Winnowing PPSSCC:
Baruch, Jeremiah
_9 Some years ago, Andrew M. Greeley publicly expressed a great deal of bitterness about being refused tenure at the University of Chicago. It was hard not to sympathize with Greeley's...
...We recalled Greeley's harsh words about his treatment at Chicago when we read that the priest-sociologist has given the university $1.1 million of his fiction royalties to endow a chair in Catholic studies...
...This exercise was successfully conducted by Ohio's James A. Rhodes, Oklahoma's Dewey Bartlett, and California's Ronald Reagan...
...This presidential commission's final two-volume, 656-page report was formally presented to Mr...
...They bring experience and capability, but they lack an understanding of the environment of government...
...Staats's perspective appear not to have influenced Mr...
...namely, as noted by Yale University' s James Fesler, that while a corporation's objective is single and clear, and its performance is easily measurable -- profit or loss -- a government agency's objective is usually not single but plural, and there is no direct comparison between the agency's cost and the return received by the public for its services...
...President Reagan announced the creation of the commission on February 18, 1982, and signed the executive order officially establishing what has come to be known as the PPSSCC or the Grace Commission on June 30, 1982...
...We are omitting such matters because we do not want to risk losing even one reader who might be turned away by having to wade through such preliminary material...
...Since a number of the recommendations have been incorporated into the administration's FY 1985 budget, an objective and expert winnowing of PPSSCC's wheat from its chaff is needed as soon as possible...
...After telling a couple of good stories about finding "fantastic savings," he noted that 1,600 of the business executives' 2,000 recommendations were implemented in his administration...
...JEREMIAH BARUCH (Jeremiah Baruch is the pseudonym of a Washington writer with a position in government...
...Commonweal: 70...
...Their analysis is likely to be presented before a Senate Budget Committee hearing, tentatively scheduled for February 28...
...Yet the preface of the final report begins with the following: Most reports of Presidential Commissions begin with lengthy introductions detailing the origins, premises, and methodologies of their studies before focusing on the results of the study...
...How refutable the commission's proposals and savings actually are will be better determined after the completion of a joint CBO/GAO study of the entire package of recommendations...
...And now a considerable amount of taxpayer dollars have to be spent to put it to some public use...
...William Ford of Michigan, Chairman of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee...
...At the September 1982 unveiling of this "major management reform" package, Ed Meese said it was a top priority of the president, who wants to leave "the American p e o p l e . . , as part of his l e g a c y . . , a government that acts in a business-like manner...
...The Reagan administration takes an apparent leap of faith that government ought to be run like business, notwithstanding the consequences that flow from the absence of profit as an organization's principal objective...
...There are commission proposals that have been around from time immemorial and very little has been done about them...
...One might take as symbolic of the PPSSCC's respect for context that the chapter discussing the commission's background begins with what is presented as a single quote of Thomas Jefferson -- but turns out, upon investigation, to be the stringing together of three separate sentences from letters of Jefferson written between 1802 and 1816...
...Reagan on January 16 by Chairman J. Peter Grace after more than two thousand "private sector volunteers," led by a 161-member executive committee (which constitutes "a major segment of the business leadership of the U.S...
...but when its proposals were approved and released by Grace's committee, the savings estimate had expanded to $7.2 billion...
...Whether he was motivated by pure affection for alma mater, by a desire to promote Catholic studies, or by an irresistible urge to heap coals of fire, altogether this was a classy act...
...The navy task force, for 10 February 1984:69 example, had estimated savings of $4 billion to $5 billion over three years in recommended management improvements...
...A recommended tightening of civil service retirement benefits, also released earlier last year, was claimed to save $16 billion over three years...
...Presidential adviser Ed Meese, as chairman of the Cabinet Council on Management and Administration, is overseeing the White House response to the PPSSCC recommendations as well as coordinating a parallel initiative, Reform '88 -- a long-range internal management effort of top government executives (it's '88 because it will take six years to implement) with the goal of making government operate as " e f f i c i e n t l y . . . as an Exxon," according to OMB deputy director JosephWright...
...For the past five months the commission's proposals have been reviewed by OMB, the agencies affected, and the White House...
...In fact, skepticism has followed Grace's efficiency task forces as they have released certain of their recommendations throughout the past eighteen months...
...CBO Director Rudolph Penner was quoted in November as saying, "Based on the few cases we have had a chance to investigate, the savings potential of a number of the Grace Commission's recommendations may be only a small fraction of the amount stated...
