As I know from my advisory work in the private sector, these were problems not necessarily unique to government. If you could travel back in time and ask an engineer at IBM or an assembly-line worker at a General Electric plant in the 1960s about their jobs and bosses, they, too, would drone on about bureaucracy and red tape. The difference is that as times got tough in the 1970s and 1980s, large companies began to reinvent themselves—moving from top-down to flat structures, relying on teams and networks to solve problems, putting quality first, and utilizing the latest in information technology to deliver for their customers.
And, as management guru Peter Drucker pointed out, these large companies had no choice. From automobiles to steel, rubber, and consumer electronics, the industries that powered the phenomenal growth in the U.S. economy from the late nineteenth century and into the middle of the twentieth were all dealt heavy blows with the “oil shocks” of 1973 and 1979, as well as competition from abroad, which exposed their fundamental weaknesses in a changing world. Unsurprisingly, these large companies contributed nothing to U.S. job growth during the two decades between 1965 and 1985. In fact, between 1970 and 1984, the Fortune 500 had permanently lost (that is, not counting recession-driven unemployment) between 4 and 6 million jobs, while the country added upwards of 40 million jobs. This was a 180-degree turnaround from the period before that (1945 to 1970) when large companies—as well as large government agencies at every level—created almost all the new jobs. To Drucker and others, it was “entrepreneurial management” that was growing new, innovative, competitive companies, rejuvenating older ones, and powering the U.S. economy.24
Pinkerton and the New Paradigmers believed that government had to reinvent and reengineer itself too. “Why can’t we use technology to create a citizen-driven, desktop, user-friendly, 800-number government?” Pinkerton asked in the fall of 1991. As the 1990s began, the man who brought the world Willie Horton found a willing audience and some allies in an unlikely place: the Democratic Party.
The revolution came first in local and state governance. By 1982, state and local governments had lost nearly one of every four federal dollars they received in 1978.25 With the deep recession of 1982 and the requirement that many had to have a balanced budget, state and local governments had to get creative. What ensued was public sector innovation all across America—from the decision in Indianapolis to outsource, or put up for private sector competition, the delivery of many services; to St. Paul, Minnesota, creating private, nonprofit corporations to redevelop its neighborhoods; to the state of Illinois reimbursing nursing homes based on quality of care delivered rather than the number of seniors kept under care. These mayors and governors had no time for the philosophical debates between the postwar, big-government liberals and the Reaganite, laissez-faire conservatives. They needed to get their job done—deliver services and serve their communities. The ideological means didn’t matter.26
Innovations at the state level intrigued a group of Democrats who rejected not only the conservative paradigm of less government as the solution but also the old liberal paradigm that more government was always the answer. Known as New Democrats, their home was a small organization on Capitol Hill called the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), run by Al From, a slow-talking, shy, bespectacled lifetime staffer, and chaired by a man who was his opposite: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Clinton and the New Democrats believed, like Pinkerton did, that government had an important role to play, but it needed to be reinvented for the increasingly global, information-age economy. In its New American Choice Resolutions, unveiled at their May 1991 convention in Cleveland, the DLC called for stripping away “unneeded layers of bureaucracy” not because government was not needed but because “decentralized bureaucracies are no longer the best or most effective way to deliver services.” Clinton and the New Democrats wanted a review of all government programs to determine if they had to be carried out by the federal government or indeed were needed at all, and supported a 3 percent reduction in the federal government’s administrative and personnel expenses. Even more notably, the New Democrats’ prescriptions for curbing pollution, improving education, and expanding health care—all core Democratic beliefs—relied chiefly on market mechanisms, contrary to the party’s previous line of thinking.27
A mere five months following the DLC convention in 1991, Bill Clinton announced he was running for president, and central to his candidacy was his belief in reinventing government, which he called the New Covenant. Soon thereafter, Pinkerton left the White House to join the Bush reelection campaign. As one observer at the time put it: “His [Pinkerton’s] mission is now poignantly simple: to destroy the one candidate who seems earnestly engaged with his own idea.” Pinkerton was unsuccessful in that mission; in January 1993, Bill Clinton took the oath of office, and would go on to execute his vision, handing the assignment to his highest-ranking deputy, the Vice President, Al Gore.
The government bureaucrats; idealistic, private sector management experts; and newly minted White House staffers gathered to hear their marching orders from their new boss and did so with anticipation and an understandable case of nerves. They were charged with working on an initiative that was at the core of the new presidency and would be central to its ultimate success—or failure.
