Government Executive - Authors - Paul L. Posner

Memo to the President: Reforming the Federal Budget Process

Paul L. Posner and Steve Redburn — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 08:00:00 -0500

The new president and Congress need a working budget process to help them put resources behind their policies and govern the nation effectively. Budgeting, one of the core processes of government, is badly broken. But a return to “regular order” is not enough. We need a new order that will help leaders make tough fiscal choices in a complex and turbulent world—the kind of budget process that would help leaders translate promises into resource allocations aimed at achieving a desired future, anticipating a broad array of complex challenges amidst almost paralyzing uncertainty.

The goal of such reforms should be to give the federal government a budget process that:

Is more disciplined, predictable and institutionalized.
Facilitates negotiation and compromise.
Regularly reviews all elements of the budget, including revenue and spending policies.
Is more forward-looking, giving greater attention to both growth-producing investments and long-term commitments.
Supports stabilizing public debt at a safe level over the far horizon.
Is neutral with regard to specific policies, including the balance between revenues and spending.
Supports more use of evidence showing how alternative resource uses would improve the government’s performance in achieving national goals.

Drawing on fresh ideas developed by the National Budgeting Roundtable, we propose the new president and congressional leaders take the following steps toward a new budget process.

Budget for major national goals by reviewing the relevant portfolio of spending, tax expenditures, regulations and other policies

The current process for developing the budget is biased toward marginal, short-term changes and familiar policies. It is piecemeal, fragmented and stovepiped, and often blind to major shifts in the nation’s economy and social structure. It misses bigger, strategic options that could produce breakthrough gains in how resources could be used to achieve national goals.

A portfolio budgeting approach to selected major policy goals should be added to the current process. Each year, for a few major national policy objectives, the full portfolio of spending, tax provisions and other policies addressed to each goal would be compared with alternative strategies that use resources very differently. The aim would be to find a new strategy to achieve a better result at lower cost. This approach could identify breakthrough gains in the productive use of resources. Budget savings could be reinvested in the same or other policy priorities that promise higher long-term returns.

Strengthen the congressional budget committees, making them leadership committees that take a bigger role in shaping budget priorities and directing the work of other panels

The legislation enacted in 1974 that created today’s congressional budget process was a compromise that limited the ability of the new budget committees to shape a coherent budget resolution and enforce its targets and priorities. As a result, the process has been used only erratically and to limited effect.

To make Congress an effective partner with the president in shaping budget priorities, the House and Senate budget committees must have a stronger role in shaping budgets and directing the work of other committees. If they are reconstituted as leadership committees—including the chairs of the appropriations and tax-writing committees—they can become a forum for negotiating the outlines of the budget at the beginning of the process, giving specific policy instruction to other committees.

Establish a multi-year budget framework and process with annual targets for budget savings and investment consistent with fiscal sustainability

One great weakness of the current budget process is its myopia. The nation cannot meet its long-term commitments and invest in future economic growth if its focus is only short-term and fails to align spending with expected revenues.

To stabilize its fiscal future and promote long-term economic growth, the federal government should budget within a multi-year framework with enforceable targets for savings consistent with long-term fiscal sustainability. The multi-year framework would include annual targets for budget savings and investment that put the budget on a trajectory toward sustainability.

Budget for tax expenditures and mandatory programs by regularly reviewing them and including tax expenditures in revenue and spending totals

The largest programs (including the major entitlements) and tax expenditures (provisions of the tax code that function much like spending programs) are not subject to the same scrutiny, regular review or degree of control as are discretionary (annually appropriated) programs.

The process should be revised to put all parts of the budget on the table and to ensure regular reviews of tax expenditures and mandatory spending. Tax expenditures should be added to both revenue and spending totals to more accurately represent the true size of the budget. Consideration should be given to the best way of controlling or capping the growth of so-called mandatory spending programs, as is done in many other countries, while providing flexibility to meet growth caps without harm to vulnerable recipients.

Revisit the use of budget concepts using a bipartisan process established by the president and Congress

Basic concepts used in constructing the federal budget are in disarray. The last comprehensive revision of basic concepts and their use was the 1967 President’s Commission on Budget Concepts. Seemingly dry and technical, decisions about the way the budget is organized and presented shape decisions and public understanding of how much money government raises and spends.

