Editor's Notebook

EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

Dear Readers:

During the last week in March, more than 500 federal officials gathered on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health to assess the progress of the government "reinvention" movement during the Clinton Administration. Government Executive was proud to be one of four hosts of the meeting, whose purpose was to wring lessons from the experience of the 225 reinvention "laboratories" agencies have created under the aegis of Vice President Gore's National Performance Review, and to chart future directions for the reinvention movement.

The conference showcased many examples of reinvention. Yet every success required heroic negotiation of bureaucratic hurdles, and for every success there seemed to have been a failure, or at least a good deal of frustration. As David Osborne, co-author of Reinventing Government (Addison-Wesley, 1992), told conferees, "there are many islands of innovation, but they are still operating in a sea of bureaucracy. And the Administration has not yet found the levers that will force the entire system to change in fundamental ways."

Gore acknowledged the problem in a keynote address, comparing the tenacious habits of the bureaucracy to The Blob, in the old horror movie of the same name, which "kept coming back" no matter how many times it seemed to have been slain. Gore cited an example: the government's effort to encourage use of credit cards for small purchases-a seemingly simple idea which has, however, been bureaucratized by agencies that "require a week of training, as if people had never used a VISA card" or make people "fill out endless reports when they use it."

Gore made news by announcing that the General Accounting Office had decided to eliminate timecards and sign-in sheets for federal workers, calling the practice that's still used in some agencies a "waste and indignity," and suggesting more reliance on computerized record-keeping. But here again, Gore admitted the limits of central decision-making, telling his audience that to make the change effective, they must "insist" within their own agencies "that it can be done."

Osborne observed that the NPR at the outset had focused the attention of "systems teams on the most important levers of change: budget systems, personnel systems, performance management and decentralization of authority throughout the federal government." But major change within such systems has not been achieved, except in procurement, where two new laws have been enacted since 1993. So the result, Osborne told his audience has been some change, but not enough. "The NPR produced enough change that people like you, who were ready to reinvent, felt you had support and permission to forge ahead. But there was not enough change to force the system to accommodate you, or to create a system that pushes every organization to reinvent."

The problem is that Congress stands in the way of systemic reforms of the kind achieved by the parliamentary governments of England and New Zealand. Congress at the moment is more interested in ruling on what the government does than how it does it. So long as that's true, federal reinventors will have to content themselves with making waves, but not tidal shifts, in the bureaucratic seas.

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