“Today crisis drives policy. It has become too politically convenient to simply allow a crisis to develop and get worse and then react to the crisis…But make no mistake about it, there is a price to be paid. And the price to be paid is that you lose the trust of the American people...My greatest concern today is that we are putting our national security at risk by lurching from budget crisis to budget crisis to budget crisis.”
— Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday, in a talk at Georgetown University that he described as “one of my last speeches as secretary of defense.”