It is time to establish a new bipartisan process—including Congress—to review and recommend changes in the use of budget concepts. The agenda should include questions about the scope of the budget—why some programs are “on budget” and others are not, and why some federally sponsored entities are included and others are not. It also should include questions about how to define spending and revenue and ways of recording the economic impacts of government actions.

Because negotiation and compromise are the essentials of a healthy budget process, efforts to reach agreement on budget process reforms may contribute directly to the conditions for better budgeting. And, a stronger budget process is one precondition for realizing the promises of a new administration and Congress.

This article is part of a series of Memos to the President, highlighting advice from leading academics and practitioners in public administration for the incoming president and his team. The series was developed by the National Academy of Public Administration, the American Society of Public Administration and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Click here for more information and links to the full set of memos.

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Memos to the President: How to Run Government Effectively

Donald F. Kettl, Paul L. Posner, and Janice Lachance — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:20:32 -0500

Political campaigns are a time of promises. Transitions are a time of frantic preparation. And then, perhaps too soon, it’s time to govern. Governing is the hard work of turning promises into legislation, budgets, actions and results.

For the transition currently underway, the stakes are tremendously high. Large portions of the electorate say they are frustrated or disillusioned by what they see as the failure of governing institutions to deliver. Elected leaders have come to share this frustration. Indeed, while presidents have left positive legacies, recent administrations of both parties have experienced disheartening failures and shortfalls of execution ranging from disaster response during Hurricane Katrina to the crash of the Healthcare.gov website.

To help the incoming administration and Congress, the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society of Public Administration teamed up with George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government to commission a series of memos highlighting the best advice from leading academics and practitioners in public administration. A total of 25 Memos to National Leaders were published several weeks ago. They address five broad areas of policy and management:

Managing Government to Achieve National Objectives: What strategies should the president adopt to improve the central leadership of government programs and agencies?
Strengthening Policy Leadership and Follow Through: What are the most promising decision-making procedures and implementation approaches the next administration can use to effectively shape and follow through on its policy commitments?
Managing Across Boundaries to Achieve National Goals: How can the new administration develop new, effective strategies for policy and administrative collaboration across boundaries—between federal agencies, across levels of government, between government and the private and nonprofit sectors, and across global boundaries?
Sharpening the Tools of Government Action: How can government outcomes be achieved effectively when government relies on independent actors through financial, regulatory and contractual vehicles?
Increasing Government’s Capacity to Manage Complex Policy Issues: What unique policy design and management challenges are characteristic of the most important policy issues of our time?

The memos depict the clash between growing demands on government and institutional realities and constraints. While government has come under pressure to meet ever-higher expectations, it has become increasingly difficult to deliver on the promises made by its leaders. This is due in part to the growing complexity of government’s role. A government that once was focused on delivering the mail and collecting taxes is now challenged to rebuild the nation’s financial system, ensure safe drinking water and improve education across a diverse nation.

With increasing polarization of views among leaders and the public alike, consensus about the role of government itself has eroded. How can government agencies operate effectively when Congress and the White House, interest groups and clients are riven by conflicts over priorities and goals on such issues as climate change, education reform and tax administration? Moreover, agencies face an increasingly blame-seeking environment with a 24-hour news cycle, in which divided constituencies deploy weaponized social media to mobilize followers and dramatize differences. Such pressures tend to discourage the risk-taking and innovation many believe are necessary for government to improve performance.

As government’s role evolves, our reliance on nonfederal actors to implement national goals increases. We are now in the habit of uploading promises and downloading responsibility to states, localities, nonprofit organizations, private businesses and citizens. While such changes in the way government functions can enhance our collective capacity to achieve national objectives, they also complicate accountability. Delegating the task of governing to others does not relieve federal agencies or presidents of responsibility or blame.

In this environment, deep-seated policy implementation and management challenges require a long-term strategy to instill urgency and institute reforms to achieve ambitious and complex goals. While the media and public often view management problems as caused by short-term leadership or situational factors, in fact the failures of government programs typically stem from chronic and perennial shortfalls in management capacity, misaligned incentives, poor use of technology, and weak cross-sector collaboration—coupled with overly hyped goals and expectations.

