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.