The Clinton Administration has ordered federal agencies to free civil servants from stifling internal regulations. While many federal agencies missed a July 1 deadline to respond to the order, at least one department is set to empower its employees on a broader scale than ever before.
In April, Vice President Gore ordered agency heads to make it easier for employees to get waivers from internal rules and regulations. Gore said many federal agencies' internal policies have no basis in law and simply stand in the way of efficient government.
Under the guidelines, waiver requests must be approved or denied within 30 days. Only an agency head can deny a waiver request. If the waiver requests are not acted upon within 30 days, the employees who requested the waivers can assume that their requests have been approved. In addition, agencies were to report to Gore by July 1 on their plans for granting more waivers.
"With this action to streamline waivers, we will open up the floodgates of reinvention all over the federal government," Gore said in April. But nearly two months later, the dam of bureaucracy is showing only minor cracks.
While the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Justice, State and Transportation Departments sent reports to Gore on their waiver plans, no other major agency had turned in a report as of July 10. Some departments that did turn in reports planned to offer waiver authority only to select portions of their agencies, even though the Clinton adminstration urged them to "take every opportunity to extend this process throughout your agency."
The problem is simple, James Thompson, a public affairs professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a reinvention expert, explained bluntly.
"Turf," said Thompson. "It's internal politics. People on the front lines want authority but staff units at headquarters won't give it to them."
At least one department, however, plans a wide-ranging effort to encourage employees to question and challenge internal rules that get in the way of meeting agency goals. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater informed the Vice President that he has directed senior department managers to create a streamlined waiver process by August 1. The department has devised a three-question waiver request form that fits on one page. Employees who want to challenge a regulation will submit the request form to a high level official in their agency, as well as the lower-ranking official with direct authority over the challenged regulation. The high level official will then have 30 days to reject or approve the request. If no action is taken, the employee who requested the waiver can assume that the rule is waived.
DOT will also set up a Web site that will house all waiver requests, so that managers and employees throughout the vastly decentralized department can compare plans for streamlining rules.
"This is an important tool to help us do the important business and not get bogged down in the bureaucratic business that we don't necessarily need to be doing," said Marylou Batt, special assistant to the deputy Transportation secretary. "We're trusting employees based on the belief that employees have the best knowledge of the kinds of things that can be streamlined."
DOT's plan, which includes an employee-friendly question-and-answer guide to waivers, is based on the lessons the department's procurement shop learned as a reinvention lab in the Clinton Administration's first term. Reinvention labs were set up around the government to test administrative and procurement flexibilities. Waiver requests in DOT's procurement reinvention lab led to a memorandum of understanding between DOT and the Small Business Administration streamlining the 8(a) contracting process, a move widely hailed in the federal procurement community.
"We had to overcome our internal fears and say we'd take the consequences if things went wrong. That's always an issue with managers," said David Litman, DOT's director of acquisition and grant management. "It was a very positive thing for us. Part of the success is creating an environment where people are willing to try new things, where people feel comfortable to be innovative. We've had some success in that, but there's always room for more."
A major lesson Litman's group learned was the importance of including everyone in the waiver process.
"You have to communicate it and you have to outreach to people," Litman said. "It's important to have the upfront consultation process because sometimes people try to waive things that aren't waivable--they're based in statute--or they try waiving things they don't need to waive because they already have the authority to do things differently."
Denise Barnes, a management analyst at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, works with administrative teams around her agency to help them become more efficient. Barnes said many arcane rules involve endless approval chains for simple requests, leaving front line employees developing pages of justifications for minor proposals.
"There are some very good regulations out there," Barnes cautions. "But the waiver authority creates an opportunity for people to really question what laws actually say. They may find that the regulation goes way beyond what the law intends or states or even what's necessary in this day and age."
Barnes also noted that people often have the authority to bypass rules, but they don't know it.
"A lot of things are passed on in what we call 'lore.' The lore may be that you can't do something because sometime 20 years ago someone got in trouble for that," Barnes said. "Part of that is with so many things changing so quickly. If you say people don't need sign-in sheets any more, many personnelists have a tendency to deny that's true because they haven't seen it in writing."
The National Partnership for Reinventing Government is attempting to coax agencies to empower employees through the waiver authority. Some agencies are hesitant. For example, the Commerce Department told Gore that waiver authority will only be granted to employees who already work in reinvention labs.
Jim Collins, a management expert and best-selling author of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, lauded the waiver authority as a mechanism for bringing about positive change. In the traditional bureaucratic system, an employee must fight up multiple management layers to make a change, he said. But Gore's waiver authority reverses that by placing the burden of blocking the change on managers' shoulders.
"If you think about the power of this mechanism, it totally turns the bureaucratic mindset upside down," Collins said. "How many managers are really going to go to the top of the agency and say, 'I don't think we should do this good idea'?"
Collins conceded that the waiver authority may not work well in every agency. But he added that agencies who are opposed to waivers should be required to find other methods of encouraging employee innovation and creativity.
"This is a very good mechanism, but it may not be the only one," Collins said. "There may be better mechanisms for certain agencies."
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