Often these implementation challenges come to our attention in a crisis. At that point, they can deal a crippling blow to an administration. So it’s critical that management issues be addressed early in a president’s term.

The Memos to National Leaders aim to facilitate that process. Government Executive will publish several of them over the next few weeks:

Staffing the President’s Team, by James Pfiffner of George Mason University. Recommends ways to streamline and expedite the appointments process to satisfy the competing needs of the White House, federal agencies and Congress.

Human Resource Management and Public Service Motivation, edited by Paul Posner of George Mason University. Provides an agenda for enhancing human capital planning across government, with a focus on improving the talent pipeline and employee engagement.

Reforming the Federal Budget Process, by Steve Redburn and Paul Posner of George Mason University. Proposes approaches to reinvent the budget process to strengthen discipline, improve certainty and heighten focus on long-term fiscal outcomes.

Performance Accountability, Evidence and Improvement, by Shelley Metzenbaum and Robert Shea, leaders of governmentwide performance improvement efforts under Presidents Obama and Bush, respectively. Looks back at initiatives from recent administrations to promote reforms to better integrate performance data into the decision-making process in the executive branch and Congress.

Collaboration Across Boundaries, by Donald F. Kettl of the University of Maryland. Brings together what we have learned about how to promote greater collaboration across agencies, levels of government and sectors.

Strengthening Partnerships with State and Local Governments, by Barry Vanlare, formerly of the National Governors Association, and Timothy Conlan of George Mason University. Develops an agenda for generating closer relationships across levels of government in setting objectives and carrying out federal programs on the ground.

Improving the Role of Public-Private Partnerships, by John Donahue of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Reviews the experiences with public-private partnerships and harvests lessons learned about managing these initiatives to balance benefits and potential risks.

Procurement: Focusing on Performance and Results, by Steve Kelman, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Provides an agenda to improve accountability for performance under contracts, entailing greater use of pay-for-success models, more transparent information on pricing and more emphasis on post-award monitoring and assessment.

Infrastructure: Building a New Paradigm for Finance and Governance, by Mark Pisano of the University of Southern California and John Bartle of the University of Nebraska. Recommends new approaches to engage private business and beneficiaries in co-financing infrastructure, while building more collaborative partnerships with states and localities.

These memos chart strategies for tackling some of the most important issues that the new administration will face. Together, they provide a road map for renewing trust in government’s ability to deliver the services that citizens want and expect.

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The Painful Management Lessons From Five Presidencies

Paul L. Posner and Jonathan Breul — Tue, 12 May 2015 11:41:20 -0400

No one runs for president to run the government. But presidential legacies are in no small part formed by how an administration manages the federal enterprise and improves its collective capacity to address the public’s high expectations for their government. Failing to see that the laws and agencies are “faithfully executed” can lead to big trouble.

Good management doesn’t win elections, but bad management can ruin presidencies. To paraphrase Mario Cuomo, presidents may campaign in poetry, but they have to govern in prose.

President Obama, like his predecessors, has fallen victim to management problems, and overcoming those issues is necessary to salvaging the policy agenda. The painful lessons of Obama and his predecessors give a clear warning: Voters don’t reward good performance, but they fiercely punish bad management. For George Bush, the point at which his negatives exceeded his positives and never recovered was Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Likewise, Obama suffered with the launch of the Obamacare website in October 2013, which similarly struck in the fifth year of the administration.

The Bush’s and Obama’s problems were basically managerial. The managerial failures created a negative narrative into which other problems played and opponents relentlessly pursued. For Obama, they include the Internal Revenue Service, HealthCare.gov, the General Services Administration, the Veterans Affairs Department, the Secret Service and a list of other management mishaps.

A recent report by George Mason University’s Centers on the Public Service highlights conclusions from a forum featuring the leaders of management improvement efforts during the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. The forum was co-sponsored by Oliver Wyman, the National Academy of Public Administration and Public Financial Publication Inc.

Remarkably, there was considerable agreement among the former Office of Management and Budget deputy directors for management at the forum. They noted there had been significant progress across administrations in leading the management of the federal government, and they were aligned on the way forward. They agreed on three points:

There is greater need for every administration to establish a management framework. The growing range of federal programs has served to increase the stakes associated with federal programs while at the same time making implementation more demanding and complex.

