he Clinton Administration's three-and-a-half year effort to reform government management has seen Vice President Gore devote countless hours to his National Performance Review. Laws reforming procurement, information technology management and performance measurement have been passed. Federal workers have pushed the limits of reform in "reinvention laboratories." Now, as a new presidential term approaches, it's fair to ask what has been accomplished, how enduring the changes will be and what's ahead in the effort to make government work better and cost less.
Clinton made little of his government reform efforts during his reelection campaign this fall. Making government work better is at the bottom of the Clinton achievements listed on the White House Web site (www.whitehouse.gov). Even here, the President only touts cutting 240,000 federal jobs, eliminating unnecessary regulations and $58 billion saved by cutting "wasteful government practices and spending." There's no word about reforms to improve government's performance. Even the Democratic platform promises only to "make responsibility the rule in Washington." The means: "cutting bureaucracy further, demanding better performance, holding people and agencies accountable for producing best results." How can this be done? Stay tuned.
Yet among Clinton Administration officials, enthusiasm for improving government management appears unflagging. "More legislation has passed in the last three years affecting management than in recent administrations," Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director John Koskinen boasts.
Strong leadership is essential to sustain reform and Gore's NPR has provided it in many areas. But some observers have taken NPR to task for treading lightly over sensitive issues, such as the number and quality of presidential appointees and the political-career interface. Koskinen believes there is significant work to be done in understanding and improving how people actually manage the large and complex organizations in government. "Leadership and management are synonymous," he says. Koskinen acknowledges that political appointees generally are brought into leadership positions because of their policy experience, not their management skills. One of the Administration's goals, he says, is to have candidates for deputy secretary posts assessed in terms of management background. "Agencies will be under continued financial pressure," Koskinen says. "There, management counts."
NPR issued a report, "Creating Quality Leadership and Management," which recommended that the Administration designate agency chief operating officers, establish a President's Management Council and conduct periodic performance reviews of agencies. All the proposals have been or are being implemented. Other recommendations on quality management and strengthening the corps of senior leaders are not as far along.
Controlled Chaos
Koskinen cites the Administration's use of the President's Management Council as an example of leadership improvement. This council is chaired by Koskinen and composed of deputy secretaries or equivalent-level officials who are charged by executive order with policy-making and coordination of governmentwide reform initiatives such as customer service improvement, streamlining and civil service reform. Acknowledging the group has not reached its full potential, Koskinen nonetheless believes it has served a valuable function in allowing the deputy secretaries to come together to talk about problems of common interest. "They can initiate programs having governmentwide significance and can provide continuity of execution," he says. The group played a major role in the decision to offer federal employees buyouts of up to $25,000.
At last fall's annual meeting of the National Academy of Public Administration, five deputy secretaries serving on the council described the practical challenges they have faced. These included maintaining a focus on performance, adjusting to changing missions, and coping with deep reductions in staff and resources.
Labor Department Deputy Secretary Thomas Glynn described his organization's difficulties adjusting to restructuring. "The first two years of the Clinton Administration were like a hurricane," he said. "At least you could do what they told you and there would be damage, but by and large you could survive. Reforms coming out of this Congress, however, have been like a tornado-random and very difficult to plan for."
Koskinen is more sanguine about the Administration's relations with Congress, asserting that there is political consensus on about 80 percent to 90 percent of what government does. What's important is finding ways to hold people accountable, Koskinen says. He thinks the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act will help. "A high-performing program will not necessarily get more money and low-performing programs will not necessarily disappear, but performance will become part of the dialogue."
Agency officials, he says, must focus on how the performance-based approach will make their operations more effective program by program. Performance measurement cannot be set off in a corner apart from core agency operations, he says, adding that "the worst thing that can happen is for special GPRA bureaucracies" to spring up in the agencies.
