Reinventing Government Osborne And Gaebler
Yogprasad Moneta
Over the past four years, the U.S. federal government's reform efforts have been led by Vice President Al Gore under the auspices of an interagency task force, the National Performance Review. It issued a set of recommendations in 1993, again in 1995, and reassessed its approaches and progress in early 1997 to prepare for the next four years. It is currently working to ensure implementation of its existing recommendations and to change the operating methods within agencies to make the government "work better and cost less." This paper reviews the origins of the effort, describes some of its accomplishments over the past four years, and lays out some of its goals for the next four years.
The U.S. government has three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The executive branch, headed by the President, is responsible for managing a budget of $1.7 trillion. The legislature has over 200 committees and subcommittees that conduct substantial oversight of executive branch agencies. The judiciary occasionally imposes activities or constraints on executive agency actions.
There are 1.9 million civil servants and 1.5 million military in 14 cabinet departments and 140 other agencies. Forty-one percent of the civilians work in the Defense Department. The federal government delivers few direct services. Most are delivered by the 50 states or the 83,000 local governments The federal government has about 40,000 field offices; these are loosely organized into 10 regions. While there have been extensive reform efforts at the state and local levels, this paper focuses only on the federal government. The current reform effort, begun in 1993, follows ten other federal reform commissions this century. Most achieved mixed results.
President Bill Clinton took office in 1993 having promised to "reinvent" the federal government to make it work better and cost less. He was the first Democratic president in 12 years and his party controlled the Congress at the time he assumed the office of President.
He took office at a time of extensive public sector management change in other countries, as well as within U.S. state and local governments. These changes were undertaken largely because of the pressures of global competition or financial crises. In the U.S. federal government, the impetus for action was an increasing public distrust in the ability of the federal government to do things right. These earlier changes were described by Osborne and Gaebler in their 1992 book, Reinventing Government and were acted upon by the 1991 Texas Performance Review led by John Sharp, that state's comptroller. These activities led to the creation of the National Performance Review four years ago, shortly after President Clinton took office in early 1993.
This paper summarizes the activities of the National Performance Review (NPR) by examining what we set out to do, what has been accomplished over the past four years, and what we plan to do in the next few years. NPR is often accused by many academics as relying heavily on the use of stories. That is now taken as a compliment. So, while NPR's story could be described in terms such as public choice, principal-agent, and transaction cost theories, I'll just talk about what really happened.
The development of the theory and approach of the NPR was heavily dependent on the mix of people involved in leading the review. Also, many of the 250 people recruited from different federal, state, and local agencies to work on the review had received Total Quality Management (TQM) training so there was a common language among many of the staff. Taken together, the "theory" behind the NPR's work evolved; there was no explicit effort to ground it in existing public management theory. The results of the Review were based on the practical experience of those who worked on it.
It was March 1993. Newly elected President Clinton announced his reinventing government initiative, appointing Vice President Al Gore to lead it and giving him a six-month deadline to produce a set of recommendations. There was excitement in the air, and a clear sense of the unknown. I was at the General Accounting Office and had been working on management reform issues there. I called a friend at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and asked him what the plans were and he replied, "I don't know. This is live and unrehearsed." In a few days, I received a call from a White House staffer who was interested in the work I'd been doing. I knew David Osborne, co-author of the best seller Reinventing Government, because of my visits to foreign countries whose reform efforts seemed to be 5-10 years ahead of our federal government. He was also an advisor to President Clinton on this initiative and had recommended to the new White House staffer assigned to conduct the review, Elaine Kamarck, that we should meet.
She called Bob Stone, Bob Knisely, and myself to a meeting a few days after President Clinton's announcement. Stone was a deputy assistant secretary for defense, responsible for managing all the military bases world wide. He was showcased by both Osborne and Tom Peters (a business management writer) as a case study of an innovator in their best selling books. He began his personal reinvention journey when he read Peter's 1982 book, In Search of Excellence and said to himself "I can do that!" He launched into a "guerilla war" within the Pentagon to get authority shifted to front line commanders. He was full of stories about the craziness of central controls in a huge bureaucracy. Knisely had experience in a wide range of federal agencies and knew a great deal about the internal cultures of different agencies. He brought a set of diverse ideas, many of which were seminal to the Review's operations, such as the notion of customer service, program design, corporate subsidies, and that the federal government was the last remaining vestige of communism (because of its many internal monopolies).
Kamarck, a PhD in Political Science, had taught at Georgetown University, wrote the Democratic Platform in 1980, was a journalist, an author on family policy issues, helped found the New Democrat wing of the Democratic Party, and was a founder of the Progressive Policy Institute. She listened to each of our stories about what we were doing and what we thought the Vice President should do in running his review. She asked us to tell him our stories personally and arranged a meeting a few days later, on a Sunday afternoon.
Never having met with someone quite so high in "the food chain," Stone, Knisely, and I agreed to get together on Saturday and rehearse what we were going to say. But before that Saturday arrived, it snowed. And snowed. We met at Stone's house; Knisely got me there via his 4-wheel vehicle. Stone showed us a draft copy of the now-well known "gold card" with the principles he thought should run the review. He said his advice to Gore would be to create a clear, compelling vision, tell simple stories to convey this vision, and tell it over and over. We rehearsed each of our stories and Stone said he would bring several examples of things that were done in a crazy way in the Pentagon as part of his simple story. The next day, we visited with Vice President Gore, with Knisely driving all of us in his 4-wheel vehicle.
The Vice President listened to our stories and agreed with the principles for the review -- that we should try to create a government that works better and costs less by (1) putting customers first, (2) empowering federal employees to put their customers first, (3) cutting the "red tape" that keep employees from putting their customers first, and (4) cutting back to basic missions. He asked us to join him in making this all possible -- by the September 7, 1993 deadline the President had made in his announcement speech the week before. Our lives have not been quite the same since!
While these people had never worked together before, they each brought a different set of experiences to the table and within a week, had mapped out the approach the Review would take over the course of six months.
To demonstrate the President's commitment to a smaller government, to create the sense of urgency, and to cut costs, NPR's most controversial proposal was to cut overhead positions in the government in half. We found 1 in 3 government positions were in headquarters, personnel, procurement, audit, etc. and cost about $35 billion a year. In addition, we found individual procurement actions for, for example, a stapler, cost at least $50 to process and we found the administrative overhead on government travel was 30 percent on top of the travel itself (the private sector cost was 6 percent). These "non-value added" functions were where we targeted our recommendations for change. Our initial recommendations would save $108 billion over a five-year period (Gore. 1993). Additional recommendations two years later added another $70 billion in savings, along with a series of other recommendations targeted to reducing regulatory burdens on the private sector with savings of $28 billion a year (Gore, 1995).
Describing the accomplishments of the National Performance Review is a bit like the blind men describing an elephant. There are many different dimensions, depending on the viewpoint. Gore cautioned that immediate success won't be possible in such a large set of organizations; he noted that it would take 8 to 10 years. But he believes we are "ahead of schedule." We've used four different vantage points to describe what's occurred.
First, the broad view from the White House is a wide range of successes across the government with some very specific accomplishments. There are hundreds of examples of what works in both large and small ways. Of the 1,500 recommendations, nearly half have been completed. These have resulted in an overall reduction of 291,000 positions and savings of about $118 billion. In addition, agencies have cut 640,000 pages of internal regulations (equivalent to 130 cases of copy paper) and created and publicly committed to meeting 3,500 customer service standards. Regulatory agencies cut regulations affecting the public by nearly 16,000 pages and rewrote another 31,000 pages to make them more understandable.
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