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

DATE: THURSDAY, May 10, 1990                   TAG: 9005100494
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STUDIES, STUDIES

RONALD REAGAN often claimed that by turning some responsibilities over to the private sector, the federal government could reduce its spending by $7 billion a year. In his second year as president, the Office of Management and Budget directed federal departments and agencies to examine certain of their tasks to see if private contractors couldn't do them better.

What happened to those studies?

The Senate Budget Committee finds that some of them still are going on. A number have continued for so long that their cost outruns their savings.

At the Pentagon, more than 1,700 people are permanently assigned to do the efficiency studies. Their findings have resulted in savings of from $27 million to $136 million a year.

Meantime, the studies themselves have cost between $150 million and $300 million a year.

It seems to take an especially long time to find anything out at the Defense Department. As of January 1989, it had 940 studies under way. Of those, 411 had been in progress six years or more.

Overall, according to OMB, the efficiency studies launched by President Reagan have saved $843 million a year. That's about 0.0008 percent of a federal budget now topping $1 trillion.

Some people think of waste and fraud almost as if they were a line item that could be excised from the budget.

In Reagan's case, reverence for the workings of the private sector blinded him to the waste, fraud and inefficiency that also exist there. Government is not per se the problem, nor does the marketplace always hold the solution.

Still, Reagan deserves credit for at least trying to find categories within government where a different approach might save money.

He wasn't the first, nor will he be the last, to find that a government so huge has a way of co-opting such efforts and turning them to its own uses. Bureaucracy in the worst sense is an organization whose chief interest is not in serving others, but in preserving itself.

If only they could make efficiency studies more efficient . . . .

by CNB