OMB has be involved in establishing and implementing this management framework. Linkage with the budget helps ensure that agencies give presidential management initiatives serious attention.

Each administration should build on the management initiatives of prior administrations. While political platforms will differ, each administration nonetheless is held accountable for managing the complex federal enterprise and is blamed if problems occur on its watch. Managing government effectively and efficiency is a challenge that calls on common skills and wisdom by leaders regardless of their political brand.

Improving the management of government is a long-term challenge that requires dogged consistency across administrations to make sustainable progress. The next administration is sure to discard Obama’s performance labels, but his management agenda has a strong foundation that largely builds on prior administrations. A new administration should be forewarned to temper inclinations to foist new ideas on federal managers, with misplaced expectations for delivering a pot of savings at the end of the rainbow. Every administration comes into the White House thinking its performance improvement plans will save millions of dollars. But it turns out the only way to save significant amounts of money in government is to do less of government.

Candidates often believe a new president’s legacy depends on new programs or initiatives. It is the thankless job of implementing existing programs and operations well, however, that will ultimately determine the legacy of a president. Management improvement will not depend on creating the next “big idea,” but instead ton taking advantage of performance measures to implement and deliver the policies and programs that have already been hatched. Presidents get elected because of leadership; they succeed because of management. In the end, management failures end up hurting president’s ability to lead.

Jonathan Breul is a fellow of the National Academy Public Administration and executive director emeritus of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Paul L. Posner is director of the Public Administration program at George Mason University.

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Can Presidents Be Managers?

Paul L. Posner and Beryl A. Radin — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 09:00:00 -0500

In July, President Obama told his Cabinet that management of the federal government would take top priority during the remainder of his administration. The pattern is familiar—presidents run for office not to manage the government but to champion and create new policy. The first part of their presidency is preoccupied with marshaling support for broad policy agendas that served as the rallying cry for the political coalitions that got them nominated and elected. Having achieved electoral victories, they then proceed to get mugged by reality—bedeviled by a host of unanticipated management problems that never registered on the political radar screen.

Presidents who bask in the policy limelight are surprised and puzzled when their support erodes. While the line between campaigning and governing has blurred, most citizens grasp the difference when there is a failure to provide the most basic services they expect from federal agencies.

President Obama achieved policy victories in his first two years that, for the most part, public opinion ignores. The passage of national health reform after a nearly 100-year battle will stand as a lasting achievement for the ages. Financial regulatory reforms in the Dodd-Frank legislation may not have solved financial bubbles forever, but the regulation of financial institutions is on firmer footing than before. The Recovery Act, passed in the first month of Obama’s presidency, provided $800 billion in stimulus through spending and tax cuts that economists give credit for staunching the loss of jobs and helping save the economy from the ravages of a depression.

Yet the Obama administration has been victimized by a litany of management failures. More than 50 percent of Americans now say they question the management competence of the president. They point to the Veterans Affairs Department’s cover-up of failures to see patients in a timely manner, the IRS’ use of questionable criteria to ban certain groups from tax exempt status, the failures of the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (now the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management) to impose regulatory limits on oil companies--contibuting to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the widespread cheating on tests mandated under No Child Left Behind, and the botched rollout of health insurance exchanges across the country.

These kinds of problems are not unique to this administration. George W. Bush—the MBA president—followed a similar pattern. His early policy victories included tax cuts in 2001, No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug coverage, and the war against terror following the Sept. 11 attacks. In the wake of these policy initiatives, however, his administration became waylaid by all manner of management problems.

Multiple factors seem to explain this dilemma:

