, on one effect of the Internet.

December 3
"Politically they are almost impossible to achieve."
-Defense Secretary William Cohen, on base closures.

December 8
"Unfortunately, none of us say, 'Hooray, I want to pay my taxes.' "
-Barbara Everitt Bryant, managing director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, on why a comparison between satisfaction with the IRS and private sector companies is not completely fair.

December 13
"The fruits of our reinvention effort are beginning to be felt by the public."
-Morley Winograd, director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, on the results of the first-ever governmentwide customer satisfaction survey.

December 16
"It is yours."
-Former President Jimmy Carter at the ceremony marking the U.S. handover of the Panama Canal to Panama.

December 21
"It is troubling to any American, much less the Lees, to have a system where government officials can systematically leak for their own purposes and ends and not be held accountable."
-Brian Sun, attorney for Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear scientist indicted for allegedly mishandling top-secret data at Los Alamos National Laboratory.