
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 28, 1993                   TAG: 9308280118
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BETTER U.S. GOVERNMENT?

The Clinton administration's plan to reinvent government would force agencies to compete with private companies for much of their work, increase the independence of agency heads and eliminate tens of thousands of federal managers.

A confidential 109-page draft of the plan obtained by Knight-Ridder Newspapers offers dozens of proposals, including promises that the U.S. Postal Service will deliver overnight local first-class mail, the IRS will pay tax refunds within 21 days and the Social Security Administration will answer its phones.

The so-called National Performance Review, being prepared under the direction of Vice President Al Gore, is expected to be unveiled Sept. 7, with detailed reports on individual agencies to follow daily.

Marla Romash, Gore's communications director, cautioned that the version of the plan obtained by Knight-Ridder was an "early draft." She said reform proposals had since been eliminated or modified and that many had been added.

In addition to a previously leaked proposal to merge the Drug Enforcement Administration into the FBI, the draft includes proposals to:

Hire private collection agencies to recover $241 billion in back taxes and other debts.

Lift limits on user fees in national parks and raise prices for government-provided food inspection, pollution measurement and waste-dumping permits.

Put the Labor Department in charge of 150 job training programs now handled by 14 departments and agencies.

Let airlines build and operate a private air-traffic control system. The carriers claim that the Federal Aviation Administration's outmoded system costs them $2 billion yearly.

Encourage private-sector competition against federal monopolies in such fields as government printing, real estate management, travel services, weather forecasting and secretarial support.

Cut the federal manager-to-worker ratio from 1-to-7 to 1-to-15 within five years through attrition, early retirements and buyouts.

Replace as many federal checks as possible with electronic funds transfers.

To reduce political sniping, the Clinton administration hopes to use a bipartisan commission to review the reform proposals. The commission then would offer them to Congress in a single package.

Most of the Gore panel's proposals are intended simply to make the government work better for less. Recent Republican presidents, by contrast, sought to reduce federal governance.

To many bureaucrats, the simplest suggestion in the draft plan will seem the most daring: Stop promoting those who "follow the rules, pass the buck, and keep their heads down." Start promoting innovative risk-takers "obsessed with their customers."

To help federal bureaucrats be more innovative, Gore's panel would jettison thousands of pages of personnel and procurement rules and cut back an army of auditors, budget examiners and inspectors that now costs $35 billion a year, according to the report.

Too much oversight has made most bureaucrats "afraid to deviate even slightly from standard operating procedure," the draft reasons. Instead, the administration wants civil servants to set clear performance goals and use ingenuity to attain them.

Just how much the federal government might save from the proposed reforms has not been determined.

The draft criticizes across-the-board personnel cuts, such as the 7 percent reduction in the federal bureaucracy that Clinton ordered upon taking office. The report says individual managers should decide the size of their staffs.

The draft report also opposes micro-management of the bureaucracy by budget examiners at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Clinton and other presidents have used OMB to manage the bureaucracy by its purse strings. The reform proposal argues that managers of agencies should control their own spending within overall budgets set by the administration.

If dry in substance, the Gore panel's draft is filled with lively rhetoric.

Gen. George Patton's management theory is quoted - "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what you want them to achieve and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." - and Babe Ruth's career is used to prove that "any organization that is not making mistakes is not trying hard enough."

After all, the drafters note, Ruth struck out 1,330 times.

by CNB