We’re at a special time, in the last few weeks of a close election, with unknown outcomes.
In general, we like to talk about our perceptions and experiences and, perhaps, discover things we can agree on. Since the election is thought to be close, we have an opportunity to step outside partisan drama and jointly explore what was, what is, and what might work better. As for me, I will be dreaming that whomever is elected might seek to reinvent reinventing government with some bipartisan involvement. At least I think both parties would be interested in improving government.
I promised Chelsea a few weeks ago that we would take up the topic of government reform. Many of us probably agree that Schedule F is a bad idea, but what would make sense? How about something like the NPR? Has the goal of “making the federal government more efficient, less expensive, and better able to deliver results” changed in any way?
What was your experience with NPR? I vaguely remember the idea of cutting out layers of middle management, which meant at one time that I had 14 direct reports. Which I thought was too many to for me to be a good supervisor. But others have told me that it wasn’t a problem for them. Or maybe that wasn’t really an idea from NPR.
If you recall the last time this was seriously considered across government was by a Democratic Administration in the 90’s. I don’t usually use AI summaries but this one seemed useful:
Vice President Al Gore led the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) to reform the federal government in the 1990s:
- Goal
Make the federal government more efficient, less expensive, and better able to deliver results
ResultsNPR led to significant changes, including:
- Consolidating over 800 agencies
- Saving $136 billion
- Reducing per capita government spending
- Making the federal government the smallest it had been since the Eisenhower administration
Eliminating over 100 programs and 250,000 jobs
- Consolidating over 800 agencies
- Methods
NPR used a variety of methods to achieve its goals, including:
- Organizing teams of experienced federal workers to examine agencies and issues
- Encouraging the use of technology
- Introducing performance measurements and customer satisfaction surveys
- Working with agencies to create one-stop websites for services like applying for loans and finding out about Social Security benefits
- Organizing teams of experienced federal workers to examine agencies and issues
I think the discussion might be informed, as usual, by us looking at what academics have to say and sharing our own experiences. Fortunately TSW readers have a range of experiences at different levels, in different agencies, in different Administrations.
Like most topics we deal with, there’s a bit of a gap between academics and those with experience. Agencies can be very, very different; have very, very different missions; very, very, different cultures, and so on, and so generalizing about “federal workers” is one of those abstractions that may not be helpful in any real place. So I think the idea of using “teams of experienced employees within the agencies” and perhaps… retirees.. was excellent.
Here’s a GAO report from 1999 that gave NPR mixed reviews:
https://www.gao.gov/products/ggd-99-120
The 90s was the decade of government tinkering – attributing any particular reinvention experience to any particular initiative might be difficult. For example, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993.
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/omb/gpra.html
And this stuff was was all happening during the waning but still potent TQM fad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management
A final ingredient in this arguably unsavory stew was the series of budget crises that partially paralyzed many agencies during the 1990s. The NPR initiative, established in 1993, assumed much greater salience after Gingrich became speaker of the house in the wake of 1994 elections. The first bill proposed by Gingrich’s Contract with America …
https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195385168/resources/chapter6/contract/america.pdf
… included a balanced budget amendment, and the new House majority came in with the intention of severely reducing the Clinton administration’s non-defense spending. If you didn’t work in DOD, demonstrating one’s reinventiveness (as it were) often became a game of bureaucratic survival.
Some good came of all this, but the effort : achievement ratio throughout the period was needlessly high. Later events, such as the disastrous Frankensteinian assembly of DHS would lead to major rethinks in how to make government work better – much of that thinking is summarized in the recent GAO publication Sharon sent around in an earlier post.
Thanks for all the links, Rich! It seems like perhaps the timeframe of an Admin (say one set of four years or even eight) encourages politicals to go for quick fixes, but real change takes time and a certain amount of consistent pressure over time. And then Congress keeps funding duplicative programs and efforts…
I think *time* is the key here. The most successful federal land managers I encountered (and here I’m talking mostly about FS and BLM) were
o in post for many years (at least 5)
o active members of the local community (it’s much harder to hate the person you see every week in church, or at the grocery, or the high school football game)
o familiar, at least to the 6th HUC level (google it kids) with the key resource management controversies on their district
o committed to managing public lands for all the public rather than a politically prioritized subset
o dedicated to implementing applicable federal laws, including those that the local barons opposed
I’m not sure I ever met a federal human (or, to be fair, any other human) that met all of these criteria, but the vast majority of feds met most.
So how to improve federal land management? I would start with a promotion mechanism that rewards the above attributes. And that means (among many other things) decoupling career advancement from assignments in DC. (This does not mean, in my view, relocating the WO – or its equivalent in your agency – to Grand Junction, a concept seldom equalled in foolishness.) It means growing the talent where the talent is. And. like it or not, with respect to public lands most of the talent is here, west of the 100th meridian.
But that takes time, and a lot of it. The bad news is that most presidential administrations don’t have it. The good (or ‘good’) news is that most administrations don’t care. I think that productive revisions to agency promotion career tracks could enhance the development of effective federal land managers in a manner that largely flies below the political radar. But maybe I’m just wishing for unicorns farting rainbows. I’d be very interested in the views on these matters of folks who have actually managed federal lands.
Rich, thanks for this. This also reminds me of Chief Thomas idea for technical specialists to be able to promote in place. At the same time, those of us who have lived and worked in different places often have different views than those whose only experience was in one place. For example, it seemed to me that cost of housing in California for awhile led to some Districts having very little new blood, when I worked in the Region. And whether an RO or an SO or a District, sometimes people who have been together for a long time with no ability to “get out” can develop some suboptimal interpersonal drama and conflicts.
I don’t know what the answer is, but if the idea is that the District is the key location where the FS serves the public, then organizational structure, personnel policies should reflect that.
We actually did that during Transformation (or whatever that one was called); our Region 2 Engineering figured out how much of their activities were in direct service to Districts and changed its organizational structure to reflect that, as far as I can remember.
I’m not sure why the imminent election would be “an opportunity to step outside partisan drama” regarding reforming government since partisan drama about “the swamp” is a key part of that picture. I’m only offering this other lesson learned (BLM headquarters move) because I saw it yesterday: https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-election-federal-agencies. At least some people view this as evidence of one party’s intent to be “disruptive” and “naked politicking” as opposed to any intent to “improve” government.
Because some of the concerns about swampiness have some validity, and when we dismiss them all because they are the concerns of the Wrong People, we have put the Bad Folks filter on and stopped listening. If the election is, in fact, close, that means to serve the American public, we need to consider the opinions of citizens who vote for different parties.
That is, we, here at TSW. Since we can’t depend on partisans of either party to do it.