The Clinton Administration on Tuesday ordered federal agency heads to make it easier for employees and managers to get waivers from internal rules, Vice President Al Gore announced Tuesday at the Reinvention Revolution Conference.
In a memorandum to department and agency chiefs, President Clinton ordered agencies to develop systems through which employees can request waivers to bypass stifling rules that slow down the employees' work. Under Clinton's new guidelines, waiver requests must be approved or denied within 30 days. Only an agency head can deny a waiver request. If the waiver requests are not acted upon within 30 days, the employees who requested the waivers can assume that their requests have been approved.
"We need to do more to free up front line workers from the burdensome rules and regulations that tie their hands down and stop the flow of their ideas," Gore told conference attendees, adding that the memorandum takes "a very important further action to increase the use of waivers to expedite innovation and to improve customer service. With this action to streamline waivers, we will open up the floodgates of reinvention all over the federal government."
Gore highlighted an internal waiver approved for the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's Tort Claims Adjudication Team. By getting a waiver from agency rules, the group, which handles citizens' complaints against the government, reduced the processing time for tort claims of less than $2,500 from an average of 51 days to an average of eight days. Gore's reinvention team, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, bestowed a Hammer Award upon the team Tuesday at the conference.
Deborah Redpath, a Minneapolis-based claims specialist with the inspection service, said her job is much easier now that some of the rules that slowed down the claims process have been lifted.
"I'm not afraid to talk to my customers anymore when they call and say, 'Where's my money?' " Redpath said.
Gore also noted that the Coast Guard has granted waivers to its field commanders that cut 500,000 work-hours a year.
The waiver announcement and the Hammer Award ceremony were part of Gore's Town Hall Meeting with federal government reinventors at the conference in Washington. Gore told the audience that his focus on reinvention is still strong five years into the initiative.
"My interest and enthusiasm is not waning and I don't think it's waning on the part of federal employees," Gore said, adding that his reinvention team is trying to "focus the whole process on results, and get the American people involved in the process."
Asked what would happen to reinvention if Gore is not elected president in 2000, the Vice President joked: "It's way too early to think about--I mean, it's 631 days. But who's counting."
"We're trying to institutionalize the reinvention process through the Government Performance and Results Act," and other laws, Gore added. "We're making a lot of progress toward institutionalizing the process. But changing the culture of the workplace is the most important thing of all."
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