REVIEW ESSAY: SOME POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF THE FEDERAL REINVENTING GOVERNMENT REPORT

The structure, themes and rhetoric of the Report closely follow Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government (1992), a book based largely on brief cases or stories of reforms and innovations at the state and local levels of government. As a governor, President Clinton was heavily influenced by the work of David Osborn, a journalist-consultant-scholar who earlier published Laboratories of Democracy (1988) which described state innovations, including several which occurred in Arkansas. Reinventing Government has become virtually a handbook for candidates for both legislative and executive offices at the state and local levels. Osborn was an unpaid staff member on the National Performance Review. The language of reinvention (customer-driven, customer choice, steering rather than rowing, mission-driven, deregulation, decentralization, privatization, empowering federal workers, fees for service, a market orientation, and being entrepreneurial) is found throughout the Report.

The Report, like the books listed above, is filled with brief stories and anecdotes about either the failings of government (the ash tray procurement matter) or successful reforms or innovations ("Dialing for Dollars: How Competition Cut the Federal Phone Bill"). Every-other page has an interesting quote ("We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming," Werner von Braun). Compared to earlier reform reports such as the Grace Commission or the Ash Council, the Gore Report is an interesting and even lively read.

Among the more important recommendations in the Report are a two year budget and expenditure cycle, dropping agency FTE ceilings, allowing departmental savings beyond an expenditure period, decentralizing and deregulating federal personnel policies and practices, deregulating the procurement process, empowering state and local governments, dropping most unfunded mandates, setting measurable performance standards for all programs and measuring quality against those standards, dropping several agency monopolies such as the Government Printing Office and the General Services Agency, eliminating layers of middle-management, adopting an expanded version of the "expenditure recision" model of line-item presidential veto, and adopting a combination of department decentralization and the elimination of field offices.

What are some of the policy implications of the Gore Report?

First, the evidence indicates that important changes in the Federal government can be traced to earlier reform commissions (DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl 1993; Thomas 1993; Mosher 1967). The development of the institutional presidency, the use of modern management techniques, and the development of an executive budget are examples. These changes have been incremental or evolutionary rather than new inventions. The more successful reform proposals have resulted from a "clear vision of the problem and of the direction in which solutions lie," and "worked best when they grew from a strong strategy and robust intellectual support" (DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl 1993, 9). It is likely that the results of this reform proposal will also be evolutionary.

Second, some of the logic of the Gore Report is compatible with many features of the "new theory" (Garvey 1993) and arguments of the "new theorists" (DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl 1993) who study bureaucracy. Competition, market models, theories of principals and agents, transaction costs, information asymmetry and entrepreneurial bureaucrats fit reinventing concepts albeit using an entirely different language. The National Academy of Public Administration has embraced the Report. Will this intellectual support be sufficient to help in the adoption of the Report's proposals? Probably some, but not as much as the Administration would like.

Third, the Report suffers at many points from the "wrong-problems problem" (Downs and Larkey 1986). It "confuses disagreement over what government ought to do with how well it is doing it" (DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl 1993). "The roots of society's inability to reduce crime, make America energy-independent, eliminate inflation and unemployment, or provide sufficient low-income housing lie in an absence of technology, resources and political will. They are not products of bureaucratic ineptness or lazy and indifferent government workers. The belief that government's incapacities are the product of such failings may make election rhetoric more colorful and protect us from the pain of dealing with difficult problems and hard choices, but it brings none of these goals any closer" (Downs and Larkey 1986, 241). In the extent to which the National Performance Review engages in the wrong- problems problem, it is essentially an argument that we can somehow manage our way out of tough policy choices. This is all the more interesting because the Clinton administration is stepping up to domestic policy issues such as health care, crime, welfare, and the deficit in much the same way that the early Reagan administration stepped up to taxes, and downsizing government. It may be that the Administration seeks a balance between working on policy with one hand while working on performance or management with the other.

Fourth, while not bureaucrat bashing in the form of the Grace Commission, the Gore Report is optimistic about better policy implementation with fewer civil servants and less money. Contemporary concerns over "hollowing out" the federal administration (Milward and Provan 1993) or the "diminished capacity" of government (Kettl 1988) appear to have had little influence on the National Performance Review.