...The commission's thirty-six task force reports and eleven special studies provide the support (together with 1.8 million pages in background materials) for the final report's 2,478 recommendations and a claimed total savings potential of $424.4 billion over three years...
...CBO revised the savings estimate to less than $2 billion...
...Notwithstanding such virtues as Mr...
...At his request, two congressional support agencies, the General Accounting Ofice and the Congressional Budget Office, were asked to review the task force study...
...Given the absence of profit as an objective of government, if one were to take to heart the words of Charles Fredcrick Abbott, they might be serving pickled jelly beans at the White House...
...i I IIINillNil/I I l i e J Washington report WINNOWING PPSSCC SOME SKEPTICISM IS CALLED FOR ~~I~USlNESS WIn-lOUT profit is not business anymore i ~ than a pickle is candy...
...The PPSSCC's final report, the press release, and Grace's press conference were replete with good anecdotal material on inefficient and costly governmental practices...
...Item: the panel observes that more than a third of the nation's post offices (12,469) serve one hundred or fewer customers (savings $272 million...
...It is interesting to note that a number of the task forces relied heavily on earlier GAO reports and recommendations...
...Yet the usually sympathetic Business Week characterized such task forces as the PPSSCC as having an "uneven record," and observed that the 1967 effort of Governor Reagan "found only $25 million in actual savings...
...When the navy project manager, accounting firm executive Robert Cockrill, challenged the commission's leadership on this change, arguing that the figure ignored immediately needed equipment investments such as new computers, he was overruled...
...The president referred to his California experience with satisfaction at a March 1982 luncheon inaugurating the venture of new Commission Chairman Grace and his executive committee...
...The White House officials would undoubtedly cringe at Professor Wallace Sayre's observation that "business and public administration are alike only in all unimportant respects...
...The government's environment is one of law, within which equity and efficiency are constantly being balanced...
...it is seldom one encounters a deed that nourishes the future in itself and yet is so deliciously savored with irony...
...Cockrill was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as commenting, "Peter Grace is a pretty hard-headed man...
...we don't know if he thinks we've treated him as badly as the University of Chicago did, but we're beginning to hope so...
...could be abolished (savings $1 billion...
...Grace and his 160 colleagues...
...As common as this shoddy practice may be, it also indicates the precision and care with which this panel spent more than $75 million taxdeductible dollars...
...What laziness -- at best...
...This figure was contested by Rep...
...The examination of the PPSSCC does not go very far beyond the Calvin Coolidge maxim, "The business of America is business...
...The PPSSCC's final report places itself within the "rich tradition of public-private partnership" that has sought to improve the workings of government: the Taft Commission, the Brownlow Committee, the two Hoover Commissions, the Ash Council, and the Carter Reorganization Project (try to obtain a published study from that costly venture...
...Whether you agreed or disagreed with them, at least they could be discussed...
...Item: Congress prevents closing bases the military wants to eliminate (savings $3.1 billion...
...Grace may have, his assertion last September that the commission's recommendations were "irrefutable" has not been left unchallenged...
...It was hard not to sympathize with Greeley's complaints, for whatever one may think of him as a polemicist and fiction-writer, as a professional sociologist Greeley has been outstanding...
...The management of money is not the only context in which to analyze a government agency's operations...
...Item: all the military commissaries in the continental U.S...
...Elmer Staats, former Comptroller General of the United States (the head of GAO) and, ironically, a member of Grace' s executive committee, remarked a decade ago: "Many businessmen who come to Washington are not notable successes a n d . . , they average less than two years...
...conducted an eighteen-month study on :how to improve the management of the executive branch and reduce federal costs...
...There is reason for some skepticism that such a saving could be realized -- even if the proposals were politically feasible, which some clearly are not...
...Well this reader was immediately lost with that beginning...
...Republican governors in the 1960s favored a "good government" device of inducing businessmen to undertake wellpublicized management studies of their state bureaucracies and then claiming the results as great savings to the taxpayer...
...The Ash Council, for example, set forth its notion of management and the principles it was applying...
...Father Greeley and Commonweal have had their differences...
...These hallowed words of ImlllFthe American industrialist Charles Frederick Abbott would not find a receptive audience within the Reagan administration -- at least with regard to the principles underpinning the recommendations of the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (PPSSCC...
...The implications of Mr...
...As observed in the weighty final report, the president had decided to establish the PPSSCC because he "has always had a long-standing philosophical commitment to the goal of conducting the affairs of government according to principles of sound business and fiscal management . . . . " The question arises as to whether the principles of business are applicable to governmental operations...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
