What A1 Gore Might Learn the Hard Way
Meacham, Jon
What Al Gore Might Learn the Hard Way Government has been reinvented before. Here's why it didn't work by Jon Meacham It's early afternoon in the White House Briefing Room. Still fresh to power,...
...But the forces that have killed reform in Washington since the days before Sherman Adams grew fond of vicuna coats are lying in wait...
...In contrast, there are 12,000 staffers in the IG offices...
...If Washington picks the adminstration's pockets on reform, then the core Democratic principle—that we, in John NATIONAL O 5S Kennedy's phrase, can do better—becomes suspiciously squishy...
...Beginning at the Pentagon in 1961, McNamara deployed a system called PPBS to link dollars to a program's performance...
...Nixon had Management by Objectives...
...The clean-up-the-mess-in-Washington rhetoric died from a thousand paper cuts...
...NPR's ultimate credibility hangs on just that: How much can the government deliver...
...LB J liked the idea and applied it across the board in 1965...
...Why not evaluate whether the computers the agency bought can do the job...
...This was a great plan, and a workable one," Malek says now...
...Once you agree to it, and tie performance to management and even budgets, then as an agency you can't dodge responsibility...
...Why isn't everybody doing this...
...For five years, Congress didn't require two welfare-to-work programs—HHS' JOBS and Agriculture's Food Stamp Employment and Training Act, which spend a combined $700 million a year to train the disadvantaged—to ask what happened to the people they trained...
...At first, JTPA required its offices just to count immediate job placements, which encouraged local administrators to exclude the hard-core unemployed or the homeless...
...Once the Labor Department caught on to the gimmick, it set the bar higher: Sixty-five percent of the people enrolled must be long-term unemployed or dropouts or homeless...
...Two laws—the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and the Governmental September 1993/The Washington Monthly 17 Performance and Results Act of 1993—now authorize agencies to set goals and measure progress...
...From the number of cases a Justice Department lawyer handles to the "acres of fine lawn maintained" at American military cemeteries in Italy and Tunisia—and around one monument at Gibraltar—we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year collecting these minutiae...
...Forty years, eight presidents, a New Frontier, a Great Society, and $1.5 trillion later, OMB has only 550 staffers, only 140 of whom assess what's working...
...Still fresh to power, the new President and his men stand in front of the famous dark blue curtains to kick off a major new initiative: reinventing the federal government...
...Sixty-seven...
...Ah, says the Gore team, this time will be different...
...Sound familiar...
...Form aid What use is it all put to...
...They've got so much data on performance already that they don't know what to do with it...
...Consider this: When the General Accounting Office surveyed the 103 big agencies that spent 92 percent of the $1.3 trillion in federal outlays in 1991, 76 of them assured auditors that they gather information on their own programs...
...Logic, meet Congress...
...None," the GAO found...
...Consider, however, the Carter experience...
...Republicans—and Perot—still score points bashing government, and 80 percent of the public believes that the "country needs to make major changes in the way government works," according to a 1993 Washington Post/ABC News poll...
...If the incumbent administration fails to bring along Congress and defeat the bureaucrats this time, the next guys who try this will have to contend with a system that much more experienced at pulling the plug on the most gee-whiz of reinventions...
...administrative orders, and the number of final State [administrative orders] issued...
...The Carter administration, with the best of intentions," says Ronald Johnson, a budgeting scholar at North Carolina's Research Triangle Institute, "got completely bogged down in forms and spent its time on copious details instead of thinking about the point of a program...
...If managers fail for two years running, the feds force the local agency to alter its program...
...Analysis of cost-effectiveness would referee where federal money would go...
...After all, we already count more than the Romans did at the pinnacle of the empire...
...Of course, somebody needs to keep an eye out for corruption, but an inordinate amount of time goes into quick-hit inspections to see whether, say, computer contracting rules are being followed to the letter...
...And that's terrifying to the bureaucratic mind...
...This is promising talk, but turning talk to action means compelling bureaucrats and politicians to do what they have ducked in years past: Report, in a real way, what they're really accomplishing...
...Two million federal workers in 304 organizations tucked away in 62 agencies undergo the productivity review every year...
...It was not always thus...
