A Quote by Bill Dedman

Federal agencies that own bridges have some of the worst records for on-time inspections. Nearly 3,000 bridges owned by U.S. government agencies went more than two years between checkups.

Bill Dedman

Quote Topics

Agencies Between Bridges Federal Government Government Agencies More Nearly Own Owned Records Some Than Time Two Two Years Worst Years

Quote Author

Bill Dedman
American - Journalist
Born: 1960

Bridges are burning all around us; bridges to responses that might have mitigated the already brutal (and just beginning) ravages of Peak Oil; bridges to reduce the likelihood of war and famine; bridges to avoid our selectively chosen suicide; bridges to change at least a part of energy infrastructure and consumption; bridges to becoming something better than we are or have been; bridges to non-violence. Those bridges are effectively gone.

Michael Ruppert

Typically, highway bridges have about 50 years. But over in England, they have iron bridges approaching 250 years. In France, there are Roman aqueducts that are approaching 2,000 years old. So a bridge can last a very long time if it's built properly in the first place and then maintained properly.

Henry Petroski

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

Matt Ridley

Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy.

Chris Chocola

There are two kinds of comics; there are the ones who build bridges, and then there are the people who walk across the bridges as though they built them. The bridge builders are few and far between.

Ron White

One of the best programs that the federal government sponsors is the Small Business Innovation Research program, in which more than 2.5 percent of federal research and development funding at the largest agencies goes directly to small businesses.

Raja Krishnamoorthi

The RFA requires federal agencies to assess the economic impact of their regulations on small firms, and if significant, consider less burdensome alternatives. Federal agencies sometimes fail to comply at all, or simply 'check the box,' fulfilling the letter of the law, while missing the purpose of the law entirely.

Sam Graves

The WPA was one of the most productive elements of FDR's alphabet soup of agencies because it put people to work building roads, bridges, and other projects... It gave men and women a chance to make some money along with the satisfaction of knowing they earned it.

Ronald Reagan

It's time for some common sense from federal agencies.

Sam Graves

The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.

Charles Duhigg

The Federal Reserve can only buy Treasuries and agencies, and moreover quantitative easing typically involves buying longer-term Treasuries and agencies in terms of bills, for example.

Ben Bernanke

The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.

Herbert Spencer

Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.

James Q. Wilson

Federal regulations forbid delaying inspections for fracture-critical bridges like the fallen Minneapolis bridge - the kind with a lack of redundancy in design, so that a single failure in a load-bearing part can cause the entire bridge to collapse.

Bill Dedman

I believe there are a lot of questions today that require expert analysis by various agencies: political agencies, foreign ministries, economic agencies and security agencies. We need to assess everything and understand what we can agree on and what the implications will be both for Japan and for Russia so that both the Russian people and the Japanese people come to the conclusion that these compromise solutions are acceptable and are in our countries' interests.