My Favorite Line From a Government Report

Government writing is usually stripped of all personality, so I like it when civil servants let loose in times of stress. It shows that the faceless bureaucracy is just people trying their best.

Here’s how Social Security’s Lancaster, California district office described the disastrous launch of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program on January 1, 1974, in an official report to Washington.

By mid-February we tried “Dial a Prayer,” and by mid-March were negotiating for an exorcist.

Quoted in Martha Derthick, Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration in American Government (Brookings Institution, 1990), 26.