Reform won’t stick without real goals
The mirror image of the "procedure fetish" is reform with no substantive end.
On the morning of September 7, 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore Jr. shared a lectern on the White House’s South Lawn flanked by two yellow forklifts, each groaning under the weight of thousands of pages of paper. Thousands more pages, in fat binders, were stacked on pallets next to the trucks. They were filled with rules governing the management of the federal government. After their speeches, Clinton and Gore — self-styled “New Democrats” — strolled around the columns of paper, marveling at all this evidence of waste and bloat.
Did U.S. Army cooks really need several pages of instructions for how to bake chocolate chip cookies? Did the Department of Commerce really need to use more taxpayer dollars purchasing a floppy disk than an ordinary American consumer would spend on the exact same item at Office Depot? Clinton and Gore’s answer was clear: Of course not.
The South Lawn spectacle on that fall morning three decades ago fêted the first report by Gore’s National Performance Review, popularly called “reinventing government.” Later rechristened the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, this initiative ultimately continued through Clinton’s departure from office. Its first administrative head, White House advisor Elaine C. Kamarck, pointed out two decades hence that it constituted the longest continuous “government reform” project in U.S. history.
Kamarck told Congress in 2013 that the initiative had, among other achievements: reduced the federal workforce by nearly half a million employees; shredded the “equivalent” of “640,000 pages of internal agency rules;” and eliminated wasteful expenses like Department of Agriculture subsidies for sheep and goat farmers (since reintroduced). Advocates of “reinventing government” including Gore and Kamarck — none of whom ever spent much time in the private sector — were keen to emphasize how their reforms made the federal state more businesslike or even “entrepreneurial,” an implicit claim that government was, ipso facto, ineffective and wasteful. But the litany of recent dysfunction recounted in Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America, and the declaration of Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that “it is crazy the extent to which we have clogged up our delivery,” suggest that despite its ambitions, Reinventing Government did not turn the aircraft carrier away from the rocks.
To understand why, we must not merely look at how Reinventing Government was implemented, as Kevin Hawickhorst and Gabe Menchaca ably explain. We need to understand the origins of the campaign within the project of reforming the Democratic Party in the 1980s. Government reform, I believe, ought to take shape as a method for achieving a positive policy goal. It should not comprise a political end in itself. By contrast, the Clinton-Gore initiative emerged as a political project unmoored from broader policy objectives. That is why its substantive results remain contested, and its electoral footprint is invisible. When politicians set “reform” as its own outcome, the effort will tend to focus purely on cuts or on mainly cosmetic fixes for small problems – or, conceivably, blend both into a bureaucratic farrago! Before embarking on institutional reform, policymakers need to very clearly define what it is they are optimizing government to do. Ideally, this should be an ambitious growth agenda.
In our own age, yet again “reinventing government” for its own sake, even if individual procedural reforms are salutary, will likely prove both politically and substantively perilous. Hubris and incompetence played no small role in the many blunders of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, but Elon Musk’s team was able to run so wild in part because DOGE suffered from a more extreme version of Reinventing Government’s problem: It was untethered from broader policy aims.
Less is Gore
Clinton and Gore borrowed the argot of “reinventing government” from an eponymous 1992 book coauthored by public policy consultant David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, former city manager of the tony Bay Area suburb of San Rafael. Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government explored how state and local governments were achieving results with fewer resources by adopting less rigid bureaucratic hierarchies, adopting new technology, and collaborating with the private sector. Osborne, who subsequently worked in Gore’s office, described his and Gaebler’s book as about “replacing large, centralized, command-and-control bureaucracies with … decentralized, entrepreneurial organizations … driven by competition and accountable to customers.” Existing public agencies were “Industrial-era,” unsuited to the new “postindustrial” knowledge economy. Osborne joined Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign as a policy advisor, where his and Gaebler’s calls to technologize bureaucracy and improve personnel management complemented a key Clinton interest: modernizing the workplace and upskilling workers along the lines suggested by the candidate’s old Rhodes Scholarship confrere Robert Reich.
As historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein describe in A Fabulous Failure (2023), the public-sector innovations Osborne and Gaebler chronicled arose from three successive and interlocking challenges: urban decay since the late-1960s, “tax revolts” modeled on California’s 1978 Proposition 13, and reductions in state and local funding by the Reagan administration. In other words, the long fiscal crisis battering American states and cities across the 1970s and 1980s necessitated governmental rethinks.
