Government Executive - Authors - Paul C. Light

Biden’s Dilemma, Part 9: Parents Don’t Want Their Children To Pursue Government Careers

Paul C. Light — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

President Biden heads toward the 2024 presidential campaign with the federal government’s job rating in decline, support for a smaller government increasing, and the demand for major government reform at a 30-year high. This series of charts and graphs explores the current landscape when it comes to Americans’ views of government reform.

The past 20 years of government breakdowns, bureaucratic layering, and anti-government rhetoric have taken a toll on student interest in government careers and parental support. The percentage of respondents who said “yes” when asked whether they would recommend a career in government to a son or daughter has been falling since 1997.

In turn, the percentage who said “no” has held steady in the 40% range. And the percentage of “don’t know” responses to the question more than doubled from 6% in 1997 to 15% in 2023. That pushes the total number of “don’t know” and just plain “no” responses to almost 60%.

The January 6 insurrection may have had an impact on parental support for government careers. And partisanship has played a role, with 56% of Democrats saying “yes” to a career in government for a son or daughter, compared with the 62% of Republicans who said “no.”

To change these numbers and bolster his own reelection prospects, Biden needs to focus on government reform. Having largely avoided blue-ribbon commissions and study groups during his tenure in office, Biden may yet discover the value of road-tested slogans such as Jimmy Carter’s “government as good as its people” and Al Gore’s “government that works better and costs less.” To quote one of his favorite sayings, Biden needs to “finish the job” that Carter and Gore began years ago.

The trend lines and analyses presented in this series come from stand-alone random-sample surveys conducted by Lake Research Partners, Maguire Research Services, the Pew Research Center, SSRS, and the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center. Occasional data points were also harvested from search engines managed by survey aggregators such as PollingReport.com, the Roper Center’s iPOLL database, and publicly available Pew Research Center surveys dating back to 1997. All survey findings were based on random-sample surveys of at least 1,000 respondents interviewed by cell phone and landline, with estimated error rates of 3% to 4% at a 95% confidence level.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 8: Government Reform Must Be Something He Wants To Do

Paul C. Light — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Although President Biden rarely misses a chance to highlight his service in the war on government fraud, waste and abuse, he has long eschewed government reorganization. This reluctance dates back to the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama asked each of his potential running mates if they would be “very happy to reorganize the government.” Biden’s answer left no doubt: “No, that’s not what I want to do.”

Biden and Congress may yet find common ground on bureaucratic reform. But the number of large-scale management reforms enacted each year has fallen sharply, as leaders shifted their focus to the urgent problems facing the nation. Boring though reform might be to policy insiders, a thorough review of federal management challenges could lead to a welcome dose of old-fashioned reform legislation.

Described by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in 2021 as the “big spender” America wants, Biden must now become the bureaucratic repairman the federal government desperately needs. To this end, Biden should move quickly to flatten the bloated federal hierarchy, streamline the presidential appointments process and modernize the rulemaking process, while making sure the blended federal workforce of 11 million active-duty military personnel, civil servants, contractors, grantees, and postal workers have the resources, systems and leadership to succeed.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 7: Federal Government Breakdowns Are on the Rise

Paul C. Light — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Like other presidents before him, Joe Biden’s job ratings are heavily dependent on how many visible government failures with high levels of public interest occur on his watch. A recent increase in such breakdowns per year strongly suggests presidential action is needed to repair government. The breakdown trend has accelerated since the early 1980s, and continues to climb ever higher.

The inventory of government breakdowns reflected in the chart below is built on a review of news stories about government failures published between 1986 and 2022 and listed in the “Pew News Interest Index.” To be listed, a breakdown had to meet three tests: high visibility in the news, high levels of public interest in response, and evidence of federal government mismanagement or policy failure.

Most breakdowns involve a combination of fragile policy design, resource and staff shortages, antiquated technology, training deficits, technology glitches, bad luck, political interference and bureaucratic sabotage, all of which relate to the erosion of what the Niskanen Center calls state capacity.

Breakdowns are almost always a product of pressure, neglect and overconfidence. Instead of blaming presidents, legislators, contractors, lobbyists and grifters for government failure, Congress and the president should address their general reluctance to move government repairs to the top of the legislative agenda.

The next generation of major reform may yet emerge from Biden’s White House chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients. Having served in several senior leadership posts in the executive branch, Zients will face little White House resistance should he embrace needed repairs at the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Aviation Administration, Food and Drug Administration, and other broken agencies.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 6: His Job Rating for Running Government Programs Is Falling

Paul C. Light — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Joe Biden finished his first June in the White House with a 50% “excellent” or “good” rating for running the federal government’s programs. But he has lost ground in subsequent surveys, hitting 30% in January 2023. Biden still has time to strengthen his job ratings and reclaim the popularity he enjoyed earlier in his presidency, but he will need to stop the government breakdowns that deplete public confidence in his governing ability.

Biden’s early job ratings were largely driven by his promise to repair a broken presidency, but he must also put government reform high on his agenda. At least for now, however, he has largely ignored the nuts and bolts of bureaucratic repair. His policy agenda has largely eclipsed his commitment to the major reform that a solid majority of Americans support.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 5: He Needs More Government Rebuilders on His Side

Paul C. Light — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Since the 1990s, when the Pew Research Center first asked Americans their preferences on the size of government, Republicans have led the call for a smaller government providing fewer services, while Democrats have pushed for a bigger government that provides more services. As hard as the two parties work to expand their bases, neither can win without holding their core support.

When it comes to their views of government reform, Americans can be divided into four categories: Rebuilders, expanders, dismantlers and streamliners. Biden, with his advocacy of activist government, is an expander.

Even if the ranks of his fellow expanders grows along the way to the 2024 election, Biden must deal with the 77% of respondents who recently told the Pew Research Center that “dealing with federal government agencies is often not worth the trouble,” the 63% who said the “federal government does a poor job responding to the needs of ordinary citizens,” and the 72% who said the federal government is not careful with taxpayer money. He needs a reform agenda that addresses these doubters.

The dismantlers gave Biden his lowest job ratings for running the federal government and its programs in January 2023, while the expanders gave him his highest marks. To make inroads with the rebuilders who could theoretically support his candidacy, Biden needs to cut down on government breakdowns.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 4: The 2024 Election Will Be Fought Between Republican Dismantlers and Democratic Rebuilders

Paul C. Light — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Public support for bigger or smaller government combines with demand for reform to create four reform positions: Rebuilders (those who support a bigger government that delivers more services, but think it needs major reform); Streamliners (who want a smaller government that delivers fewer services, but think government is basically sound); Expanders (who support a bigger government and think it is basically sound); and Dismantlers (who want a smaller government and think it needs major reform).

Like the tides of government reform that generate new laws, rules, executive orders and blue-ribbon commissions, each of the four positions generate campaign promises and slogans. Jimmy Carter focused on streamlining in calling for a competent, compassionate, lean and tight government. Al Gore was a rebuilder, promising a government that “works better and costs less.” Donald Trump fell into the dismantling category, promising to “cut so much your head will spin.” Biden, with his “build back better” agenda, is an expander.

The distribution of Americans into the four categories varies over time. According to my analysis of a January 2023 SSRS survey of 1,000 randomly selected respondents, 44% of respondents supported dismantling, 27% expanding, 19% rebuilding and 11% streamlining.

Despite continued demand for major government reform during his first two years in office, Biden has yet to embrace a reform agenda that might bring small-government streamliners and reform-minded rebuilders together on government reform.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 3: Public Demand for ‘Very Major’ Government Reform is Running High

Paul C. Light — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

The demand for major government reform has increased since 1997 and shows no sign of slowing. Driven by familiar divisions on spending, economic performance, globalization and social issues, partisans often soften their demand for reform when their party holds the presidency.

In 2010, with a Democrat president in office, 41% of Democrats favored very major reform, compared with 65% of Republicans. Ten years later in 2020, with a Republican running for a second term, 52% of Republicans favored very major government reform, compared with 74% of Democrats.

Now, with President Biden moving toward an announcement of a run for reelection in 2024, 49% of Democrats favor very major reform, along with 83% of Republicans.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 2: Americans Are Divided on the Size of Government

Paul C. Light — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

President Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign with a deep divide between respondents who favored a bigger government providing more services versus those who backed a smaller government providing fewer services. As the chart below shows, 50% of respondents surveyed in August 2020 favored a bigger government, while 43% favored a smaller government.

Further analysis shows a significant party impact on the size of government question. Interviewed in early 2023, 49% of Democrats, 27% of independents, and just 31% of Republicans favored a bigger government providing more services, while just 14% of Democrats, 29% of independents, and 67% of Republicans favored a smaller government providing fewer services.

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Biden’s Dilemma, Part 1: The Federal Government’s Job Rating Has Dropped By Half

Paul C. Light — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Biden must confront the partisan divisions in the federal government’s performance ratings. In interviews conducted in January 2023, 40% of Democratic respondents gave the feds an excellent or good rating, compared to just 7% of Republicans. Although the two parties shared some common ground, with 40% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans in favor of very major government reform, the divide on partisan preferences for bigger vs. smaller government provide little encouragement.

Americans already support Biden’s Plan to Guarantee Government Works for the People. At the same time, they want an end to government breakdowns, faster customer service at federal offices, and easy access to online resources.

The good news for Biden is that he has a vetted list of government reforms that can be enacted and implemented well before November 2024. The bad news is that he has, by my count, already faced 10 government breakdowns on his watch, with more likely to come.

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More Americans Want 'Very Major' Government Reform

Paul C. Light — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:01:06 -0400

Americans head into the 2022 midterm election season with record-setting doubts about the federal government’s faithful execution of the laws. Public demand for comprehensive government reform is at a 20-year high, while confidence in government has dropped to a historic low. The thickening of government with layers of management has continued unabated, and support for government careers has slipped below 40 percent. Absent large-scale repairs to renew and repair and renew the federal sprawling federal bureaucracy, Americans have good reason to ask whether the government can deliver on the promises it makes.

Until Washington takes the crisis seriously, Americans should prepare for more government breakdowns. Despite decades of grand reform efforts dating back to Harry Truman’s post-World-War II reorganizations, Jimmy Carter’s civil service modernization plan, Ronald Reagan’s war on waste, Bill Clinton’s search for a government that works better and costs less, and Joe Biden’s 2011 plan for a 21st century regulatory system, the federal government remains vulnerable to major malfunctions, predictable failures, design flaws and overconfidence.

As the midterm elections approach, six factors are clear:

The demand for “very major” government reform is rising
Americans are deeply divided about the size of government
The number of government breakdowns is accelerating
The thickening of government continues
Biden’s job rating for running the federal government is fair to poor
Support for careers in government is falling

Major Reform

In 1997, when Clinton began his second term in office, 58% of Americans agreed the federal government was “basically sound and only needed some reform.” The economy was strong, the world was at peace, and Clinton remained popular deep into his presidency.

This era of confidence was short-lived, however, as public demand for “very major reform” increased from 37% in 1997, when the Pew Research Center first asked the question, to 60% two decades later. Meanwhile, the number of Americans who said the government is “basically sound and needed only some reform” dropped to 28%.

Source: Survey findings from Pew Research Center, SSRS, Maguire Research Services, Inc., with additional survey findings from CBS News, CNN/ORC, Gallup, Hill-Harris X, Kaiser Family Foundation, Maguire Research Services, Morning Consult, NPR/PBS, Rasmussen, Reuters/Ipsos, Washington Post-ABC News Poll, and YouGov.

The demand for reform is broadly linked to the recent increase in government breakdowns, declining confidence in government more generally, and public dissatisfaction with the way the country is headed. Americans have a long history of following breakdowns very closely and have long memories of government tragedies such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the space shuttle Challenger accident, the sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina, vaccine shortages, medical supply issues and economic stimulus checks sent to dead people.