As Clinton and Gore had written in their best-selling campaign manifesto Putting People First:
“We cannot put people first and create jobs and economic growth without a revolution in government. We must take away power from the entrenched bureaucracies and special interests that dominate Washington. We can no longer afford to pay more for—and get less from—our government. The answer for every problem cannot always be another program or more money. It is time to radically change the way government operates—to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up. We must reward the people and ideas that work and get rid of those that don’t.”28
Clinton and Gore backed up the rhetoric with substantive proposals. They called for a 25 percent reduction in the White House staff, the elimination of 100,000 unnecessary positions in the federal bureaucracy through attrition, and a three percent across-the-board administrative savings in every agency. Clinton’s twelve years as a governor had helped teach him that it was not enough for people of good intentions to pass legislation and authorize new programs. Those programs had to be effective if they were going to have an impact. If government did not work, it would not make a positive difference. If Americans didn’t believe that their tax dollars were being spent wisely, then they wouldn’t trust government to spend them on anything.
To underscore the importance of this initiative, Clinton assigned it to Gore in the early days of his presidency and asked for a report of recommendations for action in six months’ time. Gore’s chief policy advisor? That just happened to be Pinkerton’s coconspirator in the New Paradigm Society: Elaine Kamarck.
When Kamarck stepped forward to address the members of the task force for the first time, she presented them with a rationale for their work that stretched far beyond the political needs of Clinton and Gore, the need to reduce government spending, or even the important but mundane task of making the public sector more effective. As opposed to previous efforts such as the Grace Commission, the effort Kamarck led would be about the larger task of saving government itself—making it useful and relevant to a changing world.
As she put it to the assembled group:
“In the [1950s], people’s experience in the private sector and the public sector was likely to be similar. You’d have to go to a bank between nine and three, you’d have to stand in a line, you’d have to deal with someone, and that was also the experience you’d have if you were getting a passport. Starting in the late seventies, the private sector discovered customer service with a vengeance. They started using computer technology to make things easy for people; the stan
dout example is a bank ATM machine. And so while the private sector was knocking its brains out, the government just stood still. Today, if the government were a store, nobody would buy from it. If it were an airline, nobody would fly it.”29
Under the direction of Gore and Kamarck, what became known as the National Performance Review went to work. It was guided by four key principles: cutting red tape so that government workers were now accountable for results, not just following the rules; putting customers first; empowering employees to get results, through methods such as decentralizing authority for those on the frontlines; and getting back to basics, ending obsolete programs and functions, and investing in productivity, including new technologies.
These principles sounded simple, and they were often included in standard management consulting concepts that had delivered results in the private sector. Of course, nothing is that easy in the federal government. Kamarck and the Reinventing Government (REGO) team would have to contend with such basic things as: How can you hold a federal employee accountable for results if it’s almost impossible to remove them? How do you downsize while at the same time keep employees energized to do more for your customers? How can you bring new technologies into an organization that has individual agencies and offices that dwarf any business in size and have complex and burdensome procurement procedures? And how do you do all this while under the glare of Congress and interest groups, many of whom are quite pleased with the current arrangement?
The initial REGO report was presented to President Clinton in September 1993, and had 384 specific recommendations for reform. The REGO team got to work. Five years later, Brookings scholar Don Kettl would observe, “No executive branch reform in the twentieth century—indeed, perhaps in the Constitution’s 210 years—has enjoyed such high-level attention over such a broad range of activities for such a long period of time.”30
Gore was successful in bringing attention to some of the government’s reinvention efforts, even if the actual savings impact was modest in some cases. He famously went on David Letterman’s late night TV show and, donning safety goggles, smashed a glass ashtray to mock the complex federal procurement standards for what the regulations termed “ash receivers, tobacco (desk type).” If the procurement process could be shifted from unique (often characterized as “gold-plated”) military specifications to more common commercial substitutes, the government could benefit from market competition. And perhaps costs could come down from the ludicrous levels that previous administrations had come to accept, such as spending $54 for a stapler or $435 for a hammer.31 Gore enshrined the spirit of the efficiency effort in creating the Hammer Awards for civil servants who helped save money and reform public systems—using the prize as an incentive for change. The 1,378 public sector recipients of the award received a ribbon, a plaque, and a hammer, one that cost just $6.
In truth, these moments, while memorable to many, didn’t represent the full story. Later analysis would clarify that a single hammer itself didn’t cost that much, but it had been marked up in the accounting process to cover contractors’ research, development, and other fixed overhead costs.
Still, it served a purpose as part of the larger narrative, as other reform measures made more of a material impact. Nearly 2,000 obsolete field offices were closed. Two hundred and fifty programs and agencies, such as the Board of Tea Examiners and Bureau of Mines, were shut down. Government subsidies for the production of wool and mohair, which were instituted to keep production up during World War II but were no longer needed, were eliminated. In all, 13 of the 14 Cabinet departments were reduced in size, and the overall federal civilian workforce was shrunk not by the 100,000 that Clinton and Gore promised in 1992 but by a total of 426,000 positions. When that administration left the White House in 2001, the federal government workforce—as measured by military and civilian personnel and not including contractors32—was the smallest it had been since the Kennedy administration.33
However, the goal of the National Performance Review was not simply to make government cost less or do less. No, that was the goal of small-government conservatives who disagreed with the very notion of federal government action. The goal of the review was to make a government that worked better—providing higher quality services to citizens treated as customers. Here, too, the effects were far-reaching, from allowing constituents to pay taxes with a credit card, to rewriting 31,000 pages of regulation into plain English, to committing federal agencies to tangible customer service standards.
