GovernmentExecutive.com

Last week was rough for Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean, as his rivals began cutting into his lead in Iowa and New Hampshire. But suppose he hangs on, wins the nomination and manages to defeat George W. Bush in November's election. Hey, it could happen.

What then? How would President Dean seek to organize and manage the massive federal bureaucracy?

To try to answer that question, it's important first to note that Dean is a character with which longtime federal employees have become very familiar: the quintessential outsider, rallying his supporters with the cry that he's not burdened with Washington baggage and will clean up the mess in the federal government.

Dean has been particularly dismissive of Washington insiders - even the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. They have attacked him, Dean told Newsweek, "because when you get cozy in Washington, you'd rather lose and maintain your cozy loser's position than win with somebody from outside Washington."

But Dean's outsiderness comes with a twist: He has positioned himself as one of the most traditional kinds of Washington politician - a classic liberal. Or, as he puts it, a member of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party." Dean wears his left-wing credentials proudly. He boasts of having signed the nation's first law providing equal rights to gays and lesbians, and has proposed giving federal employees the right to name same-sex partners as insurance beneficiaries.

In December, Dean went so far as to challenge the Clinton-era orthodoxy that the grand liberal age of huge federal programs and bureaucracies had passed. "While Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, I believe that we must enter a new era for the Democratic party - not one where we join Republicans and aim to simply limit the damage they inflict on working families," Dean said. Clintonites took immediate offense at the remark and the other Democrats in the race - particularly Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. - were quick to label him the big-government candidate.

But in his speech, Dean said he advocated a return to "fairer," not necessarily bigger, government. Indeed, while Dean has proposed a series of initiatives designed to beef up the government's role in regulating the economy, he also has embraced key elements of the Clinton administration's efforts to scale back the size and scope of federal operations. In a campaign document called "Reclaiming the American Dream," Dean pledges to "immediately reinstitute" the National Performance Review, Vice President Al Gore's effort to save $108 billion by improving the efficiency of agencies. An "important element of fiscal responsibility is vigilant oversight of the efficiency and necessity of federal programs," the document states.

Dean has repeatedly trumpeted his fiscally conservative record as governor of Vermont. In 2001, for example, he asked the state legislature to enact $8 million in spending cuts to balance the state's budget, and just a few months later came back with another $8.47 million in reductions. Under Dean's proposals, "many managers would squeeze out savings by leaving vacant positions unfilled, curtailing travel and overtime, or abandoning new initiatives," the Burlington Free Press reported.

Even during tough budget times, though, Dean remained a friend to state government workers, says Edward Stanak, president of the Vermont State Employees Association, which represents more than 10,000 public workers in the state. In a letter to Iowa public employees in December, Stanak noted that Dean had negotiated annual cost-of-living pay raises and salary increases based on longevity for state employees throughout the lean 1990s. Even in the one year - 1993 - that state workers agreed to a temporary wage freeze, they still got the longevity increases.

Dean also:

• Appointed a blue-ribbon panel on privatization in 1998 and signed a bill the following year that limited the use of contractors by state agencies. Within months after the law passed, Dean had "contracted in" more than 400 jobs that had been outsourced to private firms.
• Approved "agency fee" legislation, requiring that both union members and non-members in state government pay for the costs of union representation for public employees.
• Signed a bill prohibiting the hiring of temporary workers in state government except for seasonal and emergency use.

On the campaign trail, Dean has pledged that if elected he would vigorously defend the interests of federal labor unions. In a July speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Dean accused President Bush of leading "the most anti-union administration in history," saying that "under cover of national security, he stripped 170,000 workers of collective bargaining rights," and "while he's pulling back on his plan to privatize 850,000 government jobs, his objective remains the same."

There you have it. Howard Dean is a fiscal conservative and an orthodox liberal. He has backed both efficiency-based cutbacks in government operations and limits on privatization. So the question may not be what Dean would do, but which Dean would govern if he were elected to be the federal government's chief executive officer.