Where Americans stand on demand for government reform depends on party control of government. Democrats tend to favor very major reform when Republicans are in power, while Republicans return the favor when Democrats are in charge:

In March 2010, with a Democrat in the White House, 66% of Republicans favored very major reform, compared with 43% of Democrats.
In July 2014, with a Democrat still in the White House, 59% of Republicans favored very major reform, compared with 37% of Democrats.
In June 2018, with a Republican in the White House, 54% of Republicans favored very major reform, compared with 63% of Democrats.
In April 2022, with a Democrat in the White House, 84% of Republicans favored very major reform, compared with 49% of Democrats.

Party identification is not the only anchor of demand for reform—ideology also plays a role, as do recent events and scandals. Partisans often give the benefit of the doubt to the president and party, but breakdowns provoke a much deeper response.

Deep Division

The demand for very major reform and preferences for big or small government can be sorted into four broad philosophies: “expanders” favor a bigger government and only some reform; “streamliners” prefer a smaller government and only some reform; “rebuilders” want a bigger government and very major reform; and “dismantlers” seek smaller government and very major reform.

Source: Surveys from the Pew Research Center, SSRS and Maguire Research Services

At first glance, Biden’s $1.8 trillion Build Back Better plan unveiled in 2021 seemed tailor-made to attract big-government expanders. But expanders ended the campaign with little momentum toward their bigger-government-that-delivers-more agenda and didn’t earn a bounce even with an expander in the White House. Meanwhile, the rebuilders lost almost half of their support between August and April, while the streamliners settled at a recent low.

Measured in shares of support, the dismantlers had the strongest reaction to the end of the Build Back Better plan. Starting with a 27% share just before the 2020 election, the dismantlers rose to a 44% high by April 2022. The demise of Build Back Better may be bringing the rebuilders and dismantlers together in support of common sense government reforms and the deep repairs needed to address the rising number of government breakdowns. If doing so jump-starts the economy, as Peter Schuck and Philip Howard argued in early 2021, all the better for winnowing the needless rules that undermine federal performance.

For now, Biden continues to court the rebuilders with promises to end the bureaucratic runarounds that impose steep “time taxes” on government services. Skeptics might be more enthusiastic about such pledges if Biden rebooted his 2011 campaign to cut government waste and his promise to “hunt down and eliminate misspent tax dollars in every agency and department across the federal government.” Shorter lines at Social Security Administration offices and faster internet access offer little comfort to Americans who worry about economic turmoil and potential tax increases.

More Breakdowns

Federal government breakdowns, defined as policy or management failures that produce high levels of news coverage and reader interest, have risen in every administration since I started counting them in 1986. Although the news industry often promotes stories about high-profile failures for ratings, the number of breakdowns listed in the Pew Research Center’s News Interest Index has grown steadily over time.

Some of the failures were triggered by legislative hubris, underfunding, and outright sabotage. The question is whether there are patterns across the 123 breakdowns on my list that might lead to fewer failures in the future. Were policy designs at fault? Was political pressure to blame? Were major malfunctions dismissed? Were shortcuts at the center?

The answers can only come from an analysis of the facts surrounding each incident. The data is easy to assemble—the 123 breakdowns have led to dozens of blue-ribbon commissions, congressional investigations, research studies, best-selling histories, and teaching cases. The challenge is to use the findings to develop simple questions that might provoke second thoughts before the policies are enacted, programs implemented, budgets scrubbed and countdowns begun.

Each of the past three presidents started their first year in office with a short list of breakdowns that multiplied over time. Trump faced six more breakdowns in his second year, five in his third, and 16 in a final year that began with early missteps in the fight against Covid-19 and ended with the Capitol Hill riots.

Biden faced six breakdowns in a first year that started with a border-crossing surge, the Colonial Pipeline internet hack in May 2021, rising crime and gun violence into summer, a supply-chain shutdown, increasing inflation by July, and the bloody Afghanistan withdrawal in September. He added two more breakdowns to his list by mid-summer, 2022 with a baby formula shortage that started in May and a torrent of summer flight delays and cancellations by July.

Thicker and Thicker

According to the online directories published by LeadershipConnect in 2020, Biden took control of 83 layers of presidential appointees and 5,000 jobs on Inauguration Day.

He inherited hundreds of lower-level “title-riders” who thicken the hierarchy with second titles such as “associate deputy assistant secretary,” “assistant deputy undersecretary,” “deputy associate assistant commissioner,” “associate principal deputy assistant secretary,” “deputy chief of staff,” and “assistant deputy chief of staff.” The federal government has never had more layers of leaders nor more leaders per layer, confirming Trump’s complaint that “it’s just people over people over people.”

Congress has the primary role in flattening the hierarchy, but will not act without presidential demand. Despite constant nudging by the Government Accountability Office, Congress continues to ignore the outdated management laws and systems that have fueled so many government breakdowns. Lawmakers averaged five major government reform bills per year during the Nixon, Carter, and Clinton administrations, but throttled back to just two bills per year over the last 20 years.

Poor Performance Ratings

Having begun his presidency in January facing a migrant border crisis and continued pandemic chaos, Biden ended his honeymoon six months later with a dismal 69% fair/poor rating for running the federal government and its programs. Although his negative rating dropped slightly to 57% the following October, the fair/poor rating bounced back up to 63% in April 2022.

Meanwhile, Biden’s excellent/good ratings echoed the disappointments, with a 31% rating in June, 44% in October, and a drop back to 35% by April. His early support eroded with a growing list of breakdowns before the ratings began to slip again as American troops left Afghanistan.

More recent surveys also show broad public concern about the president’s performance, including a May 2022 CBS News poll in which 65% of Americans said Biden was “slow to react when important things come up.”

Public ratings of the federal government’s performance show continued cause for concern. The federal government has only breached the 40-percent mark twice since 1997 and has shown no momentum toward a lift anytime soon.

Source: Analysis of surveys conducted by SSRS and Maguire Research Services, conducted in June and October 2021 and April 2022.

Pick Another Career

The percentage of Americans who said they would want a son or daughter to pursue a career in government dropped from 56% in 2010 to just 39% in April 2022, as the number of respondents who did not answer the question increased. Republicans and independents were most likely to say “no” to a government career and Democrats most likely to say “yes,” while conservatives and moderates were the most likely to say “no,” and liberals again most likely to say “yes.”

The four reform philosophies also shape support for careers in government. Asked last April whether they would recommend a career in government to a son or daughter, 77% of the dismantlers answered “no,” “don’t know,” or refused the question, while 36% of the streamliners, 52% of the rebuilders, and 54% of the expanders answered “yes.”

Alongside the 11-point drop in the number of Americans who would recommend a career in government to a son or daughter, the number of null answers rose 13 points between 2021 and 2022, suggesting that Americans are becoming more uncertain about the value of careers in government.

Moreover, even the most enthusiastic expanders might reconsider their recommendations if they knew how long the hiring process takes, how many federal employees say performance has little impact on pay and promotions, and how few say creativity and innovation are encouraged in their organizations. Recent studies also highlight the impact of anti-government rhetoric, economic uncertainty, and benefit cuts on the attractiveness of government careers.

A Call to Reform

Biden rarely talked about the need for government reform during his years in the Senate and bluntly rejected the topic in 2008 when Obama asked if he would be “very happy” to reorganize the federal government as part of his vice-presidential portfolio. “No,” he answered. “That’s not what I want to do.”

Biden did accept occasional management chores, overseeing the implementation of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package and chairing the 2011 “Campaign to Cut Waste.” Along the way, Biden developed expertise in selling excess property, closing small government offices, harvesting improper payments, cutting government travel budgets and hunting down Medicare fraud.

Although the Biden-Harris 2021 Management Agenda Vision has won plaudits for its commitment to an “equitable, effective and accountable government that delivers results for all,” the agenda has yet to outline an implementation plan that might appeal to the two-thirds of Americans who favor very major reform. Biden’s disapproval rating already stood at 52% when the vision was released on Nov. 19 and has barely moved since. His agenda might be a big deal to public administration experts but is still far from the very major reform Americans want. It also lacks the punch that wars on government waste, budget reductions and civil service cuts provide.

Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review took a different course. “We cut government the right way,” reinventing government guru Elaine Kamarck told Congress in 2013, “by eliminating what wasn’t needed—bloated headquarters, layers of managers, outdated field offices, obsolete red tape, and rules." By the end of the first year, Gore, Kamarck, and the rest of the reinventing team had cut 78,000 federal management jobs, issued 1,250 directives toward improved performance, harvested $136 billion in waste, and added three dozen management reforms to the federal code.

Elected as the “big spender America wants,” as Paul Krugman wrote after his inauguration, Biden must now become the Mr. Fixit Americans say the federal government needs. He may not be happy in the role, but it is now on his agenda whether he likes the work or not. Although Americans often express favorable opinions toward highly visible agencies such as the Postal Service, about a fifth of them are angry toward the federal government, another 60% are frustrated, and just 22% are content.

Trust in the federal government is unlikely to rebound without significant reform. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half of Americans believe the federal government faces more difficult challenges today than in the past, but 40% say dealing with federal government agencies is often not worth the trouble.

Americans remain unsparingly negative toward the federal government’s job performance. In April and May 2022, just 32% percent said they had a favorable opinion of the federal government, compared with 54% and 66% who felt the same about their state and local governments respectively.

These findings suggest that breakdowns are more an accelerant of declining trust than a cause. Although each breakdown creates new doubts about government performance, they are almost always traceable to bureaucratic failures that can and should have been addressed long before the federal government embraced a new endeavor.

Biden owns the breakdown curve now. But with his general lack of interest in government management, the pace may increase, taking its toll in the 2020 midterms and beyond.

Paul C. Light is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

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Biden Better Get Busy on Government Reform

Paul C. Light — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 14:56:11 -0500

Joe Biden took the oath of office on Jan. 20 with broken windows still visible on Capitol Hill, trust in the federal government to do the right thing at near-record lows, the presidential transition process running at subglacial speed, and the vaccine rollout already short on dollars and doses.

Yet, even with razor-thin margins in Congress, Biden headed toward his first anniversary in office with the most diverse group of presidential appointees in modern history, his $1.6 trillion American Rescue Plan still pumping billions into state and local governments, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan signed and ready to spend, and a $2 trillion spending bill working its way through dense legislative traffic.

Despite Biden’s legislative success, public support for a bigger government that provides more services barely moved above 45% during his first year in office, while support for a smaller government that provides fewer services inched up to a seven-point lead. Moreover, as if to show how quickly a government breakdown can stun a presidency, Biden’s FiveThirtyEight approval rating fell from 55% on April 14 when he promised to end the “forever war” in Afghanistan to 47% when the last U.S. evacuation flight left Kabul on Aug. 30. On Thanksgiving Day, it stood at just 43%.

Biden’s ratings may yet rebound if consumer confidence continues to rise after a summer drought, but the bureaucratic turbulence that set the stage for the summer’s breakdowns is certain to continue as the federal bureaucracy struggles with obsolete systems, bloated hierarchies, staffing shortages, cybersecurity gaps, planning breakdowns, a long list of programs on the edge of failure, a digital skills gap in the bureaucracy, and a growing brain drain as older executives retire.

Biden must also address the breakdowns that Trump left behind, most notably the 2019 border surge that continues today, recent increases in gun violence, violent crime, police misconduct, IRS and Postal Service delays, and the failed vaccine rollout that sparked the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

Most importantly for his future, Biden must reduce the risk of further breakdowns as he heads toward the 2022 and 2024 elections. The number of federal breakdowns has risen in every administration dating back to Reagan’s second term in 1984 but will not bend without significant government reform. Biden must act now or pay the penalty at the ballot box.

The president’s potential for success in this endeavor depends on the answers to six questions about government reform.

1. Do Americans still favor very major government reform?

Despite a recent decline, public demand for “very major” government reform is still alive and well in American politics. Demand jumped during the Great Recession before falling slightly at the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016, then bouncing back up with Trump’s election. Despite small but steady drops in 2021, demand was inching up again by October.

