As I have said, your particular effectiveness lies in the fact that you are dealing at first hand with work with which you are thoroughly familiar. You are not outsiders. You are not engaged in constructing a parlor theory of how the work should be done; you are engaged in recommendations to better the business which you are yourselves to carry through and see made better when those recommendations have been adopted. You have literally an unparalleled opportunity for useful work. As far as I am aware, there has never before been made in this country, or indeed, in any country, such a comprehensive systematic effort to put the country’s housekeeping in order. I need not say to you that it is urgent. A great deal of our Government work has become proverbial for the red tape involved. Of course much of the outside criticism upon red tape is due to forgetfulness of the fact that you and I are responsible to Congress for every dollar we spend, and for every dollar’s worth of work that we do, while the outsider is responsible only to himself or those interested with him, so that we not only have to do what is right and efficient, but have to be able to show that what we have done is right and efficient; and this inevitably means that there must be certain forms observed which the unthinking outsider is apt to stigmatize as red tape. Nevertheless it is true that there is always a tendency in Government work to run to needless red tape. I asked the Keep Commission, for instance, to take up with particular care, through the Assistant Secretaries of War and the Navy, the burden of paper work resting on the officers of the Army and Navy. I remember very well the pride with which a certain high officer in one of the bureaus in the Navy Department, a good many years ago, told me, pointing to a big case of papers, that in that he could find out through the reports of the officers of each battleship how many bottles of violet ink each captain of a battleship was responsible for. I remarked that I did not care a snap of my finger about the number of bottles of violet ink on the ship, that what I wanted to know was whether the men at the guns could shoot; I did not accept the knowledge of the whereabouts of the violet ink as a substitute for shooting. The paper work must be subordinated in the departments and bureaus to the efficiency of the work itself, keeping only enough of it to make a record of what is done.