...Reagan's Grace Commission, a panel of private sector leaders who came in to identify government waste in the eighties, also talked more about slashing spending—to use budgetspeak—than about smartly spending...
...That's the second obstacle...
...That's because Congress, in its wisdom, tied the IGs' own performance to the number of reports generated and the dollars of waste identified...
...Forest Service approved a handful of pilots to test the idea...
...A quantum leap in making sense of government would mix an OMB warring on mediocrity—not waste, fraud, and abuse, but the pedestrian problems of governing—and generating clear reports to give the press the authority and means to criticize government in a way that's now all too rare...
...The Democrats' task now is to prove that the feds can accomplish smart things and be held accountable for broad policy outcomes like repairing bridges or housing the poor, even when the federal role is simply writing a check to a state or local government...
...The GAO signed off on the experiment, but by 1989, Forest Service managers nervous about losing control of the budgeting—and the reasons for their jobs—withdrew the budgeting power...
...Jimmy Carter...
...First, there is something that Gore has come to believe in the last six months: That the more time spent hunting "waste, fraud, and abuse," the less constructive evaluation is actually done...
...Because the essential questions are risky...
...To counter the inertia that killed the pilots—and could massacre the NPR on a grander scale—we need a well-staffed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) genuinely analyzing programs...
...But OMB's auditing staff has remained flat for over a generation...
...In fact, of the 145 measures that the EPA's Strategic Management and Planning System used in its water oversight, 30 percent were unconnected to any environmental goal—like cleaner water, which was the point of the enterprise...
...There's a world of difference, though, between counting how many grants the Department of Transportation processes, for example, and figuring out whether the roads have fewer potholes...
...In 1978, Carter established Inspectors General (IG) offices in 33 major departments and agencies with, again, the best of intentions...
...To save real money with his promised 100,000 (or more) job cuts, Clintpn must go after the middle ranks, and the unions ('to whom Gore has been unusually courteous) say they're all for that...
...That leaves agencies little power to decide what to spend on their own operations, even on the off-chance bureaucrats admit a program's wasting money...
...The NPR is confronting an operation where bureaucrats, accustomed to ducking IGs, fear the risk of exposure...
...This is no job for the fainthearted...
...And I had very little control over where 75 percent of the money went...
...And this approach is precisely what the administration wants to take national...
...And that's terrifying to the bureaucratic mind...
...Remember, I was sitting at HEW with what was then a $180 billion operation," recalls Joseph Califano, who was Carter's secretary of the old Health, Education and Welfare department...
...One measure demanded: "Report, by Region and nationally, the number of proposed EPA orders, the number of final EPA...
...And while Clinton and Gore are avoiding the Carter/LBJ mistake of instant implementation, the past tells us that an administration's interest in government reform dims as the years wear on...
...Today at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, analysts draw on a 328-page book filled with 2,500 "output" indicators...
...Once you agree to it, and tie performance to management and even budgets, you can't dodge responsibility...
...Ochoco is now back up to 53 line items: "We're worse off than we were before," says Rod Collins, an Ochoco supervisor...
...Performance smart So with vigilance and a touch of honesty, things can change...
...The afternoon...
...There's much more at stake here than the fate of another presidential commission...
...by 1971, it was dead, the victim of agencies who treated the analysis as a paperwork burden and a Congress that ignored the analysis and continued to appropriate money for political, not rational, reasons...
...So why weren't the decision packages eagerly read all over Washington and taken to heart, instead of languishing with Carter...
...Who knows which division really needs what they're asking for, or where the fat is...
...Instead, the law required managers to calculate "participation rates" and "expenditures by target group...
...And unless the bureaucrats and the Congress buy in (remember PPBS), this could all be a waste of time...
...The cost is minimal: IGs cost $1.2 billion a year—one half of one percent of the budget...
...But neither mandate that budgets be tied to reaching those goals...
...Isn't that logical...
...Even doubling that is nothing compared to the $100 billion in federal mismanagement costs the House Budget committee identified in 1991...
...This means Clinton and Gore must make sure that what agencies call "performance measures" aren't largely irrelevant busy-work...
...Too much of the time in government, we spend a lot of money on a problem and think we're fixing it...