By the end of the 1990s, there was some anecdotal evidence that the American people were seeing a turnaround: one 1999 survey found that 60 percent of respondents said they had noticed improvements in public service over the previous two years—a key proxy of trust in government. But ultimately, much work remained undone. The reinventing government initiative took on the challenge of how government delivers services but—due to inertia and Congressional inaction—the larger challenge of defining government’s role was often left unmet.
Gore and Kamarck’s attempt to reinvent government had come too early to tap the power of the latest industrial revolution: the information technology (IT) revolution. When Gore presented his initial report to Clinton in September 1993, there were a total of 204 websites in existence on the entire Internet. The World Wide Web, invented in 1989, existed largely in name only. But during the decade that followed, the world of technology exploded, driving productivity gains across the private sector.
To be fair, by 2000, REGO had pushed for the creation of more than 1,000 online forms, including IRS electronic filing, and had worked to help create FirstGov—a one-stop website for government information and transactions—with connections to 27 million web pages. And in an effort to improve the customer service taxpayers received, the IRS signed a $7.5 billion contract to modernize its computer system.
It was just the tip of the iceberg. Technology would grow by leaps and bounds, and government would struggle to keep up, with multibillion-dollar, multiyear modernization projects rarely proving to be the best way to do so. Today, each iPhone contains more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1961 when John F. Kennedy took office. Powered by advances in big data analytics, ever-expansive mobile broadband, and more secure cloud computing services, today’s technological capabilities have the ability to personalize recommendations on what restaurant to try, what health care provider to select, or what higher education institution to attend. And, through a standardized set of instructions called an application programming interface (API), software products can communicate with each other with little friction, even across organizational boundaries. That allows companies to partner with others in delivering better products and services to their customers.
But none of that was available to Kamarck and her team. As she later reflected, “I never got rid of the nagging suspicion that the government we were trying to reform was . . . functioning, but hopelessly obsolete. We were operating on a corpse or rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
With the defeat of Al Gore in 2000, it would fall to another generation of reformers to bring that power and potential to the continuing effort to reform government. As the nation’s first president with an MBA, George W. Bush had promised to continue much of the Clinton-Gore Administration REGO work. And with his emphasis on a “citizen-centered,” “results-oriented,” and “market-based” government, Bush was operating in the new paradigm of Pinkerton and Kamarck. Bush, in particular, focused on harnessing the power of the growing Internet to open up government to the American people. He called for and created an e-government fund and the first office of e-government to coordinate these efforts, and he wanted to shift as much of government procurement as possible online to realize some of the same productivity gains and savings the private sector was seeing.34
Those lofty goals, like much else, were soon pushed aside after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Like the first Bush pre
sidency, the second also became a foreign policy–focused one. Ironically, the main federal reform instituted to respond to the 9/11 attacks was one out of the old playbook: the creation of a new Cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and creating another layer of bureaucracy in the intelligence community with the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the Bush administration took shape, government reform was sent to the back burner. In fact, government spending and the size of the federal government grew considerably under Bush, driven primarily by the war on terror.
The lag between our government’s commitment to modernization and the continued advancements in technology grew during the remainder of the Bush presidency. Still, through the first few years of the Obama administration, the President’s sponsorship of more open and innovative government shrunk the gap some in a host of areas.
Take Obama’s challenge, in January 2010, to the assembled CEOs at the Forum on Modernizing Government: “If you can book dinner on OpenTable, or a flight on Southwest or United online, then why shouldn’t you be able to make an appointment at your local Social Security office the same way?”
Questions like that had informed the White House’s Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (SAVE) Award, which solicited ideas from frontline federal workers about how to make government more effective and efficient. Christie Dickson, a Social Security Administration employee in Birmingham, Alabama, identified a productivity drag in the system—she spent too much of her time booking appointments over the phone—and suggested online appointment scheduling.35 While that idea didn’t win the SAVE contest, it sparked a related competition, for an application that is not widely available in the private sector. Why not let veterans book physician appointments online with the same ease of an OpenTable restaurant reservation? On December 14, 2012, the VA announced an open competition on Challenge.gov, the new website President Obama launched just a few years earlier as part of his commitment to a more open and collaborative government. The VA Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest offered a chance for three teams to split $3 million if they could successfully demonstrate, in a virtual testing environment, that their innovative scheduling tools could plug in to the VA’s existing Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VISTA) system to facilitate appointment making.
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