Critically, it was recognized that the most successful of these adaptations did not merely aim to manage austerity with abstract ideals of “efficiency.” Instead, they were anchored by a clear vision of desired social and economic outcomes. None other than David Osborne made this exact point just four years before he and Gaebler inspired Clinton and Gore. In Laboratories of Democracy (1988), Osborne profiled the efforts of six governors to do “more with less.” Some of the book’s subjects presided over states whose industrial economies had been hollowed out: Michigan’s James Blanchard and Massachusetts’s Michael Dukakis (both, like Clinton, avowed “New Liberals”); moderate Republican Richard Thornburgh in Pennsylvania; and center-left sweetheart Mario Cuomo in New York. The New Liberal governors firmly believed in high-technology “sunrise” industries. They sought to inject private-sector “performance standards” into more “entrepreneurial” public administration. As this efficiency jargon implies, these governors had true technocratic impulses. But they embedded them within broader efforts to use state governments to shape and manage growth — a leaner species of what is called “market-crafting” today. Indeed, efficiency-oriented government reform tended to take a backseat to the broader agenda.
For example, Massachusetts’ Dukakis talked a good game about apolitical technocratic management. Programs like the Bay State Skills Corporation (an existing agency focused on retraining) were, in Osborne’s words, “demand-driven”: They would only fund projects that private-sector businesses agreed to co-finance. Other measures seemed like classic government “efficiency;” for example, Dukakis contracted out some state tax-collection services. Such measures helped illustrate Dukakis’s political argument that he was not simply a “big government” Democrat (Time frostily dubbed this “liberalism on the cheap”).
But efficiency was secondary to the broader agenda. Dukakis channeled significant public resources into existing, and multiple new, agencies. These usually drew on outside expertise to help the Bay State get money to its people and businesses (Dukakis’ administration was stuffed with advisors from business and academia). A newfangled “public venture capital fund” offered early-stage loans, made equity investments, and brokered private funding for tech firms with long-term innovation potential. An industrial financing agency invested in infrastructure and funneled cash for modernization and technological upgrades into older industries. An existing “community development” agency was retooled to support housing development. Areas outside of affluent Boston, like the Berkshires or southeastern Massachusetts, received more funding later in Dukakis’ governorship. Osborne (who was scrupulously sober in his assessments and didn’t claim his governors got “everything” right) reported that Dukakis focused as much on trying to regionalize development and “redistribute growth” as he did on top-line economic numbers. In the 1980s, manufacturing employment gains in Massachusetts outpaced most of the country. The 1990-1991 recession struck New England hard; Massachusetts’s leading role in computing was largely ceded to Silicon Valley. But its innovation ecosystem — comingling government, business, and universities — inculcated first economic resurgence in the 1990s and then Massachusetts’s 21st-century global leadership in biotech and R&D.
Clinton, whose time as governor Osborne also wrote about in Laboratories of Democracy, tried to take notes. Clinton created several state agencies similar to those in Massachusetts and endeavored to cultivate a tech sector in a state that had historically lacked an industrial economy as sophisticated as those in the Northeast and Midwest. (Returning from a tech conference in 1989, one of Clinton’s aides cheerily reported that “someone in Manhattan had asked … if Arkansas was becoming ‘a little Boston.’”) And his efforts in Arkansas appeared to work in the short- to medium-term: By the mid-’80s, the state’s manufacturing jobs were increasing at 11 times the national rate.
Results among states, sometimes within states, varied. For instance, Pennsylvania — and especially Pittsburgh, the hometown of Governor Thornburgh, whom Osborne had profiled — is equally praised and criticized for its postindustrial record. But I believe the core insight of Osborne’s earlier book is that government reform needed to be in service of a broader agenda.