...The problem is, accountability is an all-or-nothing proposition," says one Labor Department evaluator...
...And press again: Thirty-three admitted their information-gathering was not related to achieving those goals...
...That remark underscores two cultural obstacles the NPR must overcome...
...Let's suppose—just suppose—that Congress lets agencies make spending decisions on the spot...
...To improve their odds, Clinton and Gore speak the language recently repopularized by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in Reinventing Government: Focus on outcomes, not on process...
...One of the most ambitious pieces of domestic legislation in the eighties, the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), offspring of an odd political one-night stand in 1982 between Senators Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle, is a case study in how to set outcomes, how agencies will try to fool you, and how reform can win out...
...Carter failed where Johnson had also failed—and for largely the same reasons...
...In the fifties and sixties, for example, when the IRS audited more returns and hauled more people in for cheating on their taxes, tax compliance was higher than it is now because people were scared they'd get caught...
...OMB auditors who visit agencies are like tourists dealing with rug merchants abroad for the first time: Uncertain of the local customs and susceptible to built-in price gougings, they only see the final product—in this case, the agency's budget request—and so bargain from weakness...
...When Clinton first announced Gore would lead the NPR in March, the President said, "We'll challenge the basic assumptions of every program, asking does it work, does it provide quality service, does it encourage innovation and reward hard work...
...Education, for instance, was run by a computer, doling out money by congressional formula, and Congress wasn't interested in results as much as they were in getting money appropriated...
...Just ask Fred Malek, who was Nixon's OMB point man on Management by Objectives, a plan launched in 1971 to make agencies map out strategic plans and base budget decisions on their progress...
...The problem is, accountability is an all-or-nothing proposition," says one Labor Department evaluator...
...Yet terror can be a force for good...
...But in the context of the major corporate restructurings of the last decade, to which both Clinton and Gore approvingly refer, even that's remarkably tame: Since 1985, for example, IBM has cut its payroll by 45 percent...
...wide...
...Because "one of the major thrusts of what we're doing is measuring and controlling results, not inputs," says Bob Stone, the Pentagon reformer who's directing the Gore review...
...Despite the jargon ("It's time we had a new customer service contract with the American people"), Gore is campaigning against end-of-the-fiscal-year spending sprees, has got religion on cutting the bureaucracy, and is intent on simplifying the Byzantine, 450-level job classification system...
...The effect of all this...
...In 1985, the U.S...
...In fact, while the Gore plan to empower employees on the front lines by lifting self-imposed regulations sounds wonderful, and the Vice President has run a smart grass-roots campaign to bring bureaucrats into the game, the empowerment plan is based on the shaky assumptions that federal employees who consciously chose security in taking government jobs are chafing to shake up the system...
...The result...
...However, IGs thrive on cops-and-robbers, seizing on petty fraud instead of reporting on what works and what doesn't...
...How many get jobs, how many keep them, how much money are they making...
...Finally, only nine could straightfacedly say that the information could usefully measure progress...
...Yet no matter how small, the management pruning can't come soon enough if the administration's reinvention ideas are going to work...
...We must give top priority to a drastic and thorough revision of the federal bureaucracy, to its budgeting system, and to the procedures for constantly analyzing the effectiveness of its many varied services," the President had said during last year's campaign...
...And short of an in-House bank, Congress loves nothing better than a good waste, fraud, and abuse hearing to fulminate about wasting the taxpayers' dollars...
...Agencies complied, but overburdened the system with reams of forms: 10,000 annual "decision packages" poured in from every corner of the federal map...
...Take the fate of the great middle management class—236,500 out of a General Schedule workforce of 1.5 million—which has grown from 8 percent of the government in 1955 to 29 percent today...
...And Bush encouraged Total Quality Management...
...Today, we have submitted to the Congress the first in a series of recommendations for reorganizing the executive branch of Government," the President says confidently, promising a 300-per-son review of the government's operations...
...Why not ask the essential questions, too, by tracking a percentage of people over time...
...Two examples from the recent past: • For years at the EPA, inspectors who monitored the injection of hazardous waste into underground water sources reported the number of inspection visits—not the compliance (or noncompliance) the inspections produced...
...And Democrats will find it harder and harder to convince voters that they know what they're doing...
