Horning In on Reform

EXECUTIVE MEMO

Horning In on Reform

fter a year-long series of hearings on federal management, Rep. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, has decided that Vice President Gore's National Performance Review has fallen short of its goal of reinventing government.

Last December, Horn issued a report, Making Government Work: Fulfilling the Mandate for Change, concluding that the management capacity of the president and the executive branch has progressively weakened over the last several administrations. The NPR, with its "ad hoc and episodic approach to management issues," is a sign of that weakened capacity, the report argues.

Horn says while career federal employees have a long record of faithfully executing policies, political appointees have been far less effective. In addition, he argues, intergovernmental roles are poorly defined, organization of federal functions is uneven and duplicative and public accountability of government is weak.

To solve these problems, the report contains a laundry list of recommendations, many of which have been included in previous studies by executive-branch commissions and management consultants. They include:

• Making management of the government a stronger presidential priority and making the President's staff more accountable to the public by establishing an inspector general's office in the Executive Office of the President.
• Creating a new Office of Management, which would include both the management functions currently residing in the Office of Management and Budget and certain policy and oversight functions of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration.
• Establishing a blue-ribbon commission to study executive branch reorganization.
• Cutting the number of political appointees to 2,000.
• Appropriating funds for professional education, training and development not as separate line items in agencies' budgets but as an integral part of total personnel costs.