Federal programs increasingly draw ever higher levels of public expectations and media attention to federal bureaucracies and their programs. The victories expanding the federal role in addressing numerous problems come back to haunt the presidents engineering these policy expansions as well as their successors.
Flawed theories behind many programs cripple them at birth, consigning them to a future of implementation flaws and disappointments. Cheating on school tests under No Child Left Behind, for instance, illustrates what can happen when well-intentioned performance measures become the basis for meting out pay and sanctions for public agencies. While performance pay may work in the private sector, it usually fails in the public sector because many significant goals cannot be measured well.
Policy victories become hollow during implementation as scarce resources and the attention of top officials moves to other crises and away from systematic pursuit of successful management. The VA crisis is a case in point. The attention devoted to pursuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lacked the systematic follow-through needed to provide the agency with sufficient resources to care for the wave of seriously injured veterans needing care.
Simple efficiency requirements (such as time limits on decision-making) seem convincing at first glance, but they often lead to unanticipated negative consequences. Causes of the Deepwater oil spill were linked to requirements that MMS respond to oil company requests in a short period of time when federal employees know they don’t have enough time to conduct analyses for these requests.
Presidents gain more credit for policy victories than for management successes. The tax cuts and war on terror garnered significant success for Bush, while Obama gained credit at least from the left for health reform and bringing the economy back from the threshold of depression in 2012. Such credit, however, generally does not accrue for administering tax laws appropriately, providing timely and quality care to veterans and others, or even delivering Social Security checks on time.
Confusion over what management success means in the public sector. Much of what has been viewed as management is directly borrowed from the private sector, even though public goals are more conflicted and implementation chains involve many diverse players from state and local, nonprofit and private contractors. The goals of each agency and program often conflict. IRS must collect all revenue owed without burdening taxpayers or tax exempt groups in the process. The health insurance exchanges must guarantee access to all who are eligible without driving costs up or providers out. The balance between these conflicting goals and priorities shifts over time; when it does we often call these “management failures.” But often they are a result of second-guessing by a nation that has changed its collective view about what is important.

We wish there were a fix for these issues, but many of them are woven into the fabric of our governance system and its incentives.

Ironically in recent years, the growing presidential management portfolio has been accompanied by a corresponding growth in attention to management capacity. The White House Office of Management and Budget has fortified the “M” by recruiting a deputy director specifically for management. Financial, performance, information systems and human capital management have been bolstered by reform legislation and the appointment of chiefs responsible for those management functions at each federal agency. So, the president has some help from dedicated civil servants and appointees—he is not managing alone. But only the president can marshal the forces to achieve policy goals in a fragmented political system where power is diffused and shared among numerous federal, state, local and private organizations.

Deep-seated management challenges require an engaged White House to instill the urgency and institute the reforms needed to head off future Hurricane Katrina and VA scandals. Despite the crippling blow that such problems can deal to their administration, presidents are reluctant to make this investment of personal time and energy.

One modest change would be for media, punditry, academics and even White House staff to develop a perspective on public administration that acknowledges the complexity and contradictions within the American political system. Actually delivering on bold policy promises will require leaders and managers to take the unique challenges of delivering complex programs through a multilayered federal system seriously.

Let’s relieve ourselves of the myth that public management is like a machine—put your money in and get your services at the push of a button. Implementing complex programs is more aptly described as a new stage of politics and policymaking where the losers in the legislative fights often feel empowered by instant replay. Whether it be advancing infrastructure or collecting taxes, public management calls for more realistic expectations, effective partnerships with other sectors, and political investment by our elected officials.

Paul L. Posner is director of the Public Administration program at George Mason University and Beryl A. Radin is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

This story has been updated to reflect the renaming of the Minerals Management Service to the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management.

(Image via American Spirit/Shutterstock.com)

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Analysis: Pulling agencies back from the cliff

Paul L. Posner and Steve Redburn — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0500

Routine decisions on annual spending are consistently late, causing uncertainty and disruption across all sectors of the economy. Gridlock has left fiscal destabilization and governmental dysfunction in its wake. Congress has been unable to produce a budget resolution for seven of the past 15 years, while most federal agencies have learned to live with short term continuing resolutions. Large parts of the budget -- including the tax code and mandatory entitlements -- are on autopilot and receive no regular review. Any semblance of orderly, considered, annual review of spending and taxes has given way to ad hoc closed-door negotiations and brinksmanship. The results are disappointing, to put it mildly.

A series of new fiscal cliffs and crises in the coming months will test the seemingly infinite patience of federal managers as never before. The failure of the budget process is not the main cause of the fix the nation is in, but a well-designed set of reforms is essential to helping budget leaders and their successors sustain whatever agreements are reached in the coming weeks. There is precedent for enacting process improvements as part of a negotiated bipartisan budget agreement, and with good results.

