The ghosts of government reform
The Clinton administration spent 8 years "Reinventing Government," but we still have the same problems. Can we learn how to solve them for good?
It is a truism that the solutions of one generation become the problems of the next. But sometimes, reformers in the present rediscover problems that their predecessors never solved, only sent into abeyance.
“The federal government is filled with good people trapped in bad systems. When we blame the people and impose more controls, we make the systems worse. No one would offer a drowning man a drink of water.”
Those are, slightly out of order, the evocative lines the Clinton administration used 31 years ago to introduce its ambitious government-reform initiative, known as Reinventing Government. It is a diagnosis that parallels almost exactly what abundance-oriented thinkers like my Niskanen Center colleague Jen Pahlka offer today. Just as Pahlka does, the authors of Reinventing Government noted the specter of auditors ready to snap at any violation of procedure. As they grimly concluded: “Federal employees quickly learn that common sense is risky — and creativity is downright dangerous … Those who dare to innovate do so quietly.”
That raises an uncomfortable question. As my colleague Gabe Menchaca puts it: “If the federal government figured this out 30 years ago, why are we still in the same place?” This issue of Hypertext aims to answer that question, excavating the project of Reinventing Government for lessons we can apply today.
- puts Reinventing Government in the broad context of American debates over how bureaucracy should interact with democracy. She warns that neither the Trump administration nor the abundance movement have adequately grappled with some enduring questions.
- argues that Reinventing Government went wrong by turning headcount reductions into a goal rather than one measure of progress — and that the Trump administration has made the same mistake.
- offers a more balanced view of Reinventing Government, noting that some of its enduring changes were for the good — but that its efforts to transform bureaucratic culture did not last.
- says Reinventing Government went wrong because it turned work that at the state level had been focused on policy outcomes into a federal project framed mostly in political terms.
And to conclude, Menchaca argues that Democrats’ great error in the Obama and Biden administrations was to fool themselves into thinking they could manage around government dysfunction rather than work with Congress to tackle it head-on — a mistake they cannot afford to repeat.
One answer to why Reinventing Government failed is that its authors misunderstood the problem, or preferred not to understand it. In this view, the problem is not that good civil servants are trapped in bad systems. It is that civil servants constitute a “deep state” that undermines elected officials and does the bidding of an unaccountable elite. Whatever the merits of this position, the second Trump administration has advanced a breathtakingly extreme version of it. In the words of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administration’s mission is to rescue us from a “postconstitutional” order and from “the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.”
If that is the world we live in, then the best we can do is slash government to the bare minimum and bludgeon civil servants into obeying the commands of their political superiors, making expertise conditioned on loyalty. That counsel of despair won’t get us a high-performing government, but it will restore electoral accountability, save us a few bucks in taxes, and allow the economy to rip — at least until investors realize they no longer have the statistics, macroeconomic stability, emergency services, disease surveillance, and other public goods that make business tick.
Another answer to the question of why Reinventing Government fell short is that the problem of bureaucratic reform is hard. That means it requires not only brilliance at building organizations but also sustained political commitment. Such a political commitment must grow out of a vision of how bureaucracy can enable democracy and be anchored by substantive policy goals. Believers in that vision must then be relentless and willing to absorb costs in order to advance it over the long term.
How long? We could date the Progressive Era from the 1880s through the 1920s – a 40-year stretch that was followed by even more sweeping changes with the New Deal. Reinventing Government may have been the start of something, not the end. As early as 1994, its authors appreciated the size of the challenge we face today: “As the Industrial Era has given way to the Information Age, institutions — both public and private — have come face to face with obsolescence.”
It’s time to stare back, study the lessons of history, and start again.
David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.