Gorezilla Zaps the System

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The biggest lie in America, other than "The check is in the mail," is "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

The Pentagon calls its new weapon the Civil Servant. Reason: it won't work and can't be fired.

Did you hear the one about the clerk who needed a full week to fill out all the papers to comply with the requirements of the government's latest initiative, the Paperwork Reduction Act?

Jokes about the inefficiencies and convolutions of government bureaucracy are as American as, well, a crust-enclosed dessert filled with the fruit of deciduous Eurasian plants known as apple trees. The first two are gags that were probably old when Vice President Al Gore's father Albert Sr. was first elected to the Senate in 1952. Their antiquity indicates how deeply entrenched are the habits of bureaucratic bumbling, and the immense force of inertia that sustains them. The paperwork story was presented as fact by a Treasury Department worker sounding off at one of the "town-hall" meetings the Vice President has been holding with federal employees. It points to the failure of previous attempts to carry out the job President Clinton has given Gore: streamlining the bloated federal bureaucracy, loosening the straitjacket of its rigid rules and making it less maddening for citizens to deal with.

Nonetheless, Gore's task force this week will release a report, formally labeled the National Performance Review, that aims at nothing less than "reinventing government" -- the title of a best-selling 1992 book that the Vice President has adopted as his slogan. Gore's report will recommend sweeping changes in the way the federal bureaucracy draws up its budgets, organizes its departments and agencies, buys its equipment and supplies, even in its procedures for hiring, promoting and (gasp!) firing employees.

Then what? Well . . . not all that much, if one is to judge from the precedents set by the two Hoover commissions under Truman and Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter's zero-based budgeting plan, and the Grace Commission, which reported to Ronald Reagan. Some of these efforts did produce worthwhile reforms. But all were frustrated by the realities of the Washington power game. The savvy and iron-bottomed persistence of bureaucrats in protecting their turf is nothing short of awe inspiring. So is the jealousy with which Congress guards its power to spell out for government agencies, in the most niggling detail, what they may and may not do.

The White House, however, is at least giving Gore's report a splashier send- off than any of the previous overhaul efforts. Following Gore's press conference on Tuesday, Bill Clinton himself will hit the road to whoop up Gore's plans, with likely stops in Cleveland, Ohio, and Houston. The Administration plans some kind of publicity event on five of the six days after the conference, each probably featuring a horror story of inefficiency. Gore has compiled an extensive list, headed by the 10 pages of specifications for ashtrays -- or, as they are known to the government, "ash receivers, tobacco (desk type)."

The White House has reason to keep stoking up the pressure too. Clinton will trumpet the claim that Gore's recommended package will save $70 billion to $100 billion over five years, and will double to 200,000 the President's earlier projections on reducing the federal work force. That may be overoptimistic, but even considerably smaller savings might enable Clinton to hack his way out of a political tangle. The President has solemnly vowed to slice deeper into the federal deficit -- but how? The hairbreadth margins of his July budget victory indicate that further tax increases and deeper cuts in spending programs are politically undoable. Savings from streamlining the bureaucracy offer a feasible "third option" -- and there does not seem to be a fourth. Anyway, Clinton sold himself to the voters as a man who could make government work again.

As for the Vice President, this is his big chance to become more than "the other guy on the platform" at Clinton's speeches, as one of his aides puts it. To that end, Gore in the past six months has held 16 town-hall meetings around the country to hear federal employees bewail the silly rules they work % under and the money they fritter away. Gore has recruited a full-time staff of 200 mostly young aides (supplemented by about 800 part-timers from inside and outside government), who have torn into their job with remarkable zest. The atmosphere last week in their workshop, a second-story suite above a McDonald's restaurant, was reminiscent of a campaign headquarters days before election: young aides sat on the floor surrounded by piles of paper while phones rang constantly.

If nothing else, the Gore team has produced the most readable, at times almost breezily written, federal document in memory. Sample prose: "It is almost as if federal programs were designed not to work. In truth, few are 'designed' at all; the legislative process simply churns them out, one after another, year after year." Which leads into a penetrating analysis -- confirmed and supplemented by many other experts -- of just what is wrong with the government:

PARKINSONISM The tendency of government bureaucracies to grow inexorably larger led C. Northcote Parkinson to formulate his famous law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In the U.S. this tendency takes the form of an amoeba-like multiplication of departments and agencies. Is a department or agency obsolete (some are still operating under directives signed by President Theodore Roosevelt)? Create a new one to do some of the same jobs. Does a new problem arise? Set up another new agency. Says Robert Stone, the project director for Gore: "As a rule, virtually any task being done by government is being done by 20 or more agencies."

Which makes antipoverty efforts, by government standards, exceptionally efficient: only 11 different federal agencies and departments have a hand in administering 340-odd separate programs to aid families and children. Even so, a pregnant teenager who has a juvenile-offender record and is on welfare may have to deal with six caseworkers, each representing a different agency and no one able to deal with all her problems. Worse, they may operate under conflicting rules. A family receiving food stamps must not own a car worth more than $4,500 in market (that is, resale) value. But there is an exemption if the car is used for work or for training or transporting a disabled person. The same family, however, can qualify for cash help under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program only if the car is worth no more than $1,500 -- equity, not market, value, and no exemptions. Medicaid has a third set of + rules, under which the value of the car a family is allowed varies widely according to which particular category of assistance the family fits into.

