 Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm pleased to sit down. I should be applauding you for being here and being willing to do what you're going to do. Now I realize, of course, that almost anything I say has probably been said before. They sequester me over there in the Oval Office with all sorts of things they say I have to pay attention to while they all come over here and talk to you and then put me on last. But let me just say a few words and then I know where to meet in the other room individually. This, as you've probably been told, is not a brand new idea. Many years ago we did this in California when we inherited a situation that was just almost as bad as the federal situation is. And we turned to the private sector. And what if, if you have not been told some of these things, in reality what your task is, and I know you must have wondered, well now how do we get at this great behemoth and what do we do? Go in and look at departments, at agencies, at whatever section of government it is, and look at it as business people. And as if that were a business you might be thinking of merging with or taking over. And what changes could be made in which modern business practices could be simply put to work to make government more efficient and more economical. That was our instruction to the some 250 who ended up in the task forces in California. And then when the recommendations come back, I assure you they're not going to be a report that will go on a shelf and gather dust. We at our end must have a task force of our own people whose job is to implement the various things that can be implemented. In California there were some 1800 or more recommendations that came back from our citizens task forces. We implemented more than 1600 and they were responsible for taking our state out of the red and with a bad credit rating to a triple A rating by Moody's for our bonds and in less than two years a surplus which we gave back to the people of California in the form of a tax rebate. We ended up giving back such rebates to the last one we gave back amounted $850 million. And when you tell and forgive me for being partisan a Democratic dominated legislature that you want to give back $850 million that's like getting between the hog and the bucket. One senator came into me very irate and said he considered giving that money back an unnecessary expenditure of public funds. But we gave it back. Let me just give you just a few examples of the type of things you find and then one other thing that I think you will also find. It was amazing just things that to you are ordinary and routine but because government kind of gets into a pattern and then people that come into government find that it's been done this way so it continues to be done that way. We had people who were expert in fleet buying automobiles found I don't know what we would find in the federal government. We found at the state level that there was no plan for trade-in there every department could go off on its own and buy automobiles anyway it wanted to do at any time. And these gentlemen set up a fleet buying plan for automobiles for the state of California that was so successful that we then made it available to counties and cities that if when they were ready we would procure for them they paid for them of course but we would procure for them and had many taking this up. We had such small things as a as finding that there was a state form that had to be filed and it's kind of storage files and they found the employees very busily folding these forms over double and putting them in the files and of course that obviously reduces the capacity of the file cabinet by half if you have to double them so he said why well the forms had always been printed that size and they just picked up the phone and told the state printer that form X such and such gave the number from now on should be printed in a different size and that year we bought for 4200 fewer file cabinets they found that there had been nothing in government with regard to how many square feet of office space do you require for employees in these large offices doing the same kind of work and the result was that a contract that fortunately the state had not signed but that we had inherited for calling for a new 10 million dollar building we were able to throw in a waste basket and not build the building simply by utilizing this this method we even found one place where in our great water program a canal was planned and nearby the highway department had planned a freeway was going to continue now the people building the canal were out looking for land they could buy upon which to dump the land or the dirt they were going to excavate for the canal and the highway was out looking for land they could buy in order to get filled to build the elevated freeway and it didn't take a genius to put the two together and in addition to that then once having done that found out that they were going to be progressing parallel down the valley that they didn't both need motor pools and repair facilities for equipment that they could pool their resources and just have one center for the equipment and so forth for both jobs that were going on but this is just a sample of some of the 1800 different things I could go on that were we found storage files not the kind that you have to use every day and go to for reference storage files of state records that we're occupying and these prices will sound strange now and after the a dozen years of inflation but the prices at that time that they were occupying 40 dollars a square foot off a space when they could be in two dollar and a half square foot warehouse space and so the changes were made accordingly but in other words what would you do and look at in that new business you've merged with or that you've taken over if you found practices that were going back into the antediluvian days and that could be brought up to date and improve government and they did the savings were in one time savings of things like canceling a building amounted to some 200 million dollars to begin with and the ongoing savings made the difference that allowed us to keep on handing back to the people a tax surplus or surpluses that we put back in tax rebates the last thing I'm going to say before I get off of here is you're going to find that there probably will be some people with a chip on their shoulder they think you're coming in there and you're going to interfere with their lives and their their work I think you're going to be surprised also because I don't think California is that different from the rest of the United States you're going to find that once they know that you're for real and what it is you're trying to accomplish that federal employees are going to come out of the woodwork people who've been there for years and have known about the needless things and the duplication and the useless things that are going on and they're going to come out of the woodwork to tip you off and tell you and call to your attention these things and usually I'll predict that they'll say what they said in California they'll say we never thought anyone cared before but now that we know what you're doing yes we'd like to help because they're an awful lot of fine patriotic people out there proud to be working for government and would like to see it done better and more efficiently so god bless you for what you're undertaking and I know you may get tired of times when you're doing it but just remember this short beach talking about it in the locker room after a golf game you'll have a chance to to really get at it I can't think of a a good get-off line here except that I'm to to go in the next room down here and meet you individually and I'm looking forward to that so again the heartfelt thanks and I think that you're going to have an experience that you will really enjoy and you will find that you know an awful lot more about government than than you think you know at the at the moment by the time you get through thanks very much