To defeat the bureaucracy, embrace bureaucracy
Reinventing Government succeeded where it forced a chance in practice; neither inspiration nor job cuts proved transformational.
The pink slips have been flying in Washington of late. The Trump administration has axed civil servants by the tens of thousands, and the country is tuned in: Journalists cover it, citizens protest it, and judges are ruling on it. In response, observers are looking back to the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, which similarly cut the federal workforce.
Current commentary has focused on the blow those personnel reductions dealt to bureaucratic capacity. But this story overlooks the fact that Reinventing Government was a comprehensive effort to revitalize the federal bureaucracy; the layoffs were just one part. The full history of Reinventing Government’s civil service overhaul offers broader lessons in what makes government reforms either take root or fade away under later administrations.
Reinventing Government — at the time the most ambitious federal reform effort since the 1940s — sought a more dynamic and entrepreneurial government. In civil service reform, as in other issues, it shunned hierarchy and commands, instead aiming to inspire the bureaucracy. While this approach led to short-term successes, the effort only left a lasting mark through its institutional reforms. The initiative claimed to break with bureaucracy as usual, but the lasting reforms were those that embraced bureaucracy.
Reforming government reform
Presidentially sponsored government reform efforts like Reinventing Government have a long pedigree, running from the Theodore Roosevelt administration to DOGE today. The improvements that these efforts sought ranged from modernizing government technology to streamlining procedures for hiring and firing bureaucrats. For most of the 20th century, these efforts aimed to strengthen top-down management of the bureaucracy, perhaps most successfully in the Hoover Commission of 1947–1949, which, among other efforts, advocated for giving Cabinet secretaries greater power over their agencies’ budgets, personnel, and internal organization.
Reinventing Government was another such effort, but it rejected this managerial orthodoxy as a relic, declaring that the main problem was “industrial-era bureaucracies in an information age.” Like past efforts, it aimed to speed up hiring and modernize government technology. But unlike previous reforms, Reinventing Government was inspired by the perceived failures of top-down management. It drew upon contemporary management styles such as Total Quality Management and the Reengineering movement, which aimed to flatten hierarchies to move faster. Above all, it was inspired by (and named after) the book Reinventing Government by journalist David Osborne and city manager Ted Gaebler. This collection of stories of entrepreneurial local government was a favorite of Bill Clinton’s, whose 1992 campaign included promises to bring the same approach to the federal leviathan.
Following Clinton’s victory, Vice President Al Gore took on Reinventing Government — formally the National Performance Review (NPR) — as his signature initiative. NPR alumnus Morley Winograd told me that Gore got the job by process of elimination — healthcare reform was First Lady Hillary Clinton’s issue, and welfare reform was reserved for the president himself, leaving government reinvention available for Gore. In March 1993, Gore was given six months to review the government’s performance and offer proposals for improvement. He carried out his job with gusto and convened roughly 250 career civil servants to study government procedures such as budgeting, as well as individual government agencies. When he and his team reached the September deadline, they presented their main report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, which was bolstered by 38 accompanying reports. The administration then moved from research to implementation, which lasted until the end of Clinton’s second term.
One main pillar of Reinventing Government was personnel reform, where it aimed to “redefine accountability in terms of results” through decentralization, deregulation, flexibility, and delegated authority. It pursued these goals through four main lines:
giving agencies flexibility in personnel procedure;
offering training and awards to employees to inspire better performance;
judging government managers on outcomes;
and laying off central staff to lock in this new culture.
Streamlining procedure
Reinventing Government attacked cumbersome personnel procedures that its leadership viewed as impeding agency flexibility. For instance, the Department of Agriculture’s HR procedures weighed literally half a ton when printed out. The reformers declared that HR offices must instead henceforth “assume the primary role of consultant, providing expert advice and assistance, not acting as an obstacle to progress.” Accordingly, they reformed the governmentwide personnel requirements that they saw as rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions.
The federal government had a single standardized form for job applications, SF-171, an eight-page document that took eight hours to complete on average. Much worse was the Federal Personnel Manual from the Office of Personnel Management, which set HR policies for the entire government. The 10,000-page tome was notoriously complex — the guidance for merely handling notices of personnel actions took 900 pages. As if this weren’t enough, individual agencies added their own additional requirements.