It happened in 1990 with the Budget Enforcement Act. Many observers believe budget process improvements in the legislation were critical to sustainable savings, which later led to surpluses. The provisions included a “pay as you go” requirement for covering the cost of new spending mandates and tax cuts, as well as enforceable caps on annual appropriations. At a recent event reuniting participants in the 1990 budget summit, John Sununu, President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, attributed much of the decade’s fiscal success to the agreement. “With all due respect to my friend President Clinton and Newt Gingrich, who have been running around in recent years [taking credit] for having generated surpluses, I truly believe that the surpluses of the 1990s were generated by the agreement [on] the BEA, which required those budgets to make sure they did not spend more than they took in,” Sununu said.

Today, there is a fundamental mismatch between spending commitments and projected revenues, and a need to develop a strategic, disciplined and far-sighted approach to budget decisions. Much work has been done in recent years to identify the kinds of reform needed. The Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform produced an integrated set of proposals in 2010. The National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society of Public Administration recently published a set of recommendations, which we co-authored with others as members of the Memos to National Leaders project. The group also has endorsed best practices in other nations, including a multiyear budgeting cycle, recognition of costs as they accrue rather than when they must be paid, and legislated fiscal rules and targets.

What reforms are needed? Perhaps most important is to legislate targets for the federal debt as a proportion of the economy during the next few years that can be used to guide spending and tax decisions. This approach should replace the current debt ceiling, which imposes fiscal goals retrospectively by threatening to renounce payment for spending obligations already made. Long-term targets for entitlements also should be enacted to curb sources of fiscal instability for the nation.

The size of looming fiscal gaps will require the president and Congress to strengthen their budget institutions. A stronger process can expedite federal initiatives to reduce deficits or to bolster the economy during recession and to deal with other emergencies. Ideally, budget resolutions would become joint agreements that require the president’s buy-in up front. Public administration experts also recommend a budget formulation process that focuses on national missions and policy goals -- such as improving ground transportation, promoting good health and making higher education more affordable -- and that includes reviews of programs based on their contributions to the broad outcomes.

Whatever fiscal goals are developed, Congress needs to strengthen control of its committees to ensure fiscal progress. Budget committees should be given a broader leadership role with clout over other committees. Annual budget resolutions should include savings, investment and tax revenue mandates for related committees, and the reconciliation process should be used to move these changes through Congress.

These changes would not remove political obstacles to reaching agreement on difficult revenue and spending actions. There is no substitute for leadership and political courage. But well-designed reforms can help sustain hard-fought bipartisan agreements that will come under inevitable pressure in the future. It would be tragic if budget negotiators took big political risks to address the nation’s long-term fiscal challenges, only to see their work undone in the years ahead. It is critical for Congress and the Obama administration to incorporate a better budget process into whatever legislation emerges from the coming negotiations.

Steve Redburn, adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University-Australia and George Washington University, is former project director for the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform. Paul Posner is director of the Public Administration program at George Mason University and a consultant on national budgeting with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other institutions.

(Image via Torian/Shutterstock.com)

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Analysis: Winning Over Government Voters

Steven L. Katz and Paul L. Posner — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The new chief executive will have to campaign to first to win their votes, then their loyalty to motivate and engage them. In contrast with recent efforts by both parties to depict government and its employees as the problem, the successful campaign will have to acknowledge that it is vital for government to work, whether to save capitalism from itself during the current crisis or to move the nation to achieve its higher aspirations for education, health care and energy independence.

Winning the government vote means campaigning hard to win the votes of millions of federal, state and local government workers who, according to the Census Bureau, have among the highest voter registration and turnout percentages of all Americans -- between 70 percent and 80 percent. In the federal government alone, there are 1.9 million civilian employees (not counting postal workers). Despite campaign rhetoric against Washington, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nine of every 10 federal workers live or work outside Washington. And beyond that, Paul C. Light of New York University has estimated that the "true size of government" is more than 15 million strong, including not only civil servants at all levels of government, military service members and postal workers, but also state and local government employees working under federal grants, nonprofit organizations and private contractors.

Together this constitutes a voting bloc larger in number than the population of many cities across America, whose members have a firsthand knowledge and a personal stake in the manner and results of how the government is run.

