Science & Tech Quote by Carly Fiorina

Transparency gets pitched here as both a moral virtue and a managerial fix, and Fiorina knows exactly why that plays. By leading with a GAO statistic, she borrows the authority of an auditor to frame government not as a messy set of political tradeoffs but as an underperforming corporation with a metrics problem. “Fail to meet their objectives” sounds like a missed quarterly target: clean, damning, and conveniently abstract. Twenty-two percent is large enough to alarm, precise enough to feel scientific, and vague enough to avoid discussing which programs, whose objectives, and what counts as success.

The real lever is the pivot from “22 percent” to “we don’t know.” That’s a leap from performance to opacity, turning democratic frustration into a suspicion that the system is hiding something. “The truth is” signals candor, the rhetorical equivalent of rolling up sleeves. Then comes the solution: put “every agency budget up on the Internet.” It’s a crowd-pleasing, Silicon Valley-era answer that casts citizens as consumers and watchdogs, not as participants negotiating policy priorities. The subtext: if we could just see the numbers, politics would stop being politics.

Context matters. Fiorina, a corporate executive turned political figure, is translating business-world faith in dashboards into governance. The proposal implies that transparency will discipline agencies the way market scrutiny disciplines firms. It’s also a careful populism: not anti-government in theory, but anti-Washington in practice, positioning her as the CEO candidate who will open the books and fire the inefficiency. The line works because it offers outrage without complexity and control without admitting what transparency can’t solve: competing goals, contested evidence, and the fact that “objectives” are often arguments in disguise.