[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[September 9, 1993]
[Pages 1458-1460]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Community in Cleveland
September 9, 1993

    The President. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It is great 
to be back in Cleveland. I've never had a bad day in Cleveland. 
[Laughter] But I felt so good about coming here today that I wore a 
necktie I bought in Cleveland the last time I was here.
    I want to say first how very grateful I am to all of you for being 
here, how much I appreciate----

[At this point, audience members interrupted the President's remarks.]

    The President. I can't hear. Can you hear me?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Well, I can't hear them, and you can hear me, so 
that's good.
    Let me say, first of all, I want to thank Senator Glenn, Congressman 
Stokes, and Congressman Hoke for coming down from Washington with us. I 
want to tell you that Senator Glenn especially is going to have a big 
role in passing these Government savings initiatives we proposed because 
he's the chairman of the Government Operations Committee. So if we want 
it to operate, he has to help us make it operate. And I'm grateful for 
his support. I thank the Congressmen for being here.
    And Mayor White, I'm delighted to be back here and glad you had 
somebody out there screaming you were the best mayor. That's good. 
[Laughter] I also want to acknowledge attorney general Lee Fisher and 
your State treasurer, Mary Ellen Withrow, two good friends of our 
administration in this effort.
    Let me say as briefly as I can what all this celebration is about 
from the point of view of the Federal Government. We give the State and 
local governments over $220 billion of your tax money every year. That 
means that you give it to us; we turn it around and give it to the 
States and the cities. If we make a mess of it, we waste a lot of your 
money; and if we don't do it right, the mayors and the Governors, the 
city councils, the county commissioners can't do what you hired them to 
do.
    So a huge part of this National Performance Review, in attempting to 
make the Government work better at less cost, has to involve a better 
relationship between the National Government and the States and the 
local government. If we don't do it, then nothing we do in Washington 
will overcome the things that you don't have happen here at the local 
level.
    There's a real slogan now going around, and I think a lot of slogans 
aren't any good, but this one is appropriate for our time. It is: Think 
globally, but act locally. What does that mean? It means my job is to 
tell you as President what the sweeping problems and challenges of our 
age are and to help us to deal with all this change that's happening, to 
help make the changes our friends and not our enemies, and to talk about 
them in terms of big things, like providing affordable health care or 
bringing the deficit down or opening new opportunities for

[[Page 1459]]

jobs through trade or reinventing the Government. But it has to mean 
something to you here. It has to mean a job in that store or better 
services or better housing or safer streets. It has to mean something 
where you live.
    I've said many times we've got a lot of deficits in this country. 
We've got a budget deficit and an investment deficit and a performance 
deficit in the Government. But you all know we've also got a trust 
deficit, where people no longer really believe that anything we do in 
Washington can change their lives for the better in Cleveland. And I 
believe that is clearly wrong.
    These three Cabinet members who came here today have something in 
common with me and with the Mayor. Two of them, Secretary Pena, the 
Secretary of Transportation, and Secretary Cisneros, the Secretary of 
Housing and Urban Development, were mayors. The Secretary of Education, 
Secretary Riley, was the Governor of South Carolina. We believe we have 
to reinvent Government and reinvent education and make it work. And we 
think Washington has often gotten in the way instead of helping. So we 
are here to tell you what we intend to do to change the way the National 
Government works, so you can have more shopping centers like this, more 
safe streets, more housing projects, more people working. That's what 
this is all about.
    Now, to do that we propose to do a number of things, but I'll just 
mention three of them. The first thing we want to do is to say, if a 
mayor like Mike White has got an idea like this, and they need a little 
money to make it go, they ought not to have to hire somebody to go 
through Washington's file after file after file of hundreds and hundreds 
of grants and figure out if we can somehow write some little grant 
proposal that goes through all these hoops and clears all these 
bureaucrats and gets the money. We spend a fortune, literally billions 
of dollars--to be exact, we spend $19 billion a year of your money 
administering the $220 billion of Federal grants. I don't know whether 
you think that's right or not; that strikes me as a waste of money.
    So what are we going to do about it? The first thing we're going to 
do is to give the States, the counties, and the cities the right to 
design what we call bottoms-up initiatives. In other words, you decide 
what it is you need, tell us what you need, and if it's in a grant 
proposal that's anywhere under $10 million or over $10 million if you 
get approval for it, we will design something to give you the money you 
need instead of you having to figure out how to walk through the hoops 
of all the rules and regulations of the hundreds and hundreds of grants 
in the Federal Government. It will make a difference.
    The second thing we're going to do is to do something that the 
States have been asking for for years, and that is to take 55 of these 
big grant programs and break them down into six big ones, so that we 
will have more flexibility. Instead of worrying about every little last 
detail, if you've got something you want to do in transportation, you 
ought to be able to get it from a transportation program. If you have 
something you want to do in the environment or highway safety or water 
quality or education or defense conversion, we want to help you do that 
without you having to figure out how to comply with all these rules and 
regulations. We think that you know what needs to be done to change the 
way your schools operate.
    In the States that have lost lots of jobs from defense conversions, 
they know what they can do to retrain people to find new jobs, in what 
areas, better than people in Washington do. Why should they have to 
figure out how to comply with five or six or seven or eight different 
programs just to do it? So that's the second thing we're going to do.
    The third thing we're going to do is to try to have the National 
Government operate on problems of people in Cleveland and Dallas and 
Seattle and Tampa and you name it, just the way this city government 
did, cooperating with the county government to figure out how to move 
all the property that made the shopping center and so many of the 
housing efforts and other things possible.
    I am going today, as soon as I finish talking, to sit down here and 
sign a new order to my Cabinet to create a community enterprise board 
from the Cabinet, not a domestic policy group to tell people what to do 
but a community enterprise board. What is the practical impact of that? 
It will be for us to identify neighborhoods in trouble all across 
America. They will say what they want done. Then my Cabinet will sit 
down and work together and figure out how to do it, not how to tell them 
how to comply with our rules but how to do what people need done at the 
local level.
    Now, we know that by doing this, just by

[[Page 1460]]

eliminating a lot of the rulemakings, a lot of the regulations, a lot of 
the paperwork, we will actually save billions of dollars over the next 5 
years. But guess what? The States and the localities will actually get 
more money more quickly, with fewer strings attached, more able to solve 
the problems that the people have identified.
    We are dealing globally with a big problem: Government's not 
working, and Government must be a partner with the private sector in 
order to revitalize our economy. That's the big problem. We are dealing 
locally. You get to decide how to solve the problem. As long as you 
don't waste the money and you're willing to be accountable for it, you 
decide. You define the future. And we'll have a lot more projects like 
this. That's the significance of what we're doing here today.
    Let me say finally that we have a lot of work still to be done, but 
this administration is committed to changing America and to making 
America friendly to the changes that are going on in the world so that 
we can win in the face of change. Some days I wake up and I wish I could 
tell you, let me be President and I'll make it the way it was 10 or 20 
or 30 years ago. You know better than to think anybody can do that. All 
these changes that are rifling through the world are going to happen 
whether we want them to or not. The test for us is whether we can win in 
the face of change instead of lose in the face of change, whether change 
will be our friend or our enemy.
    And there can be no Government program that works to solve these 
problems unless you trust the Government, unless the Government 
performs, unless we repeal the problems of the past and face the future 
with confidence. And we have to be willing to change before we can ask 
any of you to change. So today in Cleveland, we are signaling a new era 
in the relationship with the National, the State, and the local 
governments to help make more projects like this possible. That's our 
commitment to change, and we're going to see it through.
    Thank you and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 12:33 p.m. at the Church Square Shopping 
Center.