The recent softening in demand appears to be related to economic growth, which Biden has described as “no accident, but a direct result of our efforts to deliver economic relief to families, small businesses, and communities across the country.” Even as he now works to stimulate new growth with his popular infrastructure plan, Biden would be wise to note the spikes in demand for reform during the Great Recession and the Russian election meddling scandal.

2. Do Americans still favor a bigger government that provides more services?

If Americans were deeply between smaller and bigger governme

nt before Biden’s election, they were ever further apart one year into his first term. The nation has been sharply divided in every survey since the Pew Research Center first asked its bigger/more versus smaller/fewer questions in the late 1990s. If there is any foreshadowing to be found in the most recent surveys, it is toward a smaller government that delivers fewer services.

These divisions are firmly linked to party identification, which makes unity particularly difficult. Interviewed last October, 65% of Democrats favored a bigger government that delivers more services, while 61% of Republicans favored a smaller government that delivers fewer services.

3. How big is the federal government’s blended workforce?

Presidents rarely miss an opportunity to celebrate the new jobs they create through federal contracts and grants, but seldom call a press conference to talk about the true size of the federal government’s blended workforce that the spending supports. A bigger government that delivers more services may be back in fashion at the White House, but the true size of government is largely hidden from review.

Most year-to-year changes in the number of active-duty military, civil service, and Postal Service employees are relatively small, but the number of contractors and grantees can rise by thousands during economic crises. Even as the jobs provide desperately needed help to hard-hit communities, they can spark stories about federal handouts and provoke presidential promises to shrink the workforce.

Biden could face a major test as federal contract and grant spending rises and 50,000 new federal jobs open up. Absent offsetting civil service retirements and unexpected departures, the blended workforce will climb past 12 million next year, a new record.

Even with more civil servants on the job, the federal government’s dependency on contractors and grantees for essential labor is certain to grow. As of 2020, there were already three contractors and grantees for every civil servant. The number is likely to surge with the Biden administration’s stimulus plans.

4. What kind of government reform will Americans support?

Americans can be divided into four reform philosophies based on what government should deliver and how much reform it needs:

Expanders, who favor a combination of bigger government and only some reform
Rebuilders, who favor a bigger government and very major reform
Dismantlers, who prefer smaller government and very major reform
Streamliners, who favor a smaller government and only some reform.

The philosophical equilibrium was relatively stable during the Clinton and Bush presidencies, but began to shift as the number of dismantlers grew during Trump’s 2016 campaign. Then it fell again in 2020, while the number of expanders grew during Biden’s campaign.

None of the philosophies has ever earned a majority in the past 25 years, but the expanders came close with a 43% share in 1997 before tumbling during Clinton’s second term. The dismantlers also earned a 43% share in 2016 as Trump surged to the presidency, then collapsed with scandal and impeachment.

Biden entered office with a liberal coalition of expanders and rebuilders that could be tested if new breakdowns highlight the unmet need for government reform.

The rebuilders and streamliners may yet provide the margin of victory in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Although both philosophies were largely missing from Biden’s expansionist agenda, both still lean Democratic. The rebuilders could also find common ground with the expanders if Biden puts government reform on his agenda. The rebuilders are 33% Democratic, after all, and favor a bigger government.

5. Do Americans still trust Biden to fix the government?

Biden drew near-majority public approval for running the federal government during his first six months in office, but was losing ground by early autumn. Between June and October, his excellent/good rating fell from 51% to 44%, while his fair/poor rating rose from 48% to 57%. The drop is almost certainly connected to the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and debt ceiling stalemate.

Even as Biden’s approval fell, the federal government’s rating inched up. Between June and October, the federal government’s excellent/good rating rose from 36% to 41, while the fair/poor rating fell from 64% to 58%.

Viewed through the lens of the four philosophies, Biden earned his highest job ratings from expanders, his lowest from dismantlers, and modest approval from the rebuilders and streamliners.

6. Can Biden stop the breakdowns?

All presidents face government breakdowns on their watch, the only question being when the first will arrive, how long it will linger, and how many breakdowns will follow. George H.W. Bush’s first breakdown occurred in March 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, Bill Clinton’s in January 1993 with the Waco standoff, George W. Bush’s in September 2001 with the 9/11 attacks, Barack Obama’s in January 2009 with a Postal Service financing crisis, Trump’s even before he was elected with Russian meddling in the presidential campaign, and Biden’s in January when Trump’s 2019 border surge returned.

Even with confused pandemic protocols issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the July eviction crisis, the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, and vaccine booster uncertainties, Biden’s breakdown list was well within the first-year totals dating back to the 1980s. However, if he continues at six breakdowns per year, he will end his first term with more breakdowns per year than George H.W. Bush (2), Clinton (3), George W. Bush (2.5), Obama (2), and inching ever closer to Trump’s 8 per-year record.

Trump’s breakdown pace increased sharply during the rest of his presidency. Biden must bend the breakdown curve back to a pre-Trump pace or put his reelection at risk. He already knows how much the Afghanistan breakdown cost. The question is not when another high-impact breakdown will hit, but how soon and what Biden will do in response.

Biden can reduce the odds of further breakdowns on his watch by returning public administration to the top of the president’s agenda. It has been 25 years since Al Gore’s reinventing government campaign, 40 since the Supreme Court voided the president’s reorganization authority, 50 since Jimmy Carter’s civil service and sunshine in government reforms, and 65 since Herbert Hoover gaveled the second national Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch to a close.

Biden took the first step toward deep-tissue government reform when he released the Biden-Harris Management Agenda just before Thanksgiving. Built around promises to empower the federal workforce, improve “customer experience,” and “catalyze outcomes that support building back better,” the jargon-laden agenda largely dodges the organizational problems that underpin many recent federal breakdowns.

Biden faces two challenges in reversing the recent breakdown curve:

First, he must fill the top jobs in government without delay. According to the Partnership for Public Service appointee tracker, just 189 of the Biden administration’s 802 top jobs had confirmed appointees by Thanksgiving, while another 231 had a nominee but were still waiting for Senate action. Another 165 had no nominee at all. If the past is prologue, many of Biden’s first appointees will be gone before the last of the empty positions have been filled. No one knows when the administration will finally nominate a director for the powerful Office of Management and Budget.

Biden need not fill every post to gain control of the government. On the contrary, he would be more successful over time if he flattened the bloated hierarchy that Trump left behind and ask his appointees to stay longer than the two-year average.

Second, Biden must forge a “build-back-better” management agenda that will strengthen federal performance into the future, while demanding congressional action and quick implementation. Compared to the long list of reforms that followed the New Deal and World War II, the inventory of recent reforms is meager at best and ineffective at worst. This agenda will not only help prevent future breakdowns but will give him protection when others arrive without warning.

Even limited reorganization authority would give Biden a chance to rebut continued public demand for reform. Until then, he'll have to work miracles with the tools he has.

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Trump Said ‘I Alone Can Fix’ Government. He Failed.

Paul C. Light — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 14:25:48 -0400

Donald Trump became president promising no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens, and no qualms about cutting the federal workforce. Four years later, he heads toward election day with a record amount of government breakdowns, rising levels of bureaucratic bloat, and a near-record number of federal employees under his command—most of whom are hidden from public view through contracts and grants.

As for his promise that “I alone can fix” the nation’s problems, the public’s demand for very major government reform is near a 20-year high, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center, Princeton Survey Research Associates, and SSRS. (The 2016, 2018, and 2019 surveys reflected below were funded by the Volcker Alliance, as was much of the earlier research discussed in this article.)

Consider the Trump administration’s record-setting number of highly visible government breakdowns, which now includes the recent White House COVID-19 super-spreader event. Trump promised to run the government under budget and on schedule, but his administration has produced a long list of breakdowns caused by poor planning, failures to act, administrative confusion, and sluggish responses to Hurricane Maria and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump often blames the “deep state” and Democratic sabotage for his long list of failures. But the number of breakdowns, as determined by surveys of public interest in major stories and investigations of federal government performance, is well above average compared to his predecessors. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton together averaged just 1.5 breakdowns per year, and George W. Bush and Barack Obama averaged 3.3. Trump has averaged 5.25 annually to date. He also just set a single-year record with nine breakdowns in 2020—with three months left to go.

Tempting though it might be to tie all breakdowns to the president in office at the time, the post-2001 increase is a predictable result of the recent drought in bureaucratic reform. It has been 50 years since the last round of civil service and ethics reform, 40 years since presidents lost their reorganization authority, and 25 since Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government campaign. Along the way, policies became more complex, the bureaucracy hardened, and the civil service continued to trail the private sector on the resources needed to get the job done.

Second, Trump has raised the amount of high-level bureaucracy to its highest mark dating back to 1960. Instead of cutting the number of “people over people over people” that he described as “totally unnecessary,” Trump has added more layers of leaders at the top of government than any president in recent history. According to directories of federal leaders, the Trump administration increased the number of layers at the top of government from 71 in 2017 to 83 today, while boosting the number of people over people by 50%, from 3,200 to 4,900. As the bloat has increased, so has the distortion of information, as it moves up and down a muddled chain of command.

Third, Trump has overseen a 25% increase in the federal government’s blended workforce of civil servants, active duty military service members, postal workers, contractors and grant-funded employees. Trump promised to run the federal government with fewer people at a lower cost, but excluded contract- and grant-funded employees from the headcounts.

Although the number of full-time federal employees has remained remarkably stable for years, it masks the addition of 1.4 million employees who work for the federal government under contracts and another 600,000 who work under grants. Fueled by large increases in defense and transportation spending, and a slight rise in the number of civil servants, the blended workforce reached a near-record high in 2019 and shows no signs of slowing down.

Trump was an unabashed advocate of this growth. Although he has claimed that the Pentagon increased its contracting budget to keep the defense industry “happy,” Trump entered office promising a “historic” increase in military spending and has more than honored his pledge. Trump has extolled the jobs created by defense contracts and signed off on the infrastructure grants that anchored his version of the 2009 stimulus package he often derides.

Trump’s mismanagement deserves closer attention if only because the breakdowns, bloat and overpromising reinforce the public's demand for major government reform. Americans are deeply divided along party lines, but three out five say the federal government is almost always wasteful and inefficient, does a poor job running its programs and can’t be trusted to do the right thing. Two-thirds say the U.S. system of government either needs major structural repairs or should be completely replaced.

Joe Biden has tried to make Trump’s mismanagement a campaign issue, but he must do much more than just criticize the president’s failures. He must also offer a detailed agenda on how he will repair the broken federal agencies and operations he will inherit. At least for now, however, Biden and his supporters still seem to believe the federal government will automatically bounce back when Trump leaves town. Biden himself has promised just such an epiphany in congressional comity—and swears it’s “not a joke.” Biden does not want for new policy ideas, but is desperately short on blueprints for bureaucratic reform.

The problems facing federal agencies demand more than Trump’s exit, even if few of the president’s appointees will be missed. Nor will tighter ethics and campaign finance laws be enough to reverse the bureaucratic decay. Absent aggressive reorganizations and a “fix-it-fast” repair plan for broken agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, the recent surge in breakdowns will continue and Biden’s build-it-back-better agenda will be lost.

Biden’s base of supporters may want more of almost everything the federal government delivers, but they should also demand significant bureaucratic repairs as part of the deal. Biden would be well advised to revisit Jimmy Carter’s good-government agenda from 1977. He might also borrow from Carter’s acceptance speech promising to honor the “majesty of the Constitution,” “lead without negativism,” and tear down the wall between government and the people.

It was the perfect message for a nation recovering from turmoil and still resonates today. Biden would be wise to embrace Carter’s themes, but must move quickly once in office. If the past is any guide, his first government breakdown will arrive by June 2021.

Paul C. Light is a professor at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. Further exploration of the trends in this article can be found on the Brookings Institution’s FixGov website.

