Al Gore was Right

ice President Al Gore has long argued that ordinary Americans favor a government that works better and costs less. It turns out that he is right. Americans have never wanted a federal workforce as big as its mission, but neither do they want a mission as small as the federal workforce.

The proof is in a 1997 survey conducted by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The Pew Center asked 1,762 randomly selected respondents to answer two questions about government reform: (1) whether they generally believed that federal programs should be cut back greatly to reduce the power of government, or that federal programs should be maintained to deal with important problems, and (2) whether they personally felt that the bigger problem was that government has the wrong priorities or that government has the right priorities but runs programs inefficiently.

The two questions create four very different views of government reform:

• Devolverswho believe that government has the wrong priorities and ought to be cut back;
• Realigners who believe that government has the wrong priorities, too, but that its programs should be maintained;
• Downsizerswho believe that government has the right priorities, but ought to be cut back to improve efficiency; and
• Reinventors who believe that government programs should be maintained and that inefficiency is the bigger problem today.

The devolvers and reinventors could not be more different. Devolvers believe the federal government needs major reform, have unfavorable views of federal departments and agencies, believe that anything run by the federal government is likely to be wasteful, and rate the ethical and moral practices of government officials as fair or poor. In contrast, reinventors like almost everything about the federal government. They see a federal role in almost every aspect of American life; are more confident about Congress, elected officials in general and government workers; and are more forgiving when government makes mistakes. Only 15 percent of devolvers said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time, compared with 54 percent of reinventors.

Luckily for Gore, the reinventors outnumbered the devolvers in the Pew sample by a margin of two-and-a-half to one (39 percent compared with 16 percent). Add in those who believe government has the right priorities but should be cut back, and Gore's reinventing campaign had the backing of 61 percent of the Pew respondents. It also has the backing of the nation's political and elected leaders. According to a parallel Pew survey of 330 members of Congress, presidential appointees and career senior executives, the reinventors outnumbered the devolvers by almost eight to one (46 percent compared with just 6 percent).