Fifth, a problem common to study commissions and presidential reform programs is the temptation to exaggerate potential savings and promise more than can be reasonably expected. Although not as extravagant as either the Ash or Grace Commissions in promised savings, the Gore Report is, nevertheless, very optimistic regarding savings which might result from the adoption of its proposals.

Sixth, much of the description of bureaucratic inefficiency and ineptness, has little to do with bureaucracy. "Overcontrol by OMB, divided party control of Congress and the executive, and micromanagement by Congress - - have created procedural straightjackets that limit the flexibility of managers to solve the problems they encounter" (DiIuilo, Garvey, and Kettl 1993, 22) The Report recognizes that high performance federal management will require grants of much greater discretion to bureaucrats and to the bureaucracy by Congress, the White House and OMB. Are principles really interested in allowing agents to take risks, to experiment and to be entrepreneurial? Can the political culture accommodate broad grants of discretion to public administrators? Probably not. But even if it were possible, would greater bureaucratic discretion and power be enough to offset the loss of effectiveness associated with sharp staff reduction? Probably not.

A few days before Vice President Gore presented the National Performance Review, the Brooking Institution published a slender book entitled Improving Government Performance: An Owners Manual (1993) by political scientists John J. DiIulio, Jr., Gerald Garvey and Donald F. Kettl. This is a wonderfully nuanced and sophisticated treatment of exactly the same issues addressed in the National Performance Review. There are interesting similarities in their recommendations. Rather than calling for the empowerment of bureaucrats they call for managers to take personal responsibility for government performance and to develop a culture of proactive problem-solving. They support both OMB and Congressional relaxation of controls and the discontinuation of micromanagement. Rather than simply calling for more contracting-out or privatization, they recognize that contracting removes the public servant another step from the customer. They call for stronger abilities of agencies to oversee their contractors. They support, with some caveats, the applications of TQM to federal administration and favor the ideas of customer- driven administration, recognizing the difficulty of deciding who the customers are. They call for reducing middle management in the civil service but also recommend a reduction in the number of Presidential political appointments.

In many ways the Brookings book is a well argued, theoretically grounded and non-exaggerated version of the National Performance Review Report. It appears, therefore, that political scientists specializing in policy studies and public administration are essentially in agreement with their political and bureaucratic cousins associated with the National Performance Review.

Political scientists specializing in public policy may judge this to be a refreshing focus on the implementation aspects of federal policy. That is my view. I suspect, on the other hand, that many political scientists who adhere to Madisonian and Jeffersonian traditions will be troubled by recommendations in both of these studies, for strengthening the bureaucracy.

NOTES

1. As is always the case, stories of innovation or reform reflect the perspective of the teller. For a contrary telling of several stories in Reinventing Government see James Fallows, "A Case for Reform" Harpers Magazine, pp. 119-123 and a two-part series in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by Dennis J. McGrath, a Minnesota reporter who visited Visalia, California, where Ted Gaebler served as city manager, and the scene of several of the success stories. "The word entrepreneur has been officially banned from city hall lexicon." "A downtown development deal built on creative financing collapsed, leaving taxpayers with a sour taste for the government-as-a-business experiment." Politics in Visalia is now described as "back to basics" or "back to common-sense." January 11, 1994.

REFERENCES

Osborne, David. 1988. Laboratories of Democracy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Kettl, Donald F. 1988. Government by Proxy: (Mis?) Managing Federal Programs. Washington: CQ Press.

Osborne, David and Ted Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing Government. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

DiIulio, John J., Jr., Gerald Garvey, and Donald F. Kettl. 1993. Improving Government Performance: An Owner's Manual. Washington: Brookings.

Downs, George W. and Patrick I. Larkey. 1986. The Search for Government Efficiency: From Hubris to Helplessness. New York: Random House.

Milward, H. Brinton and Keith G. Provan. 1993. "The Hollow State: Private Provision of Public Services," in Public Policy for Democracy, ed. Helen Ingram and Steven Rathgeb Smith. Washington: Brookings.

Garvey, Gerald. 1993. "Reorganizing Public Organizations: Alternatives, Objectives, and Evidence," Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 3:4, October, 457-86.

Mosher, Frederick C. 1967. Governmental Reorganizations: Cases and Commentary. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril.