Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform.

The Republican Congress's recent crusade to dismantle much of the federal government has caused the Clinton Administration considerable heartache, not least because it has obscured the White House's own ongoing efforts to "reinvent" government. By focusing its energies on defeating Republican bills such as a measure to require elaborate, peer-reviewed cost-benefit analyses before new regulations are issued, the White House has inevitably come off looking like a defender of the regulatory state. But the truth is this administration doesn't like much of the big-government machinery it inherited, and it hates creating the appearance that it does.

Still, the Republican assault on government does have the advantage of casting the rather ho-hum accomplishments of Vice President Al Gore's reinvention team, formally known as the National Performance Review (NPR), in a decidedly more favorable light. Okay, so the government hasn't become sleek and super-efficient. But it is still there, doing (perhaps slightly more efficiently) the work on which the public relies.

Donald F. Kettl and John J. DiIulio, Jr. of the Brookings Institution deserve much credit for keeping a watchful eye, in various books and reports, on NPR since its advent. Their findings, presented with those of other Brookings scholars in this volume, are not startling. But they are informative, and Inside the Reinvention Machine is as good an update on the Clinton reinvention record as government-management junkies are likely to find.

The most highly publicized aspect of NPR has been its downsizing of the federal workforce. But as several of the book's contributors point out, laying off federal workers isn't necessarily a formula for making government work better, and if done carelessly, it could make the situation worse. NPR's goal of reducing personnel by 252,000--later revised by Congress to 272,900--was a number pretty much pulled out of a hat, with little more than symbolic meaning. Anyway, Kettl points out that two-thirds of the crowd-pleasing personnel reductions achieved in the reinvention's first year weren't much to write home about because they came from the Defense Department, which was already downsizing because of the end of the Cold War.

Is the civil service bloated? Probably. Certainly it would be helpful if NPR found a way to make it easier to identify and fire (or relocate) those federal employees who are incompetent (or who have little to do); the Clinton Administration's steps in this direction have been fairly timid thus far. But the civil service isn't the behemoth that most people imagine. As DiIulio notes, today's federal civilian workforce of 2.1 million employees is actually smaller than it was in 1960. And Washington's slice of the federal workforce isn't any larger today either; then, as now, nine-tenths of these employees worked outside the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The real growth in government employment has occurred not in the federal government, but in state and local governments, and in the ever-growing army of federal contract employees. The federal government has gotten "bigger" in the post-World War II era mainly by spending more money on programs that are administered either by state and local governments or by private contractors.

This last point is largely missed by the NPR team and like-minded government critics, who, when talking about Big Government, tend to wax poetic about the greater wisdom of devolution to state and local governments and "private-public partnerships." In another recent Brookings report, DiIulio and Kettl pointed out that in fiscal year 1994 half of all discretionary federal spending went to contracts and grants. "To those who argue that the federal government ought to devolve power to state and local governments and the private sector," they wrote, "the answer is that it already has."

When NPR has looked past downsizing and focused on concrete ways to improve government service, the results have tended to be more substantial. Even here, however, some reinvention slogans can be problematic. For example, Kettl notes, the idea of "customer-based" government is great when applied to certain activities, like speeding up the processing of Social Security claims (which has actually happened). In other cases, however, more responsiveness to "customers" is not necessarily what society wants. Yes, regulations should be more user-friendly; but in setting the rules, they shouldn't encourage "customers" such as manufacturers to pollute the air and water. Yes. prisons should be run in a humane manner; but "customers" who commit violent crimes should be put behind bars for a lengthy period.

So where has the reinventing government effort been most effective? One clear step forward has been a new procurement system, master-minded by the Office of Management and Budget, that eliminates the federal government's previous taboo against considering a potential contractor's past performance. That was a great example of an insane procedure instituted in the futile attempt to render federal decision-making more "scientific" and less "subjective" and prone to political favoritism. But as Philip K. Howard noted in his recent book, The Death of Common Sense, complicated bureaucratic rules aimed at eliminating stupid behavior just create unforeseen complications that lead to even more stupid bureaucratic behavior.

Unfortunately, after reading this book, it's hard to identify many other government-wide improvements that NPR has yielded. Part of the fault may lie not with the Clinton Administration, but with the authors of this book, who are good at providing numbers but bad at providing fleshed-out, concrete details about how NPR has changed (or not changed) the federal culture. And part of the fault no doubt lies with the administration, which has had trouble coming up with many genuinely inspiring success stories about how the government is mending its ways. Still, the general consensus among the authors is that Vice President Gore could be doing many worse things with his time, and that aiming for a more highly motivated and more capable federal government is better than settling for a bloated, demoralized, or paralyzed one.