Government Executive - Authors - Elaine C. Kamarck

Reinventing government: Reflections 30 years later

Bob Stone, Elaine C. Kamarck, and Morley Winograd — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 06:00:00 -0400

On Sept. 7, 1993, Vice President Al Gore presented his final report, “From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less” to President Bill Clinton in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House before his Cabinet, members of Congress, and hundreds of civil servants who helped craft the report and its recommendations.

Looking back, three of his top advisors reflect on the accomplishments of the Reinventing Government initiative and what they see as key management challenges looking ahead.

Elaine Kamarck served as a senior advisor to the vice president for Reinventing Government (1993-1997)
Bob Stone served as the initial project director and energizer-in-chief for the National Performance Review (1993-1998)
Morley Winograd served as director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (1997-2001)

What accomplishment are you most proud of from the National Performance Review?

Kamarck: I’m most proud of the fact that the reinventing government efforts of the Clinton years led the federal government’s transition into the information age. Whether it was slimming down layers of management, reforming procurement of information technology or focusing on customer service – most of those efforts remain today as standard operating procedures of the federal government.

Stone: I’m most proud of changing the culture of many of the government’s regulatory and enforcement agencies. They were all a little different, but they changed from being adversaries to being partners with the businesses and individuals they oversaw. Nobody at NPR invented, or conceived this change: renegades in the civil service were doing this out of the sight of their headquarters masters. Renegades like:

Lynn Gordon at Customs and Border Protection, who changed the Miami airport operation to distinguish between smugglers and law-abiding importers and travelers.
Bob Wenzel at the Internal Revenue Service, who changed the Fresno office to help taxpayers pay what they owed instead of treating all as likely cheats.
Joe Thompson at the Veterans Affairs Department who changed the New York office to treat vets as valued customers.
Marie Urban at the Food and Drug Administration, who taught her inspector force to help companies pass inspections.
Joan Hyatt at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who “signed up to protect the American worker,” and showed the agency how to do far better.
Marjorie Buckholtz at the Environmental Protection Agency, who returned former brownfields to productive use by substituting common sense for bureaucratic rigamarole.

NPR’s role in this great transformation was to find the renegades, show them off to the rest of government as true reinventors, get Vice President Gore to sprinkle his fairy dust over them and protect them and their initiatives from often hostile headquarters.

Winograd: Creating the first customer satisfaction measurements of the federal government’s performance in the nation’s history. Creating these measurements allowed us to reinforce the agency leader’s need to pay attention to how their services were being delivered from the customer’s point of view. It led to many changes in fundamental operations, such as the IRS moving to an all-electronic service capability and to Social Security Administration offices around the country making sure their waiting times were shorter.

As the Pew study on trust in government showed, these kinds of performance improvements are what builds trust in government, one day at a time. In today’s highly polarized and cynical world, it is essential that we do more of this type of constant measurements of customer satisfaction in the delivery of federal government services, to provide a foundation on which to build higher levels of trust in our democratic form of government.

Looking ahead, what do you think is the biggest management challenge facing the federal government?

Kamarck: I’m still bothered by the fact that everyone has to file income tax returns. Way back in 1994 we published a paper, written by Greg Woods, outlining how, for the vast majority of Americans, the government could reconcile their taxes with a postcard. Back then the technical challenges were big and the plan more of a pipe dream. But today there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go back to this goal and allow Americans to file taxes easily.

Stone: The biggest management challenge facing the federal government is to harness the talent and enthusiasm of its workforce. Every cabinet and subcabinet member needs to go see workers, in their workplaces, and ask what would make them happier and more effective in their work; then do what they say. Yogi Berra once wisely said, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop them." Yogi’s advice applies to workers, too: If workers don’t want to give their best, nobody’s gonna stop them. It’s the number one job of management to get them to want to give their best.”

Winograd: The biggest management challenge facing the federal government is bringing a greater sense of accountability at all levels of our government. The 1993 Government Performance and Results Act was implemented during my tenure as director of NPR, which was a good legislative framework to encourage a heightened sense of accountability for results on the part of government agencies, but it received only lip service from the leadership at the Office of Management and Budget, leaving the bureaucratic culture focused on inputs and activities instead of outputs and outcomes pretty much intact.

Even though President Bush’s OMB did better to focus agencies on their GPRA measurements, at the lower levels of the bureaucracy accountability remained pretty much a foreign virus that the culture rejected. It is good to see President Biden’s interest in making sure things get done based on his own experiences as vice president, but there is little public evidence that he is using his current chief of staff’s own track record of delivering results to reinforce the need for further cultural change from the top levels on down to the front lines of our federal government when it comes to accountability for results.

