The CEO of G.D. Searle & Co. Donald Rumsfeld, told Congress that it should "severely and rapidly" cut every government program that is secondary and does not serve specific strategic interests

Manufacturing & Technology News, Sept 1, 2005

The CEO of G.D. Searle & Co. Donald Rumsfeld, told Congress that it should "severely and rapidly" cut every government program that is secondary and does not serve specific strategic interests. "Don't wait," he told Congress. "Whatever it is you do, the odds are overwhelming that you should have done more rather than less and that you should have done it sooner rather than later.

The most frequent mistake is to cut too little," said Rumsfeld, a former congressman and Secretary of Defense. "If one cuts too much, it is easy to add it back. 140,000 of the 280,000 people listed in the federal government as supervisors, managers and executives could be eliminated. I see fewer and fewer companies where every manager has a special assistant. But in government, it seems even special assistants have special assistants."