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What the Senate Should Do About Acting Appointees

Paul C. Light — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:03:52 -0500

Matthew G. Whitaker’s appointment as acting attorney general may yet be successfully challenged as a violation of the Constitution’s appointments clause, but is more adroitly framed as a violation of the Senate’s intent in enacting the 1988 Presidential Transitions Effectiveness Act.

The transitions act is central to the Whitaker case because it rescued the 1868 Vacancies Act from near-certain repeal, and then led to further changes contained in the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which in turn became the basis for the Justice Department’s defense of the president’s decision. Whitaker could not have been appointed under the FVRA unless then-Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee (now known as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee), had acted in 1988 to save the Vacancies Act.

As an adviser to the Governmental Affairs panel in 1997-98, I can attest that Glenn viewed the Vacancies Act as essential to the Constitution’s requirement that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Fully aware that the Vacancies Act was underused, abused, and misunderstood, Glenn nevertheless decided that the Senate’s confirmation prerogatives were better protected with the act than without it.

Congress enacted the first version of the Vacancies Act in 1792 and has revised it at least four times since the Civil War. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia explained in 1997, the act does not tell presidents when they must fill a vacancy, who they must choose, or even whether an acting appointee must have at least subject-matter expertise. It only requires that an acting appointee be the first deputy already in place, a Senate-confirmed officer somewhere in government, or someone who has worked in the given agency for at least 90 days in the previous year at the highest General Schedule pay grade. Whitaker only passed the third test.

The act is quite clear, however, on the length of service—although the time frame has changed several times over the years. Congress set the original limit at six months, shortened it to 30 days immediately after Andrew Johnson survived impeachment in 1868, raised it to 120 days in 1988, and raised it again to 210 days in 1998. Under current law, the vacancy clock stops when the president makes a nomination to the post, but starts running again if the nomination is withdrawn or rejected. This means Whittaker could serve much longer than 210 days, depending on how long his designated replacement lingers in the sluggish Senate confirmation process.

Whatever happens in the coming weeks, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee should make sure an acting appointee like Whitaker can never serve again. The panel should start by reminding the chamber that it is the Senate’s monitor of the presidential appointments process. Authorizing committees are responsible for individual appointments within their purview, but not the appointments process as a whole. The committee should then take quick action on legislation to restore the 120-day time limit set in 1998, require previous Senate confirmation for all secretary, deputy secretary, and undersecretary level acting appointments, and create a Senate fail-safe mechanism for removing acting appointees who threaten the “take care” clause.

Once through these quick fixes, the committee should open a deeper review of presidential appointments and transitions. The appointments process moves more slowly than ever, the bureaucratic hierarchy has never been taller or wider, transition and inaugural spending has never been greater, and even Trump has complained about a federal organization chart that has “people over people over people.” Trump has also provoked a recent surge in the number of both Democrats and Republicans who say the federal government needs very major reform. The Homeland Security Committee has the moderate bent, bipartisan history and leadership to take up the challenge.

I had many conversations with Glenn as the 1988 transition act took shape and am absolutely sure he would have questioned Whitaker’s qualifications for office and fought the end-around of the Senate confirmation process. Glenn knew acting appointments were inevitable, but also believed they should never be used to help a president undermine the laws or reward unqualified individuals.

Congress endorsed these beliefs when it passed the 1988 law, and President Ronald Reagan accepted the obligation to uphold them when he signed it. The question is whether the Senate will respond to the recent insult in time to prevent the next challenge to good government. It should act immediately.

Paul C. Light is a professor of public service at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. He first met Sen. John Glenn in 1983 as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He returned to the Senate in 1987 as a special adviser on presidential transitions and drafted the legislative report that accompanied the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to the Senate floor and eventual passage.

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It’s Dismantlers v. Rebuilders on the Government Reform Front

Paul C. Light — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 11:24:56 -0400

Donald J. Trump accelerated toward his electoral victory two years ago with the support of conservatives who favored a combination of major reform in how government works and a smaller government delivering fewer services. These dismantlers, as I call them, dominated the campaign discourse with a 43 percent share of public support.

But even as the dismantlers won the White House, they faced a rising tide of moderates and liberals who, while also favoring major reform, wanted a bigger government delivering more services. These rebuilders held only a 25 percent share of public support in 2016, but showed signs of growing strength dating back to the 2010 midterm election when the Tea Party uprising received the greater coverage.

Two years later, the distance between the two reform positions has narrowed sharply. Between August 2016 and June 2018, the number of dismantlers dropped from 43 percent to 35 percent, while the number of rebuilders rose from 25 percent to 31 percent. If these trends hold, the rebuilders will top the dismantlers by November and could be well on their way to choosing the next president in 2020.

Why the Dismantlers Left

This shift did not reflect rising trust in government or a sense that government was improving. Indeed, the number of Americans who said the federal government needed major reform inched up from 56 percent in 2016 to 60 percent last June. Nor is it likely that one-fifth of the dismantlers suddenly decided that they wanted a bigger government now that Trump was in charge.

Rather, the shift appears to reflect Trump’s own failure to deliver on the government reforms he promised.

First, as Trump pulled his most conservative supporters toward the right with his policies and angry rallies, he may have pushed his less extreme supporters toward the exits. Over the past two years, for example, the number of dismantlers who described themselves as “very conservative” almost doubled from 15 percent to 26 percent, while the number who called themselves “conservative” or “somewhat conservative” dropped from 44 percent to 32 percent.

Second, Trump did not deliver on smaller government. The national debt is soaring, the defense budget just notched record high growth despite Trump’s 2015 campaign promise to rebuild the military for less, and he has yet to open a bipartisan conversation on saving Social Security and Medicare as the trust funds wane. Trump also promised to “cut so much, it will make your heads spin,” but the cuts never happened.

Third, Trump also failed to take on a rigged system that only he alone could fix it. His promise to “drain the swamp” centered on his anti-government base, but also appealed to the moderates and even occasional liberals, who expected him to tackle ethics reform, insider politics, and influence-peddling. He claimed he had no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, and no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens. But he has yet to mount a reform agenda of even modest designs.

Even Trump seems to believe that he has failed to drain the swamp. How else to explain his own tweets about deep state conspiracies, the congressional resistance, and bloated bureaucracy? The dismantlers believed Trump when he promised to reorganize government, but even he derided his plan last June by asking reporters whether it just might be “extraordinarily boring and therefore not fit for camera.”

Last month’s convictions of Trump’s personal attorney and campaign chairman are certain to drive even more dismantlers to reconsider their support. Trump will continue preaching to very conservative crowds at his raucous rallies, but will still be losing ground among his moderate supporters, many of whom have never donned a MAGA hat, let alone own one.

The rebuilders will need more than an inventory of Trump failures to secure a plurality this fall, however. They also need candidates who embrace the need for major reform. There are plenty of candidates today calling for new programs such as Medicare for all and guaranteed jobs, but few who have much to say about making government work beyond abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (without offering details on what might replace it).

Much as the rebuilders might support these progressive policies, they also worry about government performance. Indeed, they are just as likely as the dismantlers to say that government is wasteful and inefficient. Like the dismantlers, the rebuilders worry that most elected officials do not care about people like them, and believe their side lately has been losing more than winning.

A Message That Resonates

The nation has seen glimpses of intense distrust in many presidential campaigns, but Jimmy Carter was the most effective in putting rebuilding at the core of his campaign. He made plenty of progressive promises for national health care, jobs, and welfare reform, but he also made a clear commitment to upholding ethics, curbing the influence of lobbyists, reforming the civil service system, and reorganizing government from the top down.

Carter also put ethical conduct at the center of his campaign. He promised to honor “the majesty of the Constitution,” “lead without negativism,” and tear down the wall that separated government from the people. The last five minutes of Carter’s 1976 acceptance speech should be required listening for any rebuilder. Even though he was driven from the presidency in 1980 by economic misery and the Iran hostage crisis, Carter proved that a rebuilding agenda can produce electoral success. The only thing missing at this point is a candidate who sees the potential.

In the meantime, Trump continues to press for dismantling across the federal hierarchy. Although Trump recently signed legislation that may help departments and agencies accelerate the hiring process, the reforms are best viewed as a first step toward long-overdue reform, and a small step at that.

Federal employees have watched the two tides of reform wash ashore in government for decades, and have more than enough experience to know that deep personnel cuts at disfavored agencies, revocations of top-secret clearances, fuzzy promises to “reskill” the workforce and eliminate “low-value work,” and enduring vacancies in key management posts are signs of dismantling.

Senior Trump officials often counter the signs with soaring rhetoric about the government’s “untold number of selfless civil servants” and genuine assurances that they do not “distain” the federal workforce. However, even good-government advocates such as OMB’s Margaret Weichert and OPM’s Jeffrey Pon still work for a dismantler-in-chief who embraces deep-state conspiracies, rarely misses a chance to attack the bloated federal bureaucracy (“and I mean bloated”), targets his political enemies, and is waging a petulant, and at least for now failing, war against federal employee unions.

If Trump is serious about surrounding himself with the best and most serious people, he would also do well to spend more time listening to federal employees and less time tweeting about their conspiracies. They were already on the job when he moved into office and remain committed to their constitutional obligation to execute the laws faithfully. What they will not and must not do is unravel laws that a president and party impugn but cannot change. There is a place to work out the disagreement, and it is at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Paul C. Light is a professor of public service at New York University, a nonresident senior fellow at the Volcker Alliance, and an award-winning author. His latest book, The Government-Industrial Complex will be published in December by Oxford University Press.

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Don’t Look to Trump to Overhaul the Bureaucracy

Paul C. Light — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 16:23:42 -0500

Federal employees who are worried about the future should stop watching President Trump and look up Pennsylvania Avenue, where the real tsunami of civil service reform will likely originate. Trump can order as many hiring and pay freezes as he wishes, but only Congress can change the laws governing civil service hiring, pay, benefits and discipline. Trump’s exemption-laden freeze is mere bluster compared to what the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has already started to design.

Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, started working on comprehensive reform long before Trump began his campaign. He has introduced a resolution backing the idea of moving certain federal operations out of Washington, supports a much more stringent hiring freeze that would fill only one in three federal job vacancies, and wants a faster firing process and higher health care premiums. At the same time, he supports higher pay for some federal jobs.

Chaffetz also knows that most federal employees share his concerns about the performance of the civil service. According to the government’s most recent employee survey, less than half of federal workers believe their units are able to recruit people with the right skills, effectively link pay and promotions to performance, deal appropriately with poor performers, and reward creativity and innovation. Many employees are proud of the work they do and believe their organizations are accomplishing their missions, but less than half say creativity and innovation are rewarded within their work units.

Chaffetz must do more than update a few civil service rules and drop his committee’s pointless investigation of Hillary Clinton if he wants to generate the kind of bipartisan civil service reform effort that’s necessary. He also must accept four realities about the current system.

First, Chaffetz must reject Trump’s notion that the federal workforce has grown dramatically in the past several decades. The number of full-time-equivalent federal employees has been remarkably stable at around 2 million since Congress imposed a ceiling on total employment in 1951. The ceiling was removed in 1978, but presidents still hew close to the mark. Federal employment was 2.1 million when the cap took effect in 1952 and 2.1 million when Trump took the oath of office.

Trump’s press secretary was correct when he said that the number of federal employees jumped from 1.7 million under President Clinton to 2.137 million under Obama. But he was guilty of plotting the best curve to make his case, then cherry-picking the data. The total number of federal workers actually rose by almost 250,000 under President George W. Bush to just below 2 million as hiring surged during the war on terrorism, and rose by 160,000 under Obama as he worked to restart the economy and repair under-staffed agencies such as the Veterans Affairs Department.

Moreover, three-quarters of the cuts that took effect during the Clinton administration came from the Defense Department’s post-Cold War downsizing. Federal full-time-equivalent employment was just over 2.1 million when Ronald Reagan left office in 1989 and just under 2 million when George H.W. Bush left office in 1993.