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John M. Kamensky served as a National Performance Review deputy director under all three of these advisors. He is a fellow with the National Academy of Public Administration and an Emeritus Fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government.

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Analysis: Reforming Government First Requires Understanding It

Elaine C. Kamarck, The Atlantic — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 12:05:25 -0400

This week President Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of a new White House office, the Office of American Innovation. It will reportedly be staffed by former business executives who will operate like a SWAT team to bring new ideas to government.

This is an admirable undertaking. Like any large organization the government can always use fresh ideas. But the reality is that government is like the private sector only in some pieces of its operations—consulting business executives can be very useful, but a real government-reform effort must be led by people with in-depth knowledge of the government itself. Otherwise, it will simply be another initiative that is forgotten almost as soon as it is announced.

Consider the size and scope of the federal government. In 2014, it had revenues of $3.021 trillion dollars. This is more than the combined revenues of the 16 largest Fortune 500 companies at the time. It also had about 4.2 million employees (including uniformed military personnel) a size that equals the total employment of the six largest U.S. companies. It is impossible to find anyone who has ever run a company this big.

Most corporations, even very large ones, have a “core” business like building airplanes or selling hamburgers. The federal government does everything from contracting for state-of-the-art weapons systems to reviewing new drugs to sending out retirement checks. It has a wide variety of missions and a wide variety of personnel needs.

For many of the biggest and most expensive operations of the federal government, there is no private sector analog from which to take good ideas or best practices. For instance, no one in the private sector manages a nuclear arsenal. That’s what many people in the Department of Energy do. And no one in the private sector makes plans and conducts operations for the defense of Europe. That’s what they do over at the Pentagon.

And the federal government doesn’t actually “do” much of what it pays for. In a whole host of areas, from clean water to drug counseling, the federal government sends money to states and localities where other government officials or private-sector contractors actually do the work. Tackling the opioid crisis is a very laudable goal, but the front lines in that fight are staffed by local law enforcement officials and drug counselors. Other than sending more money through the federal pipeline, there are limits to what can be done from Washington.

How can private-sector leaders be most helpful? When I helped Vice President Al Gore run the Clinton administration’s reinventing government initiative, we met with many corporate executives—especially ones who were famous for turnarounds. The first thing we learned was that it was near impossible to do a successful turnaround without the buy-in of the workers. I suspect that this advice still holds, even though it is now 24 years old. So far, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to insult federal workers in its attempts to “drain the swamp.” They will soon learn what all the feds know—the bureaucracy pre-dates and outlasts individual presidents.

The second thing we learned was that most corporate executives were horrified at the constraints under which the average government manager works. From the outdated civil-service rules and salaries that will not let them hire the talent they need, to budget rules that made the movement of money within agencies nearly impossible, federal managers are handcuffed in ways that few CEOs in private-sector organizations are. If Trump’s effort does nothing more than build a consensus in the Republican Party for “normalizing” the civil service and making budget rules more flexible, it will be a success.

This is not to say that the federal government can’t learn from the private sector—it can. But the best opportunities are at the operational level. The Army’s motor pool can probably learn a great deal from Hertz and Avis about keeping cars clean, reliable, and available. Those who want to improve health services for veterans can surely learn a great deal from those who run large, complex hospital systems.

There are, no doubt, many good ideas out there for improving government operations. But they need to be implemented and not just articulated. And that takes a fully staffed-out government. The Trump White House has barely begun to fill the critical second layer of government that is so important to the implementation of such initiatives.

The Clinton administration was the last to cut the size of government and balance the federal budget—all while avoiding government fiascos like the response to Hurricane Katrina under President George W. Bush or the Veteran’s Administration meltdown under President Obama. Both Bush and Obama made progress on government modernization, but during their terms, they both had bigger fish to fry: For Bush, there was 9/11, and for Obama, the financial crisis. Trump can tackle the hard work of government reform once again—but doing it is no easy task.

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The Loud Crisis

Elaine C. Kamarck, Joseph S. Nye Jr., and Steve Kelman — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

s the debate over the creation of the Homeland Security Department wound down last fall, many people, especially those who live outside the Beltway, probably were confused about why a bill that started out as a national security measure ended up in a debate about civil service reform and work conditions. We are glad some of these issues have been resolved, but the debate has surfaced what some of us have known for a long time: The federal government's personnel system is hopelessly, perhaps even dangerously, out of date.

In the early to mid-20th century, the federal government was a government of clerks. Today, the lower grades (GS-1 through 4) make up less than 10 percent of the workforce, yet civil service laws and practices hark back to an era when such employees were in the majority. Much of the government's human resource doctrine is obsolete. Rather than confront that problem head on, the modus operandi has been a piecemeal approach to reform. One by one, agencies have removed themselves from the purview of civil service law. Now, more than half the government's employees work in the "excepted" service, which is exempt from civil service rules and regulations.