These are the people the next president will lead in operating a trillion-dollar global public services organization that is at the center of American life to a greater degree than ever before -- managing the economy, wars, energy, the environment, health care, Social Security, homeland security, food safety and more. They are silent participants in the electoral process, because many of them are limited by the Hatch Act from participating in key aspects of political life -- including fund-raising or even wearing a campaign button at work.

Based on what we have seen from the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, several new strategies are central to winning the government vote necessary to reach the White House, and will be invaluable to leading from the Oval Office:

Establish and stress the importance of core values as president and chief executive that resonate with government voters.

Government voters do not want to hear and will not trust candidates' rhetoric about who is a bigger change agent. They want an honest and proactive discussion of how the next president will do the following:

Provide access to real-time working knowledge of government.
Identify key relationships across the branches of government.
Establish global partnerships.
Build from a foundation of what already exists in government.
Effectively use his experience and relationships on Capitol Hill to communicate and collaborate more effectively with Congress around core government functions and needs.

Refrain from bashing the government.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States government shifted immediately from the periphery of American life to its center. Both presidential nominees should have realized that this signaled two important changes for their 2008 campaigns.

Bashing the government is perceived by government voters as a negative and gratuitous attack on the very people and programs on whom America depends and who the new president must lead. Campaigning on the backs of government workers, only to lean on these same people to get the work done, is a strategy that undercuts the trust and support that a new president must win for the government to fulfill its myriad missions of public importance.

Since Sept. 11, Americans have taken the role of government more seriously and want it to act more proactively. As we have seen from the role of the Treasury Department in the recent economic bailout and the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, governmentnow is placing the federal workforce, including many new people we must hire, on the front lines of this crisis. The candidates must pledge to respect and work closely with government programs, and talk about them in real terms of what they contribute to the country.

Acknowledge that when bad politics happens to good government, the results are disastrous.

The next president will inherit a growing leadership gap between political appointees and experienced civil servants. To some extent this reflects a centralization of policy control in the White House during the past several decades, which isolates the president from his own appointees, as well as experts in the civil service. It reflects what Light calls the "thickening" of government -- the proliferation of political appointees in agencies that wall off the decision-making process from the input and influence of professionals and experts in government. At its worst, it can ensure the triumph of bad politics over good government.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others relied on their own self-fulfilling reasoning over that of career military and civil servants who had the experience and maturity to know better. The dismantling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the creation of the Homeland Security Department and the leadership of that agency by political appointees with no background in emergency preparedness preordained the inept response to Hurricane Katrina.

Even though both candidates have criticized the Bush administration, they must provide a clear view about what the executive branch can do, and underscore how government at the department and program levels can meet people's needs and protect their interests. Both candidates must emphasize their expectations of qualifications their political appointees will possess, and how they will be expected to work with experts and professionals in the agencies. It is time that we honored and re-energized the values of neutral competence in our government that Woodrow Wilson first espoused nearly 100 years ago.

Recognize the costs that must be paid to get the government we want.

Another version of bad politics happens when the president and Congress pledge to solve problems while providing only a symbolic glimmer of the resources required to achieve results. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is a case in point: Years of budget reductions and regulatory constraints left this thinly staffed agency a parody of what a real consumer protection agency should do. The ability of the Food and Drug Administration to monitor and inspect imported foods similarly has been compromised. We are only now learning how the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped the ball in regulating investment banks even after our trading partners in Europe implored the commission to regulate its transactions. The voluntary regulatory program left it up to the banks themselves to develop standards and to self-monitor. Not surprisingly, this never happened, leaving the entire nation and the world economy as victims.

It is tempting to promise more than we can deliver, particularly when the failures to do so only become evident on someone else's watch. The next president will have a difficult job. We have a backlog of problems that have accumulated on the federal government's doorstep, with ever more limited budgetary resources to solve them. Meanwhile, the financial crisis and economic recession exacerbate the structural budget deficit. The new president will have to be artful in making room for new priorities by making tough choices to re-examine, reform and cut back on programs that either are no longer relevant, fail to deliver on their promises or are increasingly unaffordable.