Fishing in the “mainstream”
What seems to have been lacking when Clinton and Gore decided to “reinvent” government from the White House was the joining-up of government reform with a positive vision akin to New Liberals’ earlier growth agenda. And the key fault for this lay with the Reinventing Government initiative’s biggest champions: the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
The DLC’s role in Reinventing Government was a microcosm of the Council’s agenda writ large. Popular narratives suggest that the DLC was the engine room of New Liberal politics. In reality, it brought together a variety of New Liberals in order to advance a particular electoral, political agenda — not a grand policy program. Its cofounder Al From described this as a “mainstream agenda” concerned with “values” like “responsibility” and “patriotism.” In one 1990 memo, From suggested backing away from “government clients, government workers, minorities and organized labor … whose values are hostile to those of middle America.” An uncomfortable truth for today’s Left is that From was onto something. Council members from Missouri’s economic-populist congressman Richard Gephardt to Arizona’s pro-business but environmentalist governor Bruce Babbitt (profiled in Laboratories of Democracy) won over middle-income, often suburban or exurban voters who might otherwise have been GOP-curious.
At the same time, the DLC’s narrowly political focus meant that Clinton found its policy cupboard a little bare once he entered the White House. Marquee DLC ideas like a national service program for America’s youth were occasionally handy for political ads but substantively inconsequential. And DLC staff leaders saw everything through a purely political lens, a point Lichtenstein and Stein illustrate in A Fabulous Failure. For instance, to Al From, a seismic internal budget debate over industrial policy v. deficit reduction (in which DLC figures played basically no role) was simply about Democrats’ “tax and spend image” — not long-term policy goals. Welfare reform, which ended up being highly consequential, interested From and DLC policy guru Bruce Reed mainly because it “demonstrates … willingness to break with old Democratic orthodoxy,” not because of precise policy details or aims for social programs themselves.
Popular narratives suggest that the DLC was the engine room of New Liberal politics. In reality, it brought together a variety of New Liberals in order to advance a particular electoral, political agenda — not a grand policy program.
The story was largely the same for Reinventing Government, which became, apart from welfare reform, the biggest policy the DLC pushed in the Clinton White House. The DLC recruited Osborne as an advisor, but when he went to work in the White House, the fuller picture so expertly limned in Laboratories of Democracy seemed to be left behind. The push by Vice President Gore (a DLC member long before Clinton) to “reinvent” government too often lapsed into messaging untethered from a clear agenda like “market-crafting” growth. Indeed, some of the NPR’s flashiest horror stories of government waste turned out to be wrong. Remember those overpriced Office Depot goodies? A Government Executive reporter soon uncovered evidence that the government had actually been paying less for them than had commercial buyers. As Gabe Menchaca and Kevin Hawickhorst demonstrate, the emphasis on demonstrative efficiency rather than policy outcomes led into a trap: Bureaucratic capacity was often hollowed out, but bureaucratic culture did not change.
When we ask how successful “reinventing government” was at the federal level, it is vital first to ask what motivated it and how these motivations shaped its goals. And would-be government reformers today should consider what it is they want a reformed government to achieve.
Rethinking “Reinventing Government”
Many state and local officials took up “reinventing government,” usually focused on performance management systems and performance-based budgeting. But in a 25th anniversary retrospective on the Reinventing Government initiative, Governing’s John Bunting noted sorrowfully that many of these systems wound up hardening into “just another stale compliance regime.” Mourned Bunting: “Despite a generation of reinvention, government is less trusted than ever before.”
The great flaw, I believe, is that setting measurable standards often wound up becoming more important than setting the right goals and achieving buy-in for them. “Reinventing” the state is too often construed in terms of procedures themselves, rather than what bold ideas the better procedures may instantiate. In this way, government reform à la Clinton-Gore risks becoming a sort of strange mirror image of modern liberalism’s “procedure fetish.” Put another way: The abundance movement has persuasively argued that today’s Democrats tend to try and “do too much” in policymaking. Equally, we should be wary of government reform efforts inverting this problem by doing too little. Democrats’ north star should be policy outcomes. They should design the most effective government mechanisms to attain them, but the north star should not be “efficiency” itself.
Reinventing Government, according to political scientist Paul Light, produced “a shell game” in which streamlining via job cuts as offset by “contract- and grant-generated jobs.” Did this improve American state capacity? The last two decades suggest that it did not. To repurpose the framework of Dan Wang’s new contribution to debates about state capacity, “abundance,” and America’s future: It is not necessarily enough to replace our “lawyerly society” with a new “engineering state.” (Who, incidentally, have been America’s only engineer presidents? Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.) What matters most of all is what we want to engineer.
Henry M. J. Tonks is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College. His academic research focuses on the transformation of American liberalism since the 1960s. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.
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