The Body-Count War
t seems increasingly likely that President Clinton will have as many as four
fewer chairs at his Cabinet table later this year. The Commerce Department is
almost certain to disappear. Why should Democrats care about saving Herbert
Hoover's old department? Education seems on the way out, too, although no one
quite knows where to send the remains. Back to HHS? Over to Labor?
Energy is more difficult to cut, if only because the Defense Department would
have to pick up the pieces. Fear of just such a situation is why Congress
created a civilian nuclear program in the first place. Housing and Urban
Development is an on-again, off-again target, in part because there's not much
left to dismantle.
Congress also seems sure to eliminate a pack of lesser agencies, as hungry
staffers page through the U.S. Government Manual in search of prey. The
Administrative Conference of the United States is on the block, it seems,
largely because House budget cutters simply don't know what it does. It doesn't
seem to matter that the Administrative Conference has a long and distinguished
record of making government work better, which is precisely what the budget
cutters say they want.
It is not yet clear whether the cutbacks will cause great mischief. But what
is clear is that they will probably do little good. Just as fad diets rarely
produce much long-term weight loss, quick cuts rarely generate much in long-term
savings.
Republicans aren't the only ones playing the body-count game these days,
however. Clinton Administration officials repeatedly tout their effort to cut
273,000 federal jobs, though they know most of the cuts that have been made so far come from previously scheduled military base closures.
There is nothing wrong with waging war on bureaucracy, of course, if the only
goal is making government look smaller. If, however, Congress and the President
want to realign the structure of government with their "do-more-with-less"
rhetoric, a body-count campaign will not do. For starters, the public might
actually be fooled into believing government is going to become more effective,
when, in fact, nothing much has been done to put resources where they belong: at
the front lines, where services are delivered.
More importantly, a body-count war ignores the real gains that would come
from a broad restructuring of government. The gains would not come from random
attacks on vulnerable agencies but from sharply reducing the number of layers
between the top and bottom of the hierarchy. That includes long-needed efforts
to pare down duplication in administrative and oversight units and a sustained
focus on flattening the uppermost layers of government.
One way to start a more serious debate on structure is to resurrect some of
Vice President Gore's original ideas. Lost in the current frenzy, for example,
is Gore's theory that the federal government has too many controllers, overseers
and inspectors. Gore's National Performance Review staff hasn't been talking
about that idea for months, perhaps because it became utterly impossible to figure out how to separate the controllers from the doers.
Lost, too, is a concern for real broadening of supervisor-to-subordinate
spans of control. The current effort to widen spans of control is mostly an
exercise in semantics. There are more "team leaders" in the federal government
today than in Little League baseball, but most are still behaving as managers.
Real structural reform must involve truly eliminating layers of controllers
and mid-level managers, and it must also involve an honest cut at the top of
government, where executive-level employees occupy between 40 and 60 percent of
the management layers between the President and the front lines. If it takes a
deep cut in career executives to get a parallel cut in political appointees, it
may be time to pay the price.
Real reform also means attacking the one-to-one spans of control that persist
throughout agencies' headquarters, where alter-ego deputies of one kind or
another add needless review to an already over-stuffed chain of command. And it
must include an across-the-board assault on the anachronistic regional-office
system.
This work cannot be done overnight; it's one thing to shut down the
Department of Commerce, quite another to undertake a serious restructuring of all the departments and agencies. That's why the Clinton Administration should
encourage the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to move forward with its
proposal for a commission on executive-branch reorganization. It may be the
only way to stave off the continued random assault.
At the same time, Congress can use the appropriations process to aid the
restructuring effort. There is no reason, for example, why Congress can't
require agencies to sharply reduce the number of one-to-one spans of control.
Finally, real reform means a concentrated focus on management within the
Office of Management and Budget. Much as one can admire OMB's effort to merge
management and budget at the analyst level, departments and agencies have never
done well when left in charge of their own shapes. Leaving them alone with the
refrigerator door open is hardly the best way to keep government as slim as
possible.
The weight-loss metaphor is appropriate for discussing what's now happening
in Washington. The trick is not to lose weight fast -- just about anyone can
lose five pounds overnight if they stop drinking fluids -- but to take the
weight off without harming the body and to keep it off. Alas, the current round
of budget cutting is crash dieting at its worst. We risk waking up five years
hence just as heavy as before, having squandered an important opportunity to adopt some proper habits for staying thin.
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