Second, Chaffetz must assure that the government’s vast number of contract and grant employees are doing the right jobs at the right price. According to studies I have conducted, the estimated number of contract and grant employees hit 5.2 million in 2015. The total has moved up and down with wars and economic crises, but Chaffetz cannot ignore the fact that the government-industrial complex now does more than twice as much work as federal employees. The sheer size of the contractor and grantee workforce raises the same concerns about “unwarranted influence, sought or unsought” that led President Eisenhower to warn the nation about the associated threats to democratic processes in his 1961 farewell address.

Third, Chaffetz must help the federal government recruit more millennials to its ranks. Much as they say they want to make a difference for their country, millennials can hardly be expected to line up for jobs in departments and agencies on the chopping block. The Trump freeze is almost guaranteed to increase the average age of the federal workforce, as fewer millennials enter and older employees stay. If Congress adopts an even stricter freeze on federal recruitment, the federal workforce could become the oldest in history.

Fourth, Chaffetz should investigate the inefficiencies created by the federal government’s bloated senior hierarchy. According to my analysis of decades of federal phonebooks, there have never been more layers of leaders at the top of the bureaucracy than there are today. Nor have there ever been more leaders per layer. President Kennedy appointed 451 political and career executives to fill 17 layers in 1961. Trump has inherited 3,250 billets filling 63 layers.

As the number of associate assistant deputy secretaries, assistant associate administrators, associate assistant deputy administrators, and associate deputy assistant secretaries has grown, so has the near-paralysis of the administrative process. Add in the 250 chiefs of staff who now roam the highest levels of government, and it is no surprise that decisions are the product of a never-ending game of “telephone,” in which information is distorted on the way up the chain of command and guidance is lost on the way back down.

Chaffetz cannot address these challenges if he eschews bipartisan action. Members of both parties know that it is time to fix the system and both appear ready to bargain, but Chaffetz must show them that the problems go well beyond the simple mechanics of hiring, firing, paying and promoting. If he acknowledges that the federal workforce is not an out-of-control behemoth, Chaffetz can find ample opportunity to reengineer the civil service system, regulate the government-industrial complex, invite millennials to serve and flatten the government’s hierarchy. If he does so, he can bring the civil service into the 21^st century—better 20 years late than never.

Photo: Flickr user Roman Boed

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Donald Trump Should Stop Tweeting and Start Learning

Paul C. Light — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 15:21:22 -0500

For many presidents, the transition into office turns out to be their Achilles heel in political battle. Effective transitions involve much more than interviewing gaggles of potential appointees, rock stars, sychophants and even the occasional professional skateboarder. Filling the cabinet and staffing the White House is serious work that makes a difference to the country, but Donald Trump will be held accountable for every decision his appointees make, including the government breakdowns they oversee and scandals they may create.

At least to date, however, Trump’s transition has been more like one of Linda McMahon’s WWE cage matches than a rigorous introduction to the federal bureaucracy and its many missions. The candidates for positions in the Trump administration are introduced under the bright lights, the ringleader praises their records, and the fight for position begins. Some contestants are humiliated, others rise to the finals, but only a handful survive.

At least to date, the only players not in this contest are the career government executives who are in position to brief the president-elect and his team. If Trump believes these executives will waste his time and impede his agenda, he is absolutely wrong. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have come into office assuming that civil servants are tireless defenders of the status quo and potential saboteurs. But they soon learn the vast majority of them are deeply committed to implementing the president’s agenda while faithfully executing the laws. The career service is also a source of desperately needed counsel on how government works.

Alas, Trump doesn’t seem to be very interested in briefings from government officials, even on matters of national security. He’s getting most of his advice from business executives. Only 8 percent of President Obama’s first round of cabinet choices came from the business world, but in Trump’s case the figure is likely to be two-thirds or more. There is nothing wrong with business or congressional experience in the cabinet after ethical conflicts are resolved, but there is always value in balancing the team with at a mix of people that have previous government experience. There is even good cause to consider senior career civil servants for the management posts that demand intimate knowledge about how to integrate vision with execution.

Trump’s White House team will not provide much in the way of experience in governing, either. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, have a long history of criticizing Washington, but neither has the bureaucratic skills of a Valerie Jarrett or Karl Rove. Proximity is power in the White House, but knowledge is impact in a government that employs 7 million federal, contract and grant employees and will spend $4 trillion in Trump’s first year alone.

Whatever Trump learns by Jan. 20, he will face intense pressure to “move it or lose it” before his political capital runs out. He would do well to heed Lyndon Johnson’s advice on: “I keep hitting hard because I know this honeymoon won’t last,” Johnson told his staff after his landslide victory in 1964.

First-term presidents who can tolerate endless briefings, long memos, and even short summaries can accelerate the process of gaining expertise. They get better at their job every day. Trump knows how to fire apprentices and negotiate real estate deals, but being president is a lot more complicated.

Trump’s problem is that the cycles of decreasing political capital and increasing expertise run in opposite directions: Presidents generally have their greatest influence when they know the least about their jobs, and their least influence when they know the most about what to do. Trump is certainly smart, but right now, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

America will be able to tell whether Trump is learning by the volume of his tweets. He has never been one to sleep through the night, but he will be a better president if he picks up a briefing book instead of his smartphone at 3 a.m. Trump has already skipped the reading he should have done months ago and seems unlikely to get full briefings from the transition landing teams that have entered federal agencies.

His best option, therefore, is to use that phone to download the Government Accountability Office transition app. It provides quick access to the agency’s top recommendations for improving government operations and links directly to GAO’s high-risk list of troubled programs and a rundown of the top challenges facing the nation. Every item is organized by topic and agency. The app would give Trump a primer on reducing the federal government’s $500 billion backlog of improper payments and delinquent taxes. In the process, it would help him fulfill his pledge to cut fraud, waste and abuse so fast it will make your head spin.

The app would also link him to GAO’s history of the failed hiring freezes that have always done more harm than good. He would learn that most of the damage from freezes occurs at the bottom of government, where the attrition rate is highest and the need for new talent the greatest. Trump might even end up asking himself whether he would ever use such a blunt instrument to manage his own workforce.

The app is so easy to use that Trump might even be free to send a tweet now and then. He could easily toggle back and forth between GAO and Twitter, becoming the first president to learn his job while tweeting along the way. But learning comes first in the cycle of decreasing influence. It’s the only way to secure the high place in history Trump wants.

Paul C. Light is Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University.

Photo: Flickr user hank Mitchell

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Partial Quality Management

Paul C. Light — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 09:00:00 -0400

From the archives of Government Executive...

April 1994—It has been almost five years since government began the push for total quality management and continuous improvement. Since then, agencies have spent millions of dollars studying just how to do it, and millions more setting up their systems.

There is no doubt that TQM has yielded results, whether at the headquarters level—the Department of Defense and Internal Revenue Service have both mad solid improvements—or in the field. Here in Minnesota, for example, the field servicing office of the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has generated real gains in timeliness and service through a TQM effort designed with help from the 3M Co.

Yet, as government begins the quality management “basic training” for all employees that the National Performance Review report recommends, it must confront the barriers that have plagued past improvement efforts. In the spirit of quality guru W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points and the other lists of helpful hints that characterize TQM training, consider Four Fatal Frustrations that must be resolved if TQM is to have staying power as a reform tool.

Who is the Customer Anyway?

Many agencies have been unable to identify who their customers are and haven’t known how to serve them once they’ve been identified. There is certainly nothing wrong with trying to become more user-friendly. The more serious problem comes when agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Forest Service are asked to serve one set of customers today, while protecting another far out into the future. These “stewardship” agencies can get much better at delivering services quickly and with a smile, but they may find themselves unable to satisfy today’s customers without denying tomorrow’s.

Constancy or Confusion?

Government seems unable to achieve the “constancy of purpose” that Deming listed as the first of his 14 Points. TQM was simply added on top of everything else federal managers were asked to do.

Federal agencies and their managers can hardly be blamed if they wait for this reform, too, to pass. Twenty-five years ago, it was the planning, programming and budgeting system. Twenty years ago, the Inspectors General. Fifteen, pay for performance. Ten, Reform ’88. Five, TQM. Today, it is a performance budgeting system that looks mighty similar to the old planning, programming and budgeting. Like sediment at the mouth of a river, these reforms have been added on top of each other without the old ever being dredged out.

Beyond this turnover of reforms, consider also the turnover of appointees. If past patterns hold, the Clinton Administration will replace roughly a third of its political leadership by June, and fully half by next January. TQM cannot be just the province of the career workforce.

How Fast Do the Savings Come In?

TQM cannot promise fast results or deep savings. In fact, TQM may cost money—for new equipment, better training and, dare one suggest, more front-line staff. Further, most TQM efforts take 7 to 10 years to provide payoffs. Yet, government all too often demands results in three years. What is remarkable about TQM efforts at the IRS, DoD and APHIS is not that they have produced results, but that they were able to keep their momentum. They have persevered despite persistent barriers to success.

For a small operation like the APHIS field servicing office, the barriers are doubly frustrating. The office was given no relief from personnel rules to create more room for team-building, no budget reform to carry over resources from year to year and no deregulation to free employees from mind-numbing paperwork. TQM is no easy process to begin with. It involves great commitment and energy. But it cannot be sustained without structural reform of the kind envisioned in the NPR report. Unfortunately, TQM in government is too often nothing more than exhortation and slogans. After two or three years, the employees figure that out and go back to business as usual.

Front-Line Empowerment, or Mid-Level Bulge?

TQM in government can create bureaucratic growth industries of its own, sometimes becoming a justification for positions and layers that do more harm than good. As middle managers get flattened out of their old jobs as cross-checkers and micro-processors, they may adopt TQM as their new raison d’etre .

In theory, TQM should be a virtually invisible part of the ordinary day, a natural way of thinking and doing. In practice, TQM in government can become an extraordinary bureaucratic system teetering under its own weight, a process nightmare. Meeting after meeting, training session after training session, a ton of paperwork and measurement. No federal employee has yet been TQMed to death, but thousands would likely swear they have come close.

Along the way, Deming’s 14 Points have been whittled down by political reality. Everyone still loves a scandal, so his point about “driving out fear [of mistakes]” is struck from the list. Congress won’t change the merit pay system, so his point about eliminating individual performance appraisals goes. Political appointees won’t stay put, so there goes stability of leadership. Check off all the exemptions for government, and the 14 Points look more like three or four. TQM is no longer a way of being, but an occasional afterthought; no longer a system, but an infrequent call to arms.

These Four Fatal Frustrations can be tempered by setting realistic expectations about what TQM can and cannot do for government (it cannot, for example, substitute for careful policy planning upstream in Congress and the White House) and by preventing its capture by middle-level managers in search of new work.

Still, the future of TQM, indeed of any customer-driven reform, is clouded by one simple question: Is “customer” the right word to use in describing citizens? For decades, to be sure, citizens have been treated as less than customers. They were labeled “clients” or, worse yet, “targets”—units to be serviced by government analysis and engineers. The citizen was presented as a set of problems, often to be addressed by different agencies at different locations at different points in time (hence, the Vice President’s horror story about the very different ways government agencies value assets in determining welfare benefits).

Redefining citizens as customers is no doubt a step in the right direction. It weakens the “government-knows-best” mentality that cuts into civic confidence. For the time being, however, most citizens cannot exercise any real power as customers of government. They cannot choose between Crest and Colgate, Campbell’s Soup or Progresso, Dodge or Toyota. They are usually offered one brand, and one brand only, then asked how it could be improved.

TQM may also feed on an overly generous image of the brand-loyal, courteous, well-informed customers that Macy’s would love to have. Anyone who has worked in retail knows that all customers are not created equal, nor do they all behave the same way. Some have more money than others, others have more information, still others have better access.

Marketers also know that customers do not always behave the same way in every setting—think of Macy’s the day after Thanksgiving—nor do they use the same decision-making process on every product. The choice of toothpaste or toilet paper, for example, is more likely to depend on price and shelf placement than on brand loyalty, while the choice of a car or other durable good is more likely to turn on questions of performance.

