A Time to Heal: on Government Reform
Gerald Ford:
Untangle the petty tyranny of massive government regulation
In the past decade, I said the federal budget had been growing at an average rate of more than 10% per year. The budget that I would submit, $394.2 billion, would slice that annual rate of growth in half. That would enable us to reduce taxes by
$10 billion more than lawmakers had agreed to cut in December. Government, I went on, could not create jobs for all Americans who wanted to work.
I told Congress that I would soon be submitting legislation detailing incentives to help private industry expand. I urged lawmakers to untangle the "petty tyranny" of massive government regulation, and
I predicted that we could have neither sustained economic nor an adequate number of jobs unless we had an assured supply of energy.
Source: A Time To Heal, by Gerald Ford, p.351
Jan 19, 1976
Gerald Ford:
More local initiative; even if not "visionary"
By mid-1975 [the early crises had been resolved], and I could begin to shape my own agenda and define the goals I wanted my fellow citizens to endorse as follows: less government intervention in the affairs of citizens and corporations, greater reliance
on individual initiative and free market economy, and increased local responsibility for overcoming adversities.None of these goals sounded particularly dramatic. Political pundits in the nation's capital said that my ideas were stale and that
I lacked "vision" as a President.
As President, it was my job to identify the trends that were emerging in American society-trends that were not immediately apparent to everyone and generated no headlines-and then to determine what decisions could
affect those trends and put the country in better shape 10 to 20 years from now.
Conservatism has always meant more to me than simply sticking up for private property & free enterprise. It has also meant defending our heritage & preserving our values.
Source: A Time To Heal, by Gerald Ford, p.262-264
Apr 15, 1975
Gerald Ford:
Congress is too fragmented & too involved in foreign policy
When I was in the Congress myself, I thought it fulfilled its constitutional obligations in a very responsible way, but after I became President, my perspective changed. It seemed to me that
Congress was beginning to disintegrate as an organized legislative body. It wasn't answering the nation's challenges domestically because it was too fragmented.
It responded too often to single-issue special interest groups and it therefore wound up dealing with minutiae instead of attacking serious problems in a coherent way.
Moreover, Congress was determined to get its oar deeply into the conduct of foreign affairs. This not only undermined the Chief Executive's ability to act, but also eroded the separation of powers concept in the Constitution.
Source: A Time To Heal, by Gerald Ford, p.150
Aug 25, 1974
Page last updated: Feb 25, 2019