...The objective for gathering this data...
...The President...
...Their answers—such as why the Interior Department spends $66 million irrigating lands for corn, barley, rice, and cotton in the Southwest and the Agriculture Department pays farmers $379 million not to grow crops on that same land—are dangerous to the people who make and carry out those orders...
...Hopes are high...
...Thin the ties, shrink the lapels, trim the sideburns and fast forward to 1993: After a generation of bright federal moments like the $500 billion S & L collapse, this snippet of Carter and Bert Lance has all the trappings of Bill Clinton and Al Gore's September kickoff to . . . reinvent the federal government...
...Reagan brought in the Grace Commission...
...The people who handled the money said we were operating outside the culture, and they couldn't control what we spent money on...
...In 1955, for a federal budget of $68.4 billion, OMB had 450 staffers...
...The same principle holds true here: As long as agencies think there's a possibility of evaluation, they're more likely to do their jobs...
...But the late seventies weren't bucolic: Energy and jobs and the environment were as bad then as they are now...
...Carter thought bureaucrats would fess up about what didn't work if faced with declining fortunes...
...Called "creaming," this hustle of only counting the best let the local operators meet their standards without breaking a sweat...
...So bureaucrats rightly fear "ending up in the papers or in front of a subcommittee," as one mid-level budget analyst puts it...
...In Carter's ZBB, every federal agency sent three plans to the White House every year, one assuming a 20 percent funding cut...
...Consider one of the more complete federal experiments with a key plank of the NPR: results-oriented budgeting, where agencies are given flexibility to spend money as long as performance targets are met...
...But the big push for it had to come in 1974—and as you know, President Nixon and his men had other things on their minds in 1974...
...Congress has locked in three-fourths of the $1.5 trillion budget and > REVIEW oversees line-item spending for everything from the Alaska Natural Gas Transportation System to the Panama Canal Commission...
...Here's an old con to watch out for: Bureaucrats love forms (remember ZBB) and counting stuff, because both take time...
...Damn little," says Allen Schick, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland...
...And the system's got plenty of experience at that already...
...The $2 billion program, which reaches two million adults and teenagers, sets clear-cut goals (60 percent of trainees must be working three months after the program ends...
...The deepest federal cuts, assuming they come at all, would be 5 percent...
...Out in Oregon's Ochoco National Forest, rangers streamlined the budget from 27 line items to six, raised productivity by 25 percent, repaired streambeds that had been neglected by Washington budgeters since 1964, and saved $70,000 the first year...
...The federal experience right now is real thin," admits John Mercer, minority counsel to the Senate Governmental Affairs committee...
...So it is a serious mistake to expect, as most coverage of the NPR has and will, that "Reinvention Labs" and a handful of successful pilots will produce a new government—complete with overhead savings—any time soon...
...Nobody could even read it all, much less act on it...
...Or, if trainees were on welfare coming in, did they stay off...
...Because private sector renovations of this scale take 10 to 12 years—an eternity in politics, where turnover is the rule, not the exception—what sounds grand today will seem dated before long...
...Now comes Gore's National Performance Review (NPR) to remake government...
...In the seventies, he deployed zero-based budgeting (ZBB) to force every agency to reevaluate its reason for being...
...The idea behind the IGs was well-intentioned," says Dick Kuserow, a former Health and Human Services inspector general, "but a lot of us became mindlessly adversarial, intimidating our departments instead of thinking about how we could improve what we were doing...
...It will be met with violent opposition from those who now enjoy a special privilege, those who prefer to work in the dark, or those whose private fiefdoms are threatened...
...Press a little harder: How many of these agencies had clearly defined goals...
...That has happened before, and there's strong evidence that reform isn't long for this world once middle managers get hold of it...
...Within the last 30 years, LBJ ordered Robert McNamara's Programming-Plan-ning-and-Budgeting Systems instituted governmentResearch assistance for this article was provided by Spencer Freedman, Maia Carau, Alan Greenblatt, and Jennifer Levitsky...
...We've been here before...
...July 15, 1977...
...And the only way to find out whether the government is delivering is to evaluate what programs do...
...Nobody asked...
Vol. 25 • September 1993 • No. 9