Ironically, one way to cultivate this better customer is to stop treating citizens as customers altogether. The fact is, sometimes citizens are co-producers, creating value alongside government; sometimes they are catalysts, creating value before government; and most certainly they are problem solvers, creating value in lieu of government.

Government needs to ask whether its customers need to be customers at all—that is, whether they can solve problems on their own. That is something few, if any, private firms ask. Their interest, after all, is in keeping their customers. The government must never do for citizens what they can do for themselves.

Indeed, giving citizens a fuller stake may be the key to keeping agencies lean and fit. As customers, citizens can’t be expected to care much about how tall, wide or rule-bound government is—they set their expectations by past performance, then act as passive receptors. But as co-producers, catalysts and problem-solvers, they care very much about bureaucracy: It limits their access and influence.

As America proceeds with reinventing government, it might consider reinventing citizenship, too. That’s an idea already brewing with Bill Galson, White House domestic policy aide, and Harry Boyte here at the Humphrey Institute. In the search for a metaphor that asks citizens to take a greater role in governing themselves, thinking of citizens as citizens might be just what government needs.

In 1994, Paul Light was a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, a senior fellow of the Governance Institute and a visiting fellow of the Brookings Institution.

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Excellence in Government

Paul C. Light — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It's achievable. Here's how.

These are, to say the least, not the best of times for the federal government. The first round of debt reductions took a rusty meat ax to federal agencies, and the next round will be even blunter. Congress and the president might just as well put Howie Mandel in charge of the coming Deal or No Deal disaster: Just ask agencies to pick any silver case and express their shock at the cut within. The only difference between this exercise and the actual game show is that federal agencies won't have the option to stop opening the cases.

There's no doubt that Americans are fed up with what they see as wasteful spending, and they have lost confidence in the federal government's ability to respond effectively to national and international, economic and political problems. Some of the complaints are no doubt fueled by the Tea Party's rhetoric on big, bad government, the constant headlines about government shutdowns at the national and state levels, and the vicious posturing at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. But they reflect a kernel of reality.

The polls may show a deep disquiet about whether Washington can actually honor the promises it makes, but most Americans still want more of virtually everything the government delivers for helping the economy, the elderly, students, small businesses, and their own cities and towns. They also want safe streets, smooth roads, new bridges, clean water, honest markets, and a host of regulations for preventing disease, oil spills, pollution, airline accidents, terrorism, and tainted food and drugs.

Equally important, Americans are still convinced that the big problem in Washington is not the wrong priorities-unless Americans are asked whether the tax code should favor the super-wealthy. Rather, most believe the big problem is inefficiency in delivering basic goods and services at the lowest possible cost. They want just what former Vice President Al Gore once promised: a government that works better and costs less. They want value for their money. The good news is, there's a way to give it to them.

Three Challenges

It has been 70 years since the last comprehensive review of the federal government's basic structure and operations. Now there's simply no time for another blue-ribbon commission for restructuring government like the two that were led by President Herbert Hoover in 1947 and 1953. We need immediate action.

For most Americans, the problem is not so much what government does, but how it works. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has entered office promising government reform, but none has quite succeeded. Instead, today's federal bureaucracy remains anchored in organizational strategies and structures invented in the 1930s. As former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul A. Volcker said this spring, "If major financial, health and education overhauls are indeed sorely needed to improve the quality of life of Americans, so too is a federal service reform that will equip the federal government with the tools that it needs to successfully implement reforms and carry out existing missions."

This is not to argue that the federal government fails at every turn. Federal employees accomplish miracles every day, often struggling against the bureaucracy to create measurable impacts through their work. Moreover, most Americans agree with the federal government's basic mission. No sensible person wants to weaken efforts to boost cancer research, protect the food supply and ensure drug safety, enhance the nation's leadership in science and technology, and provide an affordable national defense. But for the federal government to perform at its highest level, comprehensive reform is needed to solve three challenges: accountability, effectiveness and productivity.

Accountability

With the government's ever expanding mission, it is often impossible to know where the buck stops or what agency is responsible for the execution of which task. Not only is the federal government's program agenda riddled with duplication and overlap, it remains encumbered by administrative structures that diffuse accountability and confuse the chain of command.

The problem is easiest to see in the proliferation of management layers at the top of the federal organizational chart. There have never been more layers in government or more leaders per layer. The total number of senior federal officers increased from 451 in 1960 to more than 2,600 in 2008. More than 500 of these posts require Senate approval, but they move through the White House and Senate vetting processes at such a sluggish pace that it now takes more than a year on average for an administration to finally fill the top positions.

Accountability is not only lost up the vertical hierarchy within departments and agencies, but also along the horizontal chain of coordination between duplicative and overlapping programs. According to the Government Accountability Office, seven agencies work on U.S.-Mexican border water quality, and 20 are involved in managing federal cars, trucks and airplanes.

Also, there are two dozen agencies involved in preventing bioterrorism; the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are still working in separate silos on controlling explosives; 15 agencies are assigned to food safety; each of the armed services has separate health programs; and there are 18 programs for food assistance, 44 for employment and training, 54 for financial literacy, 80 for economic development, 82 for teacher quality and 100 for surface transportation.

Effectiveness

Virtually every study from GAO, the Office of Management and Budget, and think tanks across the political spectrum suggests that Americans have reason to be worried about the federal government's ability to deliver services.

Some of the angst is a direct result of the woefully understaffed acquisition process. In 2008, the federal government spent $188 billion on noncompetitive contracts, up 229 percent since 2002. During the same period, cost- reimbursement contracts nearly doubled to $135 billion, while the size of the acquisition workforce remained slightly smaller than it was in 1992, just before Gore's reinventing government campaign. The acquisition workforce is only one of many problems with government's administrative infrastructure:

Thirty years after Congress and the president created agency inspectors general to monitor government's economy, efficiency and effectiveness, their offices are understaffed and rarely focus on how to prevent mistakes early in the regulatory and legislative processes.
Twenty years after Congress and the president created chief financial officers in every agency to produce audited financial statements, there continues to be a lack of fiscal discipline and systems for reducing wasteful expenditures.
Many years after Congress and the president enacted the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, many agencies are unable to measure the impact of their programs as a tool for rewarding high performance and winnowing failure.
More than a decade after Congress and the president created chief human capital officers and chief information officers in every agency, the government's personnel system continues to fall short, and information networks remain antiquated and poorly designed.

Rebuilding this infrastructure is essential for assuring the highest possible performance across government. Statutes must be revitalized and enforced, while agencies must provide the leadership to assure managers and executives fully embrace the need for change.

Productivity

The government's ability to prevent, respond to and solve public problems depends on what the Founding Founders called "vigor and execution" in the workforce. But vigor and execution have corroded with budget cut after cut, neglect and mismanagement, and growing problems attracting and supporting the best and the brightest for federal careers.

Start with the senior leadership. Whether political or career, the government's leaders are so focused on scoring policy victories that they don't spend enough time on management. This is certainly what federal employees think. According to the government's own surveys, only 44 percent of employees believe that the leaders of their organizations generate high levels of motivation and commitment among employees. Similarly, just 45 percent said they were satisfied with the policies and practices of their senior leaders. This leadership crisis is especially critical now as a large portion of the workforce faces retirement.

Further down the ranks, the federal government continues to struggle with providing incentives for high performance, especially in the pay, promotion and disciplinary processes. In fact, 45 percent of federal employees believe pay raises do not depend on how well employees perform their jobs, and 41 percent do not believe that steps are taken to deal with poor performers. Although many agencies have been given the authority to create their own pay systems to improve productivity, efforts to implement pay-for-performance systems generally have been unsuccessful.

A Chance to Act

Luckily, there are big-ticket savings that Congress and the president could easily reap by addressing these challenges. A comprehensive reorganization package would give President Obama the government overhaul he promised in February, while House Republicans would get many of the bureaucratic reforms they pledged to enact in last year's midterm campaigns. Reorganization has yet to reach the bargaining table, however, in no small part because Congress simply does not understand why organization and management matter. Other than a handful of members, such as Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Tom Carper, D-Del., both former governors, members of Congress view organization and management as the all-time "my eyes glaze over" issue.

Yet, technical and boring though government organization and management might be, Congress and the president would be wise to consider the enormous cost savings and enhanced performance they could bring. A set of seven reforms suggests government could reap $1 trillion or more in savings over 10 years and untold gains in accountability, effectiveness and productivity. In short, there is a path to a government that works better and costs less. The only question is whether Congress and the president can get past the polarization and posturing to bring the following reforms to fruition:

Reduce the number of presidential appointees by half, whether Senate confirmed or at will, full or part time. Eliminate all department and agency chief of staff offices and positions. Count and cut management layers between the top and bottom of government.
Freeze hiring at the senior and middle levels of government unless and until the president certifies that a given vacancy must be filled to meet one of the national priorities set by the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act.
Harvest all the money that is already owed to the federal government. Eliminate all mistaken or fraudulent payments to federal beneficiaries, providers, contractors and corporations. Collect what the Treasury Department calls the federal government's nontax debts, including unpaid loans and fees such as leases, fines and import taxes. And eliminate the $300 billion backlog of delinquent federal income taxes owed by federal and congressional employees, contractors and stimulus recipients.
Streamline operations. Eliminate duplication and overlap across the federal government's programs and administrative systems. The creation of the Homeland Security Department, for example, merged 22 agencies that contained multiple administrative systems for payroll, procurement, information technology and more.
Focus the federal bureaucracy on productivity. Restore and strengthen productivity measures that were abandoned in 1994 and then use the new measures as a component of a results-based bonus pay system with possible application to a simplified classification and pay system.
Eliminate automatic time-on-the-job pay increases. Reverse grade inflation in the employee performance appraisal process by establishing quotas for each rating category. Get rid of pass-fail appraisal systems. Build a fair and efficient disciplinary process for terminating poor performers quickly-requiring, for example, that all disciplinary proceedings be completed within four months of filing. Allow only 10 percent of employees to receive the highest grade in the performance process. Require annual productivity gains of at least 3 percent.
Cut the number of contract employees by 500,000. Create a results-based pay system for the estimated 7 million contractors who would remain, and demand annual productivity gains of at least 3 percent.

There's little doubt the total savings from such a series of steps would add up to more than $1 trillion. The two key questions are who would lead the effort and how it would be done.

Who Leads and How?

It is difficult to imagine that anyone in the House could lead this comprehensive reform campaign. Nor has President Obama shown much interest in the issue. Warner, however, could credibly build such a government-reform package from his perch as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee's Task Force on Government Performance. He made a small fortune in the private sector, was a successful governor of Virginia and has built a reputation as the Senate's expert on government reorganization.

Implementation is a more difficult challenge. The White House seems to favor either renewing the authority that once allowed presidents to submit re-organization plans to Congress, or establishing a quasi-independent commission to draft proposals for up-or-down votes in Congress. Either could work, but for the rancor that will taint proposals moving up Pennsylvania Avenue from a Democratic White House to a Republican House.

Reorganization plans would be more appealing if they came from a quasi- independent entity. Such an entity could be modeled on the Resolution Trust Corporation. Launched during the savings and loan crisis in 1989, RTC produced one miracle after another during its seven years at work. Given full authority to act; an absolute sunset; and ample freedom to hire, pay and fire at will, RTC dumped almost $400 billion in troubled assets and closed or reorganized almost 750 thrifts.

A seven-year Government Reorganization Corporation might work similar miracles for the federal bureaucracy. Given the same authority and freedom to act, it could dispose of the federal government's useless property; hire enough employees to collect the delinquent debt; and fire off legislative proposals for up-or-down votes on hiring, flattening and consolidation. After seven years, it would disappear.

Whatever the tool, Congress and the president still have a chance to use this year's budget crisis to capitalize on the opportunity for deep reform. Overhauling government may not be exciting, but it does provide a way to capture savings and establish momentum for reform.