RED TAPE In a misguided effort to head off waste, fraud and abuse, Congress and the Executive Branch enmesh operating personnel in endless spider webs of rules. Line-item budgets allow no flexibility in shifting money from one use to another. Two areas of one military base boasted well-maintained sidewalks, while in another area, personnel walked in mud because the base commander's budget contained money only for repairing sidewalks, not for building any. Government employees who need to travel must get approvals from many superiors and superiors' superiors, and then often have to deal with a single airline under contract to their agency; they cannot snap up a cut-fare offer from a competing line.

Purchase of the $200 billion of goods and services the feds buy every year is governed by rules that generally require centralized buying, in bulk, and after many approvals (an average of 23 signatures on each government printing order, by one calculation). That system may have had some advantages in the 1940s, but it is out of tune with modern markets. Buying a computer, for example, takes about a year for a desktop model, up to three years for a mainframe. Employees at Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Atlanta and many other government offices complain that their computers are usually obsolete by the time they are finally delivered. The government does not even do a good job of keeping track of what it has already purchased. In the Washington area alone, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy found $1 million worth of telephone jacks to which no telephones were connected. His department apparently had ordered and then forgotten them.

REWARDS FOR MEDIOCRITY The civil service system, set up in 1883, is a classic case of a reform that wiped out one evil only to replace it with another. Instead of filling government offices with political adherents of the party in power, it filled them with timeservers -- or at least that is a prominent view. Because of rigid rules for hiring, promotion, raises and dismissals, says Susanne Tompkins, vice president of the Massachussetts Taxpayers Foundation, the system in effect sets as its standard "mediocrity rather than merit."

Gore and many others insist that the vast majority of civil servants are competent and willing workers who are endlessly frustrated by the system. By ) making raises and promotions dependent almost entirely on seniority, the system rewards those who timidly follow the rules and gives no incentive to creativity. Managers have no way to reward outstanding work: a brilliant chemist, for example, who has reached the top of the pay scale in her classification can be given a further raise only if she is promoted to a supervisory position -- and that would take her away from her test tubes and retorts. A civil servant usually can be fired only for the grossest incompetence or insubordination, and the process takes about a year. Many a manager grits his teeth and suffers a goof-off in silence.

What to do? For one thing, Gore will recommend, and Clinton will no doubt order, that some government departments try to measure how well they do their jobs. That so screamingly obvious a step should have to be commanded from the Oval Office in itself speaks volumes about the federal mind-set. But it is a fact that many Executive agencies are so obsessed with following the rules and staying within their budget that they never try to measure how well -- or if -- they serve the public. Gore and Clinton will insist that they commit themselves to specific performance standards and will suggest some -- for instance, that the Postal Service guarantee overnight delivery of all first- class local mail. Good idea -- but how to make sure such goals are met?

Gore's crew is likely to recommend consolidation of many agencies -- though the first such idea to leak, blending the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, got a cold reception from both. Budget reforms are a major focus: the National Performance Review will recommend that Congress draw up budgets for two years at a time, that it give federal managers more authority to shift money from one account to another, and that it allow agencies to keep at least half of any money they save out of a fiscal year's budget. At present, if an agency spends less than its budget allows, it must return the money saved to the Treasury, and its appropriation for the following year will be reduced. Result: each September, federal departments and agencies scramble to spend every last penny of their budgets before a new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, a process that undoubtedly wastes billions.

Gore will also present ideas for cutting red tape. There is, for instance, talk of issuing a government credit card that managers and employees could use to purchase laptop computers, airline trips or whatever locally, without going through the General Services Administration. Finally, the National Performance Review will urge personnel reforms. Among them: allow more raises and promotions within a job classification; and, yes, simplify and accelerate the firing process.

All well and good -- but will anything in fact be done? Some of the reforms can be accomplished by presidential directive or by departments and agencies acting on their own -- though it will take insistent prodding to get them to move. The most important recommendations, however, especially budgeting and civil service reforms, can be enacted only by Congress. And Congress, to put it mildly, will not relish the idea of diluting its power to dictate how every cent of federal money is spent or its ability to micromanage Executive-agency operations. Unions are far more powerful in the government than in the private economy; they represent only 16% of all civilian workers but 60% of federal employees. Their leaders express willingness to consider changes in hiring, promotion and firing rules but will resist any layoffs.

On the other hand, the pressures for reform are stronger than ever. Gore's team cites polls showing that only 20% of Americans trust the Federal Government to do the right thing most of the time, vs. 76% three decades ago, and that the average American today believes 48 cents of every tax dollar is wasted.

No one expects Gore or Clinton to reinvent government overnight. Virtually all experts think the Vice President's presentation this week will be, at best, the opening gun in a war that must be prosecuted relentlessly for many years to show any substantial success. And even over the long run, it is always risky to bet against the forces of inertia and obstructionism, especially when they are led by some of the world's most accomplished heel draggers. But perhaps Gore can shorten the odds a bit.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington, with other bureaus