In no small respect, the federal government's ability to deliver on its promises and to provide the resources that managers need to achieve results will depend on our collective capacity to reform Social Security and Medicare, which are threatening to consume the entire federal budget during the next several decades. And ultimately, this president will have to do something that has proved to be anathema in our politics -- ask for higher taxes, by whatever language. Once the recession passes, it will become more apparent that our spending appetite has outpaced our revenue intake completely. If we fail to rebalance the budget, the current financial crisis will seem like a walk in the park.

Lead the management of government through collaboration, not shaming and blaming. The new president will be held responsible for nearly every major problem the nation faces and for the performance of the entire workforce -- both government employees and contractors. Thus it is not only appropriate but necessary that he provide energetic central leadership of agencies. Presidents Clinton and Bush each launched initiatives that focused more attention on the performance of the federal establishment. Given the growing importance of government in the daily lives of the nation, the next president should continue to spur agencies to measure performance, demand greater accountability for results and eliminate programs that fail to deliver. In doing so, however, it will be critical that the president work collaboratively both with agencies and Congress to gain support for management improvements and reforms. Strategies relying on shame alone to gain attention to problems may produce short-term gains, but will be undermined and ultimately ignored in the longer term.

Getting more value for taxpayer money is important, but it requires the entire federal community -- agencies, appropriations committees, and intergovernmental and private partners -- to be on the same page about how to define what public values will be measured, monitored and delivered. The No Child Left Behind Act is an example of a federal initiative to drive performance that became unhinged when government officials failed to bring the most important stakeholders on board in the collaborative enterprise of public education. More often than not, the federal government is a relatively minor player in the areas it is trying to influence, whether that emergency preparedness, health care delivery or housing finance. Accordingly, the new president must master the art of leading from behind and work to engage the many stakeholders whose support for reforms is critical to making real progress.

Demonstrate the value of experience as a senator to serving as chief executive.

Instead of each of the nominees pretending that he lives in a bubble in Washington and on Capitol Hill, both should demonstrate that they understand exactly why the public preferred them to gubernatorial candidates during the primary. It is because the public is reacting to the numerous problems facing the country. With the crumbling of economic cornerstones in the post-primary season and the necessity of government intervention, the public wants someone who is already on the ground in Washington.

In fact, both candidates are being given the extraordinary opportunity -- the benefit of the doubt -- to step into the role as president with virtually none of the scrutiny of their track records and competencies that would required of a prospective CEO. The public knows that as legislators, both nominees have been deliberators, not decision-makers. Voters also have learned from the four recent governors elected president -- Reagan, Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush -- that executive experience at lower levels of government does not guarantee capability as a federal chief executive.

Lead, compel and leverage people, programs and resources across government -- including federal and intergovernmental collaboration -- to solve problems.

The next president must reverse the old-fashioned hierarchical approach to tackling the nation's biggest problems, which tends to bury the government's ability to grasp, manage and attack problems deep in the bureaucracy. During the past 40 years, policy has been centralized increasingly in Washington, while the real responsibility for delivery remains at the state, local and private sector levels. While federal budgets and programs have grown, the number of civil servants actually has declined, reflecting a greater reliance on nonfederal agents to do the real heavy lifting of delivering on government promises. From the Medicaid mandates of the 1990s to No Child Left Behind, federal officials have fostered a yoke of rules and mandates where carrots and collaboration would have been more successful.

Whether the subject is terrorism, health care, housing, energy, the environment or obesity, the next president needs to emphasize leveraging people and resources across boundaries to attack and solve problems. It should be clearer today than ever before that government has to avoid creating any unnecessary new structures to solve problems before considering how this will affect the capacity of our entire system to cope. Ultimately, the president should to learn how to implement truly national, not federal, programs and policies. This entails developing policies not within tight inner circles in the White House, but collaboratively with the many players whose input and resources are vital for success. A reconstituted intergovernmental office would be a small, but potentially effective, way to institutionalize a commitment to collaboration. Trying to go it alone will get us nowhere.

Paul L. Posner is director of George Mason University's Public Administration program and president-elect of the American Society for Public Administration. Steven L. Katz is former counsel to Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, on the Governmental Affairs Committee, an adviser in the Clinton White House, and author of the book Lion Taming: Working Successfully With Leaders, Bosses and Other Tough Customers (Sourcebook Inc., 2004).

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