Paul C. Light is Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University and the author of several books, including Thickening Government (Brookings Institution Press, 1995) and The Tides of Reform (Yale University Press, 1998).

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Taking the Cake

Paul C. Light — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Bush's actions taint the anniversary of hallmark reforms.

December marks the 30th anniversary of three of the most important administrative reforms enacted during the past half century: the Civil Service Reform Act, the Ethics in Government Act and the Inspector General Act. The Bush administration will not be holding an anniversary party, however.

It has worked hard to undermine the spirit, if not the letter, of these laws.

Even in its final days, for example, the administration is mounting a serious challenge to the Civil Service Reform Act by asserting the president's right to define any government position as exempt from the merit principle. It is undermining the Ethics in Government Act by tolerating potential conflicts of interest in the management of the $700 billion bailout, giving private firms unprecedented influence over the effort. And the administration continues to attack the Inspector General Act through intimidation, budget caps and an unwillingness to address the incompetence of some of its appointees.

These are not the only examples of post-Watergate management statutes that are flagging. Others include:

The 1966 Freedom of Information Act cannot keep up with the pressure to hide more secrets.
The 1976 Government in the Sunshine Act has been repeatedly narrowed through tight definitions of exactly what constitutes "government" and "sunshine."
The 1984 Competition in Contracting Act has been undermined by the vast expansion in the dollars now awarded without competition.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act has become an exercise in wordplay as Vice President Dick Cheney claims that he is an officer of Congress, not the executive branch, in an effort to shield his papers from public view.
As for the 1974 Privacy Act, is there anything left at all?

The Bush administration would contest all these complaints, of course. The percentage of noncompetitive contracts is "no more and no less" than other administrations, says the president's budget office, even though spending on those contracts has soared. A nation at war requires new vigilance on freedom of information, says the White House staff, even if that means redaction of the most trivial documents. Most important perhaps, the need to guarantee constitutional prerogatives, says the Justice Department, allows the president to exercise a line-item veto through the rising tide of signing statements.

This is not to suggest that the Bush administration is against good management, at least as long as it fits its political agenda. It has brought needed reality to the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act by rating programs. It also has worked with good government groups to improve human capital management and e-government. The president's deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Clay Johnson, has given almost eight years to the effort, and has been a steadfast, if sometimes lonely, voice for improvement.

At the same time, the Bush administration often has worked against Johnson's goals. It has missed important opportunities to improve the presidential appointments process, to acknowledge and redress meddling by its twenty-something political operatives, and to reduce the needless layers of executive management that have thickened the federal hierarchy. Viewed as a whole, the administration likely will be remembered for accelerating the steady erosion of the federal government's ability to faithfully execute the laws, which Alexander Hamilton described as the "true test" of good government.

Ironically, the administration could have made a persuasive case that the Civil Service Reform Act is so badly broken that most of it should be repealed. The law has never lived up to its promise of a more responsive civil service, nor has it achieved its major goals. Instead of addressing its weaknesses through comprehensive reform, however, the Bush administration has worked mostly around the law, often in arrogant disregard of the core principles embedded in the merit system.

The administration could have made an equally compelling case that the Ethics in Government Act has failed. There is good evidence that the law has discouraged talented Americans from seeking presidential appointments while creating an enormous and undue paperwork burden on the thousands of federal employees who must complete the annual financial disclosure forms. Perhaps the paperwork would be worth it if it produced a scandal-proof government, but the scandals have kept coming. Few good-government groups ever inspect the financial disclosure forms, and still fewer worry about how to produce an aspiration of ethical conduct that rises well above the floor set by the law.

Finally, the Bush administration could have made a reasonable case that the Inspector General Act needs an overhaul. Rather than view IGs as double agents of Congress, the administration could have joined Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., in passing long overdue reforms in the act.

Instead, the administration threatened to veto the McCaskill-Cooper bill until the House dropped a provision that would have given inspectors general a seven-year term and removal only for cause.

The administration also stood against giving IGs authority to submit their budget requests directly to Congress if their agencies denied the resources needed to pursue fraud, waste and abuse at all levels of the hierarchy.

There is a reason that the Bush administration has decided to ignore the anniversaries of these statutes. Bluntly put, it does not believe in laws that get in the way of executive fiat. Now that the administration is done dealing with the messy constitutional requirement that it must either faithfully execute all the laws or change them, there isn't much reason to celebrate.

Paul C. Light is the author of A Government Ill Executed (Harvard University Press, 2008) and a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

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Making Reform Stick

Paul C. Light — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

If one thing is sure about the future of bureaucratic reform, the next president will sweep away whatever his predecessor has done and develop an entirely new package of change.

That's what President George W. Bush did with Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government campaign, which now resides in a cyber cemetery at the University of North Texas. It was also what Gore did with President George H. W. Bush's total quality management initiative, which lingered in name only until his son abolished the remnants of the program in 2001.

The private sector knows reforms take years, if not decades to stick, but first-term presidents want the impact to affect their reelection. Congress wants them faster. If a reform yields no results in a year or so, it is back to the drawing board-Gore's reinventing government program was reinvented three times in six years.

The next president would be wise to take more care in drafting his management package. Instead of adding yet another corpse to the body count of forgotten reforms, he should take the best from the past in fashioning a new agenda. At least in federal management reform, there is truly nothing new under the sun, and many old promises merit a second chance. Call it something new-for example, the Streamlining for Performance Initiative-but don't ignore the past.

The next president should start by acknowledging Bush's commitment to performance measurement, which actually tracks back to Gore's reforms. Al-though high performance is in the eye of the political beholder, Bush's effort achieved at least some success in changing the conversation from inputs such as dollars to program results. The administration's new tool for rating individual performance has been a bust, however. The president's budget analysts might know a great deal in terms of dollars, but they don't have the training to tell good management from bad.

The 44th president also should dump the Bush administration's traffic-light-style scoring system for measuring progress of its management agenda. The green lights heralding progress have flashed on and off more with the political calendar than with actual progress. Cabinet secretaries can preen about their scores whenever they get together, but no one knows for sure whether they reflect real improvement on the front lines of government where services are delivered. If the next president wants agencies to be serious about measurement, then his management team must be serious about it, too.

The winner of the 2008 election also should revisit Gore's investment in customer satisfaction and flattening the number of federal managers. By requiring agencies to conduct annual satisfaction surveys, for example, Gore let the bureaucracy know that citizens would have a voice in measuring results. And by cutting the ratio of managers to employees, he eased at least some of the hierarchical thickening that still undermines efficiency and accountability. The campaign had salutary effects for the Democratic Party. For the first time in years, the public began to believe that Democrats could do just as well at managing government as Republicans. Coupled with a cut of 250,000 federal jobs, Gore's campaign reassured the public that the Clinton administration was serious about trimming bureaucracy.

The next president should go even further back in history to rescue the first President Bush's total quality management agenda. Designed to mimic similar efforts in the U.S. automobile industry, the administration focused on breaking down long-standing rules and procedures that explain the recent cascade of breakdowns-the toxic trailers, counterfeit heparin, aircraft groundings, leaded toys and poisonous peppers. But Bush was out of office long before his reforms penetrated the bureaucratic mind-set.

Most of these efforts were easily swept away because they were established through executive fiat, not statute. That made them painfully easy targets for immediate disposal. Thus, even as the next president blends his own initiatives with the past, he should make his management agenda part of his legislative list, not executive order. Congress has become addicted to the reform du jour and must be a partner in creating the "steadiness in administration" that Alexander Hamilton described as essential to a government well-executed.

In the meantime, Congress should restore presidential authority to implement limited reorganizations. Presidents had the ability to submit reorganization plans to Congress for what was almost automatic approval until 1984, when the Supreme Court rejected the device as an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power.

Congress will never give another president the authority to abolish whole departments and agencies. But a more restrictive initiative-by-initiative renewal might allow action against specific targets such as the redesign of antiquated rules and the process for replacing the 600,000 civil servants who will retire during the next decade.

Wedded to a fast-track congressional review process of the kind used when closing military bases, this authority could give the next president a fighting chance to marry the "golden oldies" of past administrations with a new agenda of long- overdue reforms in everything from the presidential appointments process to rebuilding a notoriously inefficient civil service. It could be just the device for making reform last long enough to stick.

Paul C. Light is the author of A Government Ill Executed (Harvard University Press, 2008) and a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

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Making Reform Stick

Paul C. Light — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A management agenda by any other name should build on what works.

If one thing is sure about the future of bureaucratic reform, the next president will sweep away whatever his predecessor has done and develop an entirely new package of change.

Paul C. Light is the author of A Government Ill Executed (Harvard University Press, 2008) and a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

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Laws Gone Astray

Paul C. Light — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500

ecember marks the 25th anniversary of three of the most important administrative reforms ever enacted. There might have been a celebration, perhaps even a congressional resolution, if the laws had worked. Unfortunately, the Civil Service Reform Act, Inspector General Act and Ethics in Government Act, all signed in 1978, have not made a dent in public cynicism toward government.

It is not that the laws are too modest. The Civil Service Reform Act was designed to create a government as good as the people, the Ethics in Government Act promised to close the revolving door between private interests and presidential appointments, and the Inspector General Act launched a coordinated assault on government fraud, waste and abuse.

It is not that the laws have been ignored. The federal government created a prestigious Senior Executive Service to lead its civilian workforce, promulgated new financial disclosure rules for presidential appointees, and established inspector general offices at every agency to coordinate the war on waste. Reforms included a new pay-for-performance system, prohibited former appointees from lobbying their agencies for at least a year after leaving office, and gave inspectors general broad authority.

The IGs have been particularly active lately, launching highly visible investigations of the Justice Department's terrorist detentions, contract fraud at the General Services Administration, continued problems with airport security and political meddling in Interior Department rule-making.

Despite these efforts, the public is even more doubtful about government performance today than it was 25 years ago. According to an October survey by the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service, which I direct, 70 percent of Americans say the federal government wastes a great deal of money, and 23 percent say it wastes a fair amount. By comparison, only 11 percent think small businesses waste a great deal of money, while more than half think they waste little or none.

So what went wrong?

First, the Ethics in Government and Inspector General acts might have worked too well. Instead of ensuring a scandal-proof government, the Ethics Act discouraged talented Americans from seeking presidential appointments, while feeding the public's cynicism about the role of big money in government. And instead of easing public concerns about government spending, the inspectors general produced yearly records of waste, which candidates of both parties used to bash the bureaucracy in their election campaigns.

Second, despite their successes, all three laws produced frustration. The Senior Executive Service never became the highly mobile corps it promised to be, the Ethics Act has done little to restore public confidence that government is clean, and the IGs still struggle to get the resources needed to prevent fraud, waste and abuse.

The Civil Service Reform Act has been a particular disappointment. Pay for performance has never worked as intended; the hiring, firing, and promoting process has produced a government as tall as Mount Everest and filled with excessive layering, overgrading and muddled chains of command, in which no one can be held accountable.

As for IG activism, the Bush administration appears to be struggling to get the watchdogs back in the kennel. Despite last year's mini-purge of four Clinton administration holdovers, the IGs keep on digging. The deeper they dig, the more they hit problems on Bush's watch, and White House political czar Karl Rove continues to urge presidential appointees to muzzle the IGs.

Third, lawmakers and presidents have never stopped reforming government. Between 1980 and 2002, they enacted another 82 major laws designed to make government work, and a host of repairs and expansions of old laws.

As the velocity of reform has increased, so has the confusion. Congress and the president have asked government to do it all-build new agencies, reform the old, and ferret out fraud, waste and abuse-while opening government to the sunshine, then fighting to keep the public out. Every president enters office promising the most ethical, transparent, waste-conscious and businesslike administration in history, but soon finds its policies, appointees, task forces and decisions under scrutiny. All of a sudden, being ethical and transparent aren't so attractive.