The Administration also has proposed creating performance-based organizations (PBOs) to provide greater autonomy and flexibility to business-type operations in government. OMB is developing a base set of concepts for the new organizations. Although some PBO features-procurement flexibility, for example-are generally accepted, new personnel practices and the capability to hire a chief executive under a performance contract for a fixed term, a higher salary and potential bonus, pose major challenges. Congress did not pass legislation creating PBOs this year, and Koskinen acknowledges that legislators are going to want a closer look at each proposal to create such an organization.
High Expectations
High on the Administration's agenda, Koskinen says, is fundamentally rethinking the way government manages its workforce, including communication between supervisors and employees. "We tend to look at this in terms of poor performers," he says. "This is useful to get people's attention, but the key question is what generates poor performers in the first place." Because the personnel system is poorly designed, he says, people are forced into formal processes to appeal adverse rulings or actions. Koskinen says the situation cannot be fixed through legislative remedies alone.
The Clinton Administration has thus far focused its workforce management efforts on top officials. To forge a common set of performance expectations between Cabinet secretaries and the President, the White House has experimented with a series of agreements setting out goals and performance measures. For example, Labor Secretary Robert Reich was tasked with "preparing all Americans for good jobs, easing the transition of workers from job to job, creating high-performance American workplaces and reinventing the Department of Labor." Each goal included objectives and performance measures.
These agreements worked well at Labor and in some other departments, Koskinen says. But he acknowledges that some secretaries, especially those in the "inner Cabinet" (Defense, State, Justice and Treasury) did not adopt the agreements. Koskinen believes such agreements fold neatly into the GPRA framework, which requires every agency to have a strategic plan and annual performance plan focusing on its mission. The goal is to roll these up into a governmentwide plan which will result in performance agreements between the President and Cabinet secretaries.
But the prospects for achieving performance-based government are limited. It will be an enormous challenge to build and keep a complex matrix of personal and organizational goals and measures intact over a long enough period to enable any legitimate assessments of performance.
More Than Moving Boxes
During the 104th Congress, there was much talk of restructuring government by abolishing Cabinet departments, privatizing programs and even establishing a bipartisan commission-much like the Hoover commission a half century ago-to develop a new government organization chart. The talk was principally from Republicans, who had gained a majority in both the House and Senate in 1994.
Democrats weren't much interested, though the Clinton Administration did ask three Cabinet departments and two independent agencies to justify their existence during meetings in December 1994. Downsizing and restructuring were ordered up at the departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development and Transportation, and at the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. At HUD, the number of employees was set at 7,500 by the turn of the century, down from about 12,000. The goal is still in place. At Transportation, several operating administrations were to be merged into three, but Congress didn't buy the proposal.
Koskinen is impatient with meat-ax restructuring and consolidation proposals. "Organization problems are more subtle than just abolishing the Commerce Department," he says. He prefers to concentrate on consolidating and coordinating programs serving similar constituencies.
But there can be little doubt that pressure for consolidations will continue, as government continues to react to tight budgets, the end of the Cold War and the cascading information revolution. To the extent that the Republican Party retains or enhances its power in Washington, the current structure of government will remain a prime target of attack.
With a new set of precepts focusing on customer service, decentralization, innovation and empowerment, the Clinton Administration set out to reinvent government from the bottom up. With reinvention labs, Hammer Awards and a team of federal employees in the vanguard, the National Performance Review delivered the message across government: Innovation was in, middle management and overhead positions were out, customers (however defined) were important and budgets were coming down.
Yet, the NPR initiatives are fragile, since there is no institution established by law to carry on the program. Without changes in law beyond those already enacted, there is little to embed reforms in the day-to-day practice of government.
Leading and managing government in the next presidential term will be no less challenging than during the last four years.
There will be more reliance on information technology and new opportunities to streamline and eliminate middle management will occur as a result. Performance-driven government will gradually gain hold, as additional features of GPRA kick in. We may actually approach an era where performance measurement does play a meaningful role in budget decisions and employees' assessments. Thus reinvention will continue its slow but steady pace, and government will continue to improve. But there will be plenty left to reform after the champagne is uncorked at the dawn of the third millennium.
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