Ronald Reagan Attacks Bloated Government and Welfare Abuse (1974)

First of all, I think that you could approach with a rather heavy scalpel. Any business knows that, over a period of time, administrative overhead and fat creep in. This is true in spades in government. Government is not bound by the profit motive. Government down through the years has not had to increase its productivity. Government can just add whatever it needs and send the bill to the people. And it has done this. But how would you apply the scalpel, Governor? Would you apply it across the board to all agencies, to the defense budget? Well, I think there's fat in that. I am one who wants a strong defense, and I do not agree with those people that think we don't need any and who would cut the defense budget willy-nilly just because they don't think it's necessary. I think that the United States must remain the strongest nation in the world. But, even so, yes, there's fat in that. And I think it requires the cooperation of Congress.

I think that Congress must be willing to see appointees in administrative positions who come in as a man would come in as the head of a new business and wants to do this and not put up the fight they do to preserve the bureaucracy and to not let anything change in those departments. I believe that every program should be reviewed to see whether it is, whether that program itself is needed. One of the fights against... I believe that in personnel -- without massive layoffs -- I believe there are far too many public employees. And they have crept up in increased numbers. I think you can do that as we did it in California. You put a freeze on hiring replacements and, by attrition, you reduce government down to the point at which you say, to reduce it any further would impair efficiency. Now, I'll be leaving office after eight years in California. When I came in, the number of state employees was increasing two and a half times

as fast as the increase in population in our state. And yet the increase in population was being used as the excuse for the growth of government. Well, when we leave our administration, we'll have virtually the same number of employees we had eight years ago when we started. And, in some departments, because of our growth, they have absorbed as much as a 66 percent workload increase and are turning out the job in less than half the time they did eight years ago. Now, this in business would be taken as an increase in the productivity of the department, of the workers. It can be done. The federal government, we know that in the first term of the Dwight Eisenhower, he reduced the number of federal employees by 10 percent. And... Well, Governor, since you put such great emphasis on holding down federal spending and reducing the size of the federal government, let me ask you, would you cut back unemployment compensation to those who are being laid off? Would you reduce Medicare? Would you reduce Social Security?

Would you reduce those social welfare programs which help those who are caught in unfortunate economic circumstances? No, and I'm glad you asked in this, because one of the things, if you're going to lick inflation, you have to accept that there is going to be temporarily an economic dislocation and increased unemployment. And I quarrel very much with some of the labor leaders today who are saying this is absolutely unacceptable. But, at the same time, I say that what the President has suggested is right, that you, if anything, are willing to extend unemployment insurance, to do everything you can to minimize the hardship on those people who temporarily will be victims in this fight against inflation. Now, the reason that you must take that dislocation to fight inflation is because the calamity, if we don't lick inflation, that will come a few years down the road, if not sooner, is far worse than this temporary problem. No, I would say that you add to that, you extend it, you do what you can

to ease that particular problem. When you get to the social reform programs, no. You do not shirk what you should do right today in many areas, the recipients of many of our social welfare programs are themselves being cheated as are the taxpayers, because the amount of money available is being shared and spread too widely among people who don't deserve it. And here we can speak with authority in California, because we reformed welfare three and a half years ago. Our caseload was going up 40,000 a month in California. We had quite a battle to get our reforms implemented. We had court cases. We had legislative obstruction. We had HEW in Washington refusing to grant various waivers. But when I tell you that we discovered for ourselves that no one in the United States knew how many people were on welfare, they only knew how many checks they were sending out.

And there was no way really to check and find out how many individuals were getting more than one check. Right now, Bob Carlson, who was a part of our welfare reforms here and who now is the welfare director in Washington, has estimated that, in aid to dependent children nationally, more than 10 percent of the recipients are absolutely ineligible for the program. Another 23 percent -- so now you're talking the full third -- are being overpaid. In other words, these are people who have some outside income, but they're misstating it. The first check we ran in California, a computer check of the stated earnings of a welfare recipient who also had outside income, as against what he actually was earning, when we finally received permission -- we were denied by regulations the right to check on a word. When you pay your income tax, you have to prove, and they check with your employer's statement that your earnings are stated correctly. But the welfare recipient could come in and tell you what his financial

situation was and, by regulations, the workers were forced to take his word for it. And we found, in the first check we ran, 41 percent of the people were falsely stating the amount of their outside earnings. Now, today, three and a half years later, we're not increasing 40,000 a month. We have almost 400,000 fewer people on welfare in California. And, yet, in addition to helping the taxpayers make the program more efficient,