This is certainly the case with the Bush administration. It was one thing to promise transparency before Vice President Dick

Cheney was accused of a conflict of interest over his energy task force in 2001. But it was quite another to honor the pledge during a desperate search for weapons of mass destruction and the feeding frenzy surrounding $87 billion in Iraq reconstruction projects. If the past is any guide, the projects will go to qualified bidders who gave buckets of campaign money to Republicans.

It is no wonder, therefore, that even big statutes might not be able to turn the tide of public opinion. Like drops in the ocean, they cannot stop the tidal wave of quid pro quos that make Washington look more like a flea market than the home of the world's greatest democratic institutions.

Paul C. Light is director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service and a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. ]]>

Making Do at NASA

Paul C. Light — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

ow that the results are in on the causes of the Columbia disaster, it's abundantly clear that the accident stemmed from more than just mechanical failures. According to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the disaster was rooted in NASA's "can-do" culture. While this ethos produced what the board called "tenacity in the face of seemingly impossible challenges," it also created a tendency to operate "too close to too many margins."

This culture has been the driver of great achievement. It helped the United States win the space race, put the first human on the moon, and repeatedly mesmerized the nation with pictures from distant planets. NASA's can-do attitude enabled crews to bring the ailing Apollo 13 safely back to Earth and to find a way to fix the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit. And it could have led to the rescue of Columbia's astronauts. There is little an agency with such a culture cannot do when it is given a clear task and the resources to accomplish it.

But it's that very culture that has insulated NASA from reality. It encouraged managers to ignore, even suppress, the danger signs that led to the Challenger accident; to downplay the calls for greater care from one blue-ribbon commission after another; and to reject engineers' pleas for further imagery that might have saved the Columbia astronauts.

It also led NASA to stifle dissent, whatever the source. In the Challenger case, the dissent came from Morton Thiokol, the company that designed and manufactured the solid-rocket motors that failed early in the flight. In the Columbia case, the dissent came from a group of NASA engineers led by their soft-spoken chief, Rodney Rocha, who was rebuked time after time by can-do program managers.

Organizational culture does not arise and endure on its own. It is the product of leadership, environment, organizational structure and systems. It gets handed down from one generation to another through training, recruitment and reward, and is reinforced through the budget and promotion system. The managers who made the decision not to take a deeper look at the potential damage to Columbia didn't adopt the can-do spirit by accident. They advanced through the ranks because they believed in it.

The Columbia board is right that organizational culture was at the root of the accident, but NASA's culture has become more "make-do" than "can-do." NASA made do with a shuttle design that was riddled with vulnerabilities because it was the least expensive.

NASA also has made do with a personnel system that is encrusted with needless bureaucracy and unyielding penury; a contracting system that has created a slow but steady evisceration of accountability between the agency and the United Space Alliance, which runs the shuttle program; and a hierarchy that makes it impossible to hold any one person accountable for what goes right or wrong. Most importantly, NASA has made do with a budget process that has produced one cut after another, and a "cheaper, faster, better" philosophy that has conditioned managers to count every penny and fear every mistake. NASA wanted "the cosmos on a shoestring," as RAND researchers noted in a 1998 report on the agency's budget pressure. It got it.

The nation was willing to bear any burden and pay any cost to conquer space in the 1960s, but not to build a space truck to carry supplies to a missionless space station in the 1990s. As a result, NASA went from a can-do budget under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to a make-do budget under every president since. Hence came the penny-pinching mentality that led to the back-to-back Mars meltdowns in the late 1990s, and the very real fears that managers could lose their jobs, if not the whole Space Shuttle program, if they failed to keep the aging vehicles flying.

These fears were reinforced at virtually every turn, including the first months of Sean O'Keefe's tenure as NASA administrator. O'Keefe's forthrightness during the Columbia investigation, as well as his commitment to rebuilding the agency, is admirable. Yet, his early cost-cutting campaign fueled make-do worries about who and what would survive, especially as the federal budget deficit soared.

O'Keefe also reinforced the make-do mentality when he fired NASA Inspector General Roberta Gross six weeks into his tenure. The dismissal involved "a judgment call," O'Keefe told The Washington Post, and was based almost entirely on the fact that Gross had been in office too long. "Seven years argues for a change," he said. The firing gave managers and contractors a breather from the kind of experienced audits and investigations that might have made them just a little more reluctant to cut corners.

NASA will recover only if it rebuilds the can-do culture that the Columbia board now blames for the accident. O'Keefe's recommendations for a new personnel system will help, as will a careful sorting of priorities. But O'Keefe must also rebuild the morale of the agency. Although NASA managers can never be forgiven for not taking a second look at the possibility that Columbia had been fatally wounded, they were doing exactly what the agency had long told them to do: Make do with what you are given. Columbia and its crew deserved better.

Paul C. Light is director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service and a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. ]]>

Government by the Numbers

Paul C. Light — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

s Democrats and federal employee unions battle the Bush administration's proposal to put thousands of federal jobs up for competition, the government's hidden workforce has crept to its highest level since the end of the Cold War.

According to new estimates by the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service, which I direct, federal contracts and grants generated just over 8 million jobs in 2002, up by more than 1 million since 1990. When these off-budget jobs are added to the civil service and military head count, the true size of the workforce stood at 12.1 million in October 2002, up from 11 million in October 1999.

The true size of government is still smaller than it was before1990. The end of the Cold War resulted in cutbacks of more than 2 million on- and off-budget jobs at the Defense and Energy departments and NASA by 1999. But according to the center's triennial inventory, based in part on estimates generated by Eagle Eye Publishers, the federal government has added back more than half of that head-count savings.

But even as cuts were under way at Defense, Energy and NASA, other agencies added roughly 300,000 jobs back into government between 1993 and 1999. In the three years since, civilian agencies have added 550,000 more jobs and Defense has added roughly 500,000.

Although some of the post-1999 growth was in the final year of the Clinton administration, most of the 1.1 million new on- and off-budget jobs reflect increased spending on the Bush administration's watch. Many of these jobs have been added at agencies involved in the war on terrorism, but many have also been added at other agencies, such as the Health and Human Services Department.

The number of contract workers would have been even higher, and civil service cuts even deeper, had the Bush administration won its battle to contract out the passenger and baggage screener jobs at the new Transportation Security Administration. But even though screeners are federal employees, the Transportation Security Administration still uses contractors to recruit and hire screeners and manage day-to-day personnel and administrative functions. The Bush administration and its allies in the Republican-controlled House also won the battle to allow contractors to operate the checkpoints at five major airports.

Overall, the center's figures confirm four trends:

The federal civil service will continue to shrink.
Even as the contract- and grant-generated workforce has grown by 1.5 million jobs since 1990, the federal civil service has shrunk by nearly 500,000 jobs. The civil service is only the tip of a very large hidden government, but it is shrinking nonetheless.
The peace dividend in employment from the end of the Cold War will soon be gone.
Employment outside Defense, Energy and NASA actually increased by more than 300,000 jobs from 1990 to 1999 as the Clinton administration spent part of the peace dividend on domestic priorities and added 1.1 million jobs between 1999 and 2002. At this rate, the peace dividend of nearly 2 million jobs will almost certainly be gone in the next few years. Rebuilding Iraq will make sure of it.
The contractor workforce is growing across government.
Except for Energy, NASA and a handful of other civilian agencies, contract and grant-generated employment has been growing across government. The growth in Defense has come entirely through contracts, while the one-third of the growth at non-Defense agencies has been through contracts and two-thirds through grants.

A government of roughly 12 million employees isn't necessarily bad. It merely reflects the total workforce required to deliver the promises the federal government has made. The totals are even larger when state and local employees who work for the federal government under funded and unfunded mandates are added. As of 1996, the state and local share of the federal workforce was 4.7 million, and that hasn't changed.

The government has arrived at this diverse workforce more by accident than intent. Driven by attrition and hiring freezes, agencies have gone every which way to build a workforce that can do the job. According to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the military head count may include up to 320,000 jobs that have migrated from its civil service workforce to the military because the civilian hiring process is so sluggish.

It is time for a real accounting of all the jobs in government-put them all on the table and ask who should do what. This means more than putting civil service jobs up for competition with the private sector. It also means a deliberate sorting of when and where to use contractors, grantees, state and local employees, military personnel and federal civilians to do the work. The real issue is who can do the job best, not how many people it will take to do it. If this means bringing jobs back into government, so be it.

Paul C. Light is director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service and a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. ]]>

Outsourcing Fever

Paul C. Light — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 00:00:00 -0400

ou can't throw a rock in Washington without hitting someone who has an opinion on the Bush administration's competitive sourcing initiative. Under the original plan, agencies were supposed to put at least 15 percent of their not-inherently-governmental jobs up for competition by the end of the summer; the quota would ultimately reach up to 50 percent. Although the administration abandoned its government-wide quotas in July, the pressure for competition is going to increase. If Bush confidant Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has his way, the competition will lead in only one direction: to smaller government.

Norquist and the administration are not the only proponents of more competition-and of the contracts to private firms that will almost certainly come with it. Many Democrats like outsourcing because it makes government look smaller than it really is. By shifting jobs from the civil service to private contractors and grantees, outsourcing allowed Vice President Al Gore to claim that the government workforce was smaller in 2000 than it had been 40 years before.

Many Republicans like outsourcing because it creates private sector jobs. They simply believe that the private sector is inherently more efficient than government. That is why the House fought so hard against putting federal employees in the airports as passenger and baggage screeners and why Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Harold Rodgers, R-Ky., has imposed a freeze on any further hiring for the screener force, perhaps forgetting the sloppy work that contractors performed both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even some civil servants seem to like outsourcing-as long as it focuses on front-line jobs, that is. Outsourcing gives federal managers more authority to hire and fire than they could have under the civil service system. It can take months to take action against a poorly performing civil servant, but only a phone call to convince a contractor to remove one of its poor performers. It also gives federal managers more control over performance, or so they think. But contractors make mistakes, too. They can shred tax returns, misuse credit cards and cook the books with the best of them. Just read the stories about MCI, which is one of the federal government's favorite telecommunications providers but was part of the WorldCom meltdown.

Whatever they think in private, proponents of outsourcing almost always argue in public that competition is good for the organizational soul, largely by bringing the market to bear on price. According to RAND, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, outsourcing competitions have saved the Defense Department 30 percent to 60 percent in operating costs, regardless of whether government or the private sector wins. The savings almost always come from a net reduction in the number of people needed to do a job. The study shows that neither government nor companies enjoy a particular advantage in reducing personnel costs-they both do it the same way, by using fewer people.

The problem is that price is a poor measure of other factors the government might value. Price reveals little about potential performance, for example. Although limited evidence points to competition as a producer of customer satisfaction, there is little objective data showing contractors deliver better performance. Morton Thiokol won the space shuttle solid-rocket booster contract based on price, for example. But the economical design put the burden on two thin o-rings to protect shuttle astronauts from harm. In 1986, the o-rings failed, causing the Challenger to explode. Mellon Bank won an Internal Revenue Service tax-return processing contract, also on the basis of price. But the price was based on how many envelopes are opened per hour, a goal that fell to pieces when rush hour hit.

The administration's decision to abandon the governmentwide targets was not just good policy. It ended two years of unrelenting criticism by labor unions, good government groups and the General Accounting Office. There are many good reasons to put jobs up for competition, but meeting arbitrary quotas is not one of them.

The end to governmentwide quotas does not mean the administration is backing away from putting as many jobs as possible up for grabs, however. The administration is sure to press individual departments and agencies to set quota-based targets, especially now that every government unit will have a competitive sourcing officer in charge of the process and accountable to the White House.

Moreover, there is sure to be intense debate about just how jobs are sorted for possible competition. The administration has already put agencies on notice that it intends to contest decisions to protect jobs by defining them as inherently governmental or essential to an agency's activity.

In some cases, price is all that matters, and in others, worker motivation or productivity is more important. As currently designed, however, the Bush administration's competitive sourcing campaign is based solely on price. It is a guarantee that the nation will get exactly what it pays for-and no more.

Paul C. Light is director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Service and a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.

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