Elaine Kamarck, Vice President Al Gore's outgoing senior policy adviser, says her greatest day in the White House was the day people told her the government had become too efficient.
"Three businessmen came to see me and what they wanted to do was complain about the government," Kamarck recalls. "They had all built businesses essentially based on the government's ineptitude, and suddenly the government had gotten good."
She says she couldn't even feign politeness.
"I said, 'You guys are making my day and if you think I'm going to do anything to help you, you're crazy.'"
For four years, Kamarck has been Gore's right hand on the reinventing government initiative, spearheading cost-saving measures in agencies and making customer service the primary mission of agencies. At the same time, some of the administration's initiatives have drawn fire, such as the "Citizenship USA" program, a 1996 INS effort to speed up the naturalization process that critics said was done for political reasons and allowed criminals to become citizens without background checks. Kamarck contends that the program was simply about boosting productivity in a poorly performing program.
In an interview with Government Executive, Kamarck, who is leaving to head up the "Visions of 21st Century Governance" project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, mused about the future of the movement she helped get off the ground.
Kamarck said politics will always have an effect on reinventors' ability to reform the government.
"You don't get 100 percent of what you set out to do because politics does interfere. But that's not a reason not to do it," Kamarck said. "In the public sector, because of the influence of politics, you're lucky if you get 50 percent [of what you set out to do] because you know you're going to lose some [battles]."
Kamarck noted, however, that much of the barriers to effective reform come not from Capitol Hill, but from within the executive branch itself.
"The law gets a bad rap. Congress, in fact, gets a bad rap. Much of what is bureaucratic red tape that causes inefficiency are self-inflicted wounds that the government has done to itself over the years," Kamarck said.
Kamarck predicted that agencies will continue to be forced to become more productive. Balanced budgets, coupled with a continuing demand for government services people have come to expect, will push the bureaucracy to improve its performance, she argued.
"This is an era that will be characterized by governments being measured on productivity terms," Kamarck said. "Productivity has been until very recently a foreign idea to people in public administration."
Kamarck added that it's important to separate those functions of government that can be subjected to productivity measures and those that can't. As an example, she cited the policy making arm of the State Department as an unmeasurable activity, while the department's passport office is a function that can adopt private sector business practices to improve its productivity.
"If you start to apply [productivity] willy-nilly to everything, it will fall of its own ridiculousness," Kamarck said.
Kamarck is not the administration's only reinvention guru opting to leave the federal government. John Koskinen, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, who has been the point man on the Government Performance and Results Act and other reform initiatives, is leaving Washington next month, and other key reinventors have left or are planning to leave. But Kamarck said the exodus does not signal the end of the reinvention movement.
In the second Clinton term, Kamarck said, "Reinvention ability is a major criteria in the selection of people throughout the sub-Cabinet."
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