New book calls reinvention a waste of time

Career civil servants would most likely have few qualms with one of the main premises of You Won--Now What?, a new book about government: Elected officials and political appointees, not bureaucrats, are the problem with American government. But they may not agree with the book's other central conclusion: that efforts to reinvent government operations are doomed to failure.

Public servants used to being bashed by politicians will no doubt enjoy seeing authors Taegan D. Goddard and Christopher Riback turn the tables and take elected officials to task for their lack of management expertise and tendency to pass the blame for wasteful government to bureaucrats.

"The real problem is that many newly elected and appointed officials have little relevant previous experience ... many new public officials have little interest in managing their agencies ... many of our public officials drift aimlessly and never complete what they promised. Some barely get started ... Full of frustration, these public officials then try to reinvent government ... What these new public officials really must reinvent is themselves," Goddard and Riback argue.

But Goddard and Riback also contend that the philosophy of government reinvention, under which thousands of federal employees have been laboring for five years, has been a big waste of time.

The authors attempt to debunk Reinventing Government, the 1992 book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, which served as the basis for many of the Clinton administration's reinvention efforts. Reinventing Government explained how public administrators could adapt private sector management techniques to run government agencies. The 1992 tome also argued that government's systems, not the people who work in them, are the problem.

Goddard and Riback say reinvention is just another in a long line of management fads, doomed to fail because it doesn't address the real problem with government, which is, the authors contend, incompetent government officials.

"Public sector management fads--from reinventing to reengineering to downsizing--are not merely unhelpful; they hurt government," the book says. "Each time some poor public official holds up one of these plans as the magic tonic to save government, people believe. And each time they're disappointed."