# Grover Norquist — "drown it in the bathtub" > [!quote] "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." > — Grover Norquist, interview with NPR's Mara Liasson, Morning Edition, May 25, 2001 ## Context Said on NPR's *Morning Edition* in 2001 by the founder and president of [[Americans for Tax Reform]], the man behind the [[Taxpayer Protection Pledge]] that nearly every Republican officeholder has signed. Norquist has repeated variants of the line for decades; this is the canonical 2001 phrasing. ## Why this matters The single most-quoted articulation of the [[Starve the Beast]] doctrine — the strategy of cutting taxes not for their own sake but to manufacture deficits that force spending cuts and shrink the state. It reframes anti-tax politics as a deliberate program to render government too small to function, and is the receipt most often cited to argue that fiscal conservatism's goal is structural, not budgetary. ## Verification - **Source:** NPR *Morning Edition* interview with Mara Liasson, May 25, 2001; widely reproduced. [Grover Norquist — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed, repeatedly reaffirmed by Norquist himself. ## Related quotes - [[Lisa Nelson - laboratories of democracy]] — ALEC framing of the same shrink-the-state project at the state level. - Featured in [[Project 2025 and the Administrative State]] — the administrative-state-demolition pattern collection.