Reinventing Government pared back centralized solutions so that agencies could craft simplified procedures tailor-made for their unique needs. SF-171 was eliminated, allowing agencies to accept resumes. Meanwhile, the Federal Personnel Manual was condensed into a tidy 350-page OPM handbook. NPR officials even made a show of tossing the unlamented Federal Personnel Manual into a dump truck. Gore and company hoped they had ushered in a new era of flexibility.
Over the longer term, the outcome was positive but limited: red tape had been cut, but the hoped-for benefits were mainly unrealized. Replacing the incomprehensible Federal Personnel Manual with a streamlined handbook was an impressive accomplishment—but agencies mainly didn’t use the flexibility it offered. Meanwhile, the complex SF-171 was replaced by equally complex formats for federal resumes. Agencies still followed the old way of doing things and the Office of Personnel Management still distrusted innovative proposals. Reinventing Government’s improvements had focused on eliminating bad procedures instead of creating better procedures, whereas system change would have required training agencies on their new flexibility and demanding that they use it.
Awards and training
NPR’s second personnel initiative was creating new awards and training to promote government innovation. The reformers believed that bureaucratic culture was stymied by the risk-averse oversight that their report called a “theater of the absurd.” To combat this risk-averse culture, NPR aimed to teach entrepreneurialism and highlight government successes.
To that end, Reinventing Government created the “hammer awards,” jokingly named after a notorious (if mythological) symbol of government waste, a $400 hammer purchased by the Pentagon. Hammer awards recognized government teams that streamlined bureaucracy, saved money, or delivered better service to the public. More than 1,200 teams received this award, which consisted of a hammer, ribbon, and note from Vice President Gore. One bureaucrat, for instance, reformed the permitting process for building fish ladders over dams, cutting one and a half years off the average approval time.
This investment in bureaucrats was also seen at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI), which trained top career government officials. Since its founding in 1968, FEI had mainly featured academics who lectured on constitutional law and civics. Clinton appointed the first director with a business background, Barbara Kester, who revamped the curriculum by bringing in lecturers from local government and business who taught a can-do attitude. FEI took its own medicine: It began offering online education and, for the first time, began measuring the impact of its training. Kester had been pleased to conclude, for instance, that an Army reform proposal — crafted at an FEI training session during her tenure — had saved $387,000.
But despite saving money and briefly changing agency culture, the reforms didn’t last under the next administration, which had different priorities. Following 9/11, federal training under President Bush was swiftly refocused on improving interagency cooperation, which might have prevented the tragedy. The Clinton administration’s Hammer awards were closely associated with the defeated Gore and were discontinued. These reforms were only the administration’s pet projects and, as they were never institutionalized, didn’t last.
Performance bonuses
The third personnel initiative was focusing top government managers on results by tying their bonuses to agency performance targets. Agencies had traditionally ignored results in favor of outdated and frequently meaningless procedures. NPR’s deputy director John Kamensky told me of his amusement at discovering, for instance, that one agency maintained a travel reimbursement policy that still included stabling a horse.
The administration attempted to reorient agencies towards results by setting customer service standards and negotiating performance agreements with them. Working with Congress, the administration codified this approach in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, which it then invested significant effort into implementing. As part of this effort, the administration made the bonuses of members of the Senior Executive Service—the top government managers—depend upon hitting the law’s targets, as well as upon improving public and employee satisfaction.
Tying bonuses to Performance and Results Act goals had been intended to get agencies invested in the law’s success, and by the end of the Clinton administration it was fully implemented. Moreover, its implementation was continued and even expanded by the succeeding Bush administration, which went so far as to rearrange seats at meetings to move high-performing agencies closer to the president. Today, while SES bonuses are no longer necessarily tied strictly to agency performance targets, the Government Performance and Results Act is well established. The law, in turn, codified useful new tools for presidential management and congressional oversight — so it lasted.