Shouldn't this tell us something? It's time to reinvent the civil service so it can serve the government of the future, not the government of the past. Before Sept. 11, the issue was debated in relatively few circles. They included schools of public policy, which were worried that many of their students were choosing not to work in government. Comptroller General David Walker placed human capital on the General Accounting Office's "high-risk" list of government management challenges. Samuel Heyman, a philanthropist with a deep devotion to government, founded a group called the Partnership for Public Service to lobby for better human resources policies and to encourage young people to pursue government careers. And Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, devoted much time, energy and political capital to this topic in spite of its limited political sex appeal.

But the terrorist attacks sparked a new urgency in fixing the government's human resources problem. Now many Americans have learned what only a few of us were worried about: The government has a severe people problem-one that could jeopardize the country's security.

In the next few years, large numbers of civil servants will retire. Yet, in spite of the last year's surge of patriotism, the polls say young people still don't believe the government is a good place to work. Those who try to get government jobs still encounter an antiquated hiring system. As a result, many are lost to the private sector.

The government doesn't have enough people to translate the intelligence we collect. It doesn't have the skills or the money it needs to train people in new technologies. Salaries for highly skilled workers in the private sector have been rising at a rapid clip, but salaries for the top workers in the public sector have been frozen-creating severe pay compression and contributing to an already serious brain drain.

None of this has to be. Successful experiments in civil service reform-pay banding and category ranking, for example-failed to become the law of the land. Two successive administrations have trumpeted numerous flexibilities that managers have already, yet many are loath to use them. In an effort to get them moving, OPM Director Kay Coles James has even published an easy-to-read guide about the flexibilities available. And the recent legislation creating a Department of Homeland Security extends some needed flexibilities to the entire government. It is time to tackle more important issues and make some fundamental changes in human resource policy for the entire government-changes that will allow the government to employ an information age workforce. Over the past year, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University convened leaders from government, academia and the corporate world to study the civil service rules. From these discussions emerged four steps that could bring the government's human resources policy into the next century.

MARKET THE MISSION

The government has one big advantage over the private sector-its jobs have meaning. Whether they are fighting terrorists, protecting the food supply, vaccinating poor children or explaining America to people in far away countries, people in the government know why they are there. But in recruiting new workers, this asset often gets buried in a quagmire of bureaucratese. The all-volunteer military has thrived on its ability to market "meaning," but other government organizations don't have similar advertising budgets.

FIX THE HIRING PROCESS

This is not solely a legislative function. OPM should continue to school managers in the flexibilities already in the law. Agencies can follow the lead of the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies that have restructured their hiring operations to make them faster and more efficient. Finally, Congress should be congratulated for effectively replacing the rigid "rule of three" with a system of more broadly based hiring categories.

FIX THE FEDERAL PAY SYSTEM

The General Schedule was invented for a different workforce. Congress should let agencies replace the schedule with broad banding, which would provide greater flexibility in hiring and keeping employees. In addition, Congress has to confront the crisis at the top grades.

Historically, civil service pay has been linked to Congress' pay. Not surprisingly, Congress members are reluctant to take the politically unpopular step of raising their pay. But as two of our colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government, labor economists John Donahue and George Borjas, illustrate in a forthcoming volume from the Brookings Institution, there is a real crisis at the top of the pay scale.

Advocating better pay for the people Americans think are already well paid isn't easy. But one only needs to look at the billions of dollars that have been wasted in failed federal information technology projects over the years to realize that paying competitive wages for critical skills would save money in the long run. Congress should pass legislation to base pay rates on occupations and localities-and then put the money on the table to fund it.

In addition, traditional classification systems are inconsistent with the need for a flexible, agile workforce and they encourage the "not in my job description" mentality that is so toxic to public service.

INVOLVE EMPLOYEES

Talented people often leave government after only a few years because they are bored and frustrated In fact, a 2002 survey of graduates from the Kennedy School and graduates from the Harvard Business School found that five years after graduation the business school graduates were more satisfied with their jobs. Private sector employees said they were well-mentored and had responsibility and authority. The government employees interviewed felt just the opposite. No doubt some of them will leave, adding to the brain drain.

A decade ago, a public service commission chaired by Paul Volcker declared a "quiet crisis" in the federal government, Since Sept. 11, the crisis has not been quiet. It is time to fix the whole system. Government is only as good as the people in it, and now, of all times, it needs to be the best.

Elaine C. Kamarck, head of the National Performance Review in the Clinton administration; Steve Kelman, former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy; and Joseph S. Nye, former assistant secretary of Defense, now are with Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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