President Ford emphasized the bill's potential for reducing inefficient bureaucracy, as the grant replaced seven previous programs that were “too fragmented to provide comprehensive solutions to complex local needs”. He also noted its potential for improving government effectiveness by “replacing Federal judgments on local development with the judgments of the people who live and work there”: placing more decision-making power on local funding choices in the hands of local governments who “are most familiar with local needs”. The CDBG was presented as explicitly meant to “redistribute influence from the federal bureaucracies to local governments” - in Ford's words, to “return power from the banks of the Potomac to people in their own communities”.