Editor's Notebook

EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

Dear Readers:

During years of practicing the journalistic trade in Washington, I have often turned to the Office of Management and Budget as a source of wisdom and institutional memory about government's business. There were capable people, willing to educate reporters like me, among the political ranks: Bowman Cutter and Suzanne Woolsey during the Carter Administration, for instance, James E. Miller III and Richard Darman during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, and Alice Rivlin and John Koskinen among Clinton appointees. And there were many experts in the career service-such as David Mathiesen, Jim Tozzi and Barbara Krimgold-who knew the agencies and their budgeting tactics and were able to place the latest political twists from the White House or Congress in the context of history.

So I listened with interest when Alan Balutis, a Commerce Department executive and fellow member of the American Society for Public Administration , suggested that we give the annual ASPA-Government Executive Leadership Award to OMB's James B. MacRae Jr. I knew MacRae had been at the center of OMB's highest-profile management activity, the effort to curb the zeal of the government's huge regulatory apparatus. Though the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in which he worked made waves and headlines in Congress and the press from time to time, MacRae himself had, in the best tradition of OMB, kept a pretty low public profile over the years. Yet he was considered a giant in the field of regulatory oversight by Boyden Gray, who was himself an energetic deregulator as White House counsel to Bush for 12 years.

The awards committee chose MacRae, and thus we laid plans to carry a profile of him this month (see p. 54). During an interview in our office, I was once more impressed by the wry, dispassionate take on life in government that often characterizes senior OMB officials. Despite his years in OMB, MacRae has little faith in centralized efforts to improve the management of agencies and programs. OMB can have some influence over agency budgets, but "I'm not sure you can do much in terms of management practice at OMB-influencing management policy," he says. "Lord knows, Darman tried. And all these things, even the [Government Performance and Results Act of 1993], I don't think there's much to it. Well-intentioned, but I don't think it's going to mean much."

MacRae is equally skeptical of the National Performance Review. The NPR's drive to shift responsibility to lower levels of the bureaucracy is commendable, he says, but "the problem is, on top of that, you come along and say, 'Oh, by the way, we're also downsizing.' You're not going to get people taking a hell of a lot more responsibility for their actions if they're scrambling around just trying to hold onto their jobs."

There spoke a voice of experience and candor in the tradition of OMB, from which MacRae retired early this year. It's unfortunate the government is losing people like MacRae who are, in their mid-50s, still vital and intellectually engaged. He exemplifies the kind of career leadership for which the Government Executive award was created. When he accepts it at an ASPA conference on April 16, MacRae might be seen as symbolizing the passing into retirement of a generation that was schooled in the late 1950s and early '60s, came to government in the expansionist Kennedy-Johnson era, and served their nation well in times both favorable and unfavorable toward government.

--Timothy B. Clark
Editor and Publisher, Government Executive