Mitt Romney wants to shut down or amalgamate several US government departments if elected president, but has no plans to tell voters in advance of November's general election, he told wealthy campaign donors.
Mitt Romney and his wife Ann stand outside Fenway Park baseball stadium in Boston on Monday
The presumptive Republican nominee let slip his plans at a high-rollers fund-raising event in Florida estate that was supposed to be a closed-doors event but was accidentally overhead by a group of waiting reporters standing on the pavement outside.
"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I'm probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go," Mr Romney said, according to NBC News, who had a reporter outside the event.
The Republican candidates for president have promised to slash bureaucracy in Washington which they say is emblematic of President Barack Obama's appetite for 'big government' solutions to America's social and economic problems.
The issue of closing departments sunk the campaign of Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, earlier this year when, having promised to shut three federal agencies, was only able to name two of them in a live televised debate.
Mr Romney said that the Department of Housing which was headed for four years from 1969 by his father George Romney, who served in Nixon's cabinet, was also in the crosshairs.
"Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I'm not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we've got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states."
The remarks, which also included some as yet undisclosed further details of how a Romney administration would pay for proposed tax cuts, prompted the Obama campaign to accuse Mr Romney of having a "disturbing" love of secrecy.
"Apparently Gov Romney believes only high dollar donors have a right to know what programmes he will cut," Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, posted on Twitter.
The Obama campaign, which hopes to paint Mr Romney as an out-of-touch multi-millionaire, is pressing Mr Romney to release more of his tax returns that could contain details of potentially embarrassing offshore investment trusts used in legal tax avoidance.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign's chief strategist, promised over the weekend to make secrecy a key plank of the Democrats' attacks on Mr Romney, who they depict as a faintly sinister character who has the interests of the 'one per cent' uppermost.
"Hearkening back to my youth, which extends far beyond yours, there was a show called, 'I've Got A Secret.' Increasingly, I think that would be the appropriate title for the Romney campaign," Mr Axelrod told the Politico website, recalling the story that Mr Romney removed the hard drives from his office computers at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts.
"There are central issues, but this is a disturbing one," he added, "and it goes to that question of, like, 'Who is this guy? What does he stand for? What does he believe? What do we know about him?'" In another unguarded aside, Mr Romney's wife Ann was also overheard admitting that she had "loved" last week's campaign controversy that was sparked when a democratic strategist criticised her for being a stay-at-home mother.
"It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it," said Mrs Romney said who Republicans hope will be a key weapon in narrowing Mr Romney's 19-point opinion poll deficit with women voters.
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