Federal executives need to spend less time developing policy and more time running their agencies' programs, the Clinton Administration's budget chief said Monday.
Speaking at the Reinvention Revolution Conference in Washington, Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines called on government leaders to devote attention to management problems. He said agency leaders are too consumed with creating and defending policy proposals and budget plans.
"We have a disproportionate amount of time spent on policymaking," Raines said. He added that agencies' efforts to comply with the Government Performance and Results Act, under which they must develop performance measures, may also be pulling executives' time away from the day-to-day management of programs. "We seem to be focused on policy and measurement, without much attention to performance," said Raines.
A majority of senior federal executives do not agree with Raines, according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and National Journal. Fifty-one percent of SESers said they spend too much time doing administrative tasks, and 58 percent said they have too little time for policy planning, the poll of 151 SESers, released last week, found.
Raines trumpeted the Federal Emergency Management Agency as an example of an agency focused on management. FEMA was long decried as a bastion of bureaucracy and mismanagement, Raines said, until its director, James Lee Witt, and other FEMA executives decided to clean up the agency. FEMA improved its operations--and its image--not by issuing new policies, but by better managing existing policies, Raines said.
Often, poor-performing agencies must explain their weak performance to OMB while simultaneously asking the agency to approve budget increases. But when Raines saw that Witt and FEMA were committed to good management, OMB responded by approving FEMA initiatives.
Raines said he has told OMB staffers to "defer to high-performing executives and agencies."
Raines suggested that federal executives should execute existing policies before writing new ones. But he noted that many policies Congress creates become executives'--and citizens'--nightmares. For example, this year's capital gains section of the 1040 tax form, Schedule D, which has confused millions of taxpayers and made extra work for IRS employees, was revised by Congress last year.
Similarly, when Congress created Medicare, doctors were wary of being involved in the program. So Congress created a reimbursement system that paid doctors quickly. Since the first goal was to get payments out fast, people should not be surprised that as much as 30 percent of all Medicare payments were erroneous, Raines said.
Raines said he hopes both executives and politicians start emphasizing management.
"The best politics is good government, and the best government is good performance," Raines said.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., in his regular press briefing on Monday, echoed Raines' concerns.
"We should have more oversight and investigative-type hearings in the Senate, not less. I think we pass too much legislation and don't spend enough time in oversight and investigations as to how these programs and these bills that we've passed, these laws that are signed into law, are actually working," Lott said.
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