Government downsizing
A final personnel initiative was, famously, reducing the federal workforce. The elimination of 426,000 positions — mainly in back-office roles such as procurement — was intended to lock in flexibility by eliminating the staff viewed as imposing burdensome procedures. This measure was controversial, with internal disagreement about whether publicly committing to workforce downsizing would capture the public imagination or prove to be a damaging gimmick. It all might have gone differently: David Osborne told me that Gore made the final call after more than 24 hours without sleep. He decided in favor of downsizing. The main report accordingly called for slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs.
To accomplish this, the administration established the President’s Management Council, in which the deputy heads of agencies jointly set managerial priorities and shared best practices. This council’s first major task was implementing the job cuts. The deputy directors discussed best practices for identifying redundant positions and shared progress updates. They then used their knowledge for congressional outreach and, as the council’s first public initiative, won legislative approval for workforce reductions.
These workforce reductions were accomplished mainly through voluntary buyouts: Employees would be paid a bonus to resign, which they would repay if they accepted federal employment again. Congress granted the authority for these buyouts in three statutes from 1994 to 1996. The great majority of workforce reduction was accomplished via these buyouts (and ordinary attrition), with merely 25,000 employees being laid off.
Although the cuts were intended to lock in Reinventing Government’s flexibility reforms by eliminating the central bureaucracy that rigidity had wrought, they instead hollowed out the government’s capacity. In the short run, the downsizing eliminated the talent that agencies needed to capitalize on their newfound flexibility. The long-term consequences were much worse: In the succeeding Bush administration, the War on Terror demanded complex acquisition programs that the government could no longer competently handle, thereby empowering contractors at the expense of government.
This initiative ultimately was a double-edged sword. As commentators today note, the workforce reduction, despite being the signature initiative of Reinventing Government, was in many respects the least successful. And it was a lasting failure, because it was written into law in the buyout statutes. However, these commentators overlook the initiative’s underappreciated success: The President’s Management Council was continued by succeeding administrations and played a major role in improving management. Ironically, the machinery created to implement the layoffs was more successful than the layoffs themselves, which never led to the intended cultural changes. Institutionalized change was what lasted.
Reform in the eras of grunge and DOGE
On the whole, these four personnel initiatives gave the U.S. a hard-charging bureaucracy during the Clinton administration. They shared a common mindset: that inspirational leadership and the removal of perceived obstacles would lead to lasting cultural change. But these hopes were dashed. By contrast, institutional changes —new laws, new regulations, new organizations, and yes — new vacuums of capacity—were Reinventing Government’s lasting impact.
This history should inform the work of reformers who once again aim to reshape the bureaucracy. DOGE, unlike Reinventing Government, is focused on spending and personnel cuts above all else. It should nonetheless heed the lessons of the Clinton years. DOGE is similarly unlikely to change the bureaucracy’s culture through its personnel cuts (which, unlike with Reinventing Government, have not even been written into law). Instead, lasting impact will require new laws and regulations, and a commitment to implementing them well. The Trump administration has, for instance, issued personnel reforms that attracted bipartisan praise, and is rewriting government acquisition procedure. However, experience suggests that unless agencies are compelled to use this improved procedure, these reforms will go nowhere. DOGE and any successors will only defeat the bureaucracy by embracing bureaucracy.
Today, with decades of hindsight, Reinventing Government shows that far-reaching change is possible, but it is only achieved by examining the guts of bureaucracy. So why didn’t Clinton’s reformers focus more on institutions? In a sense, they did; had Gore won the narrow 2000 election, a further eight years of reinvention might have led to these reforms taking root. As it happened, under the Bush administration, the War on Terror led to totally new priorities for the bureaucracy, causing reform efforts to be abandoned that might otherwise have continued. If history had gone differently, their approach might have succeeded institutionally.
But this qualified defense doesn’t change a basic truth: The very unpredictability of the future is one of the strongest arguments for locking down reforms. Even observers at the time criticized Reinventing Government’s disregard for institutions. Ultimately, the effort was a product of the 1990s — more comfortable with stories of corporate transformation than with government personnel manuals. And yet, it still led to reforms that help the government succeed today.
Looking back on the era of reform he inspired, David Osborne noted, “It was very much of the time.” But Reinventing Government’s influence endures because it sometimes rose above its time.
Kevin Hawickhorst is a Policy Analyst at the Foundation for American Innovation.
 | A guest post by
|