Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 23, 1994 TAG: 9409240004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Much of that difficulty is self-inflicted. (See "Whitewater" and "Dodges, artful.") It also reflects the temper of the times. (See "Public, grumpy mood of" and "Media, sensationalism in the.") And, the rise of anti-everything nihilism. (See "Limbaugh, Rush" and "Dole, Robert.")
But it's also because the successes have tended to come in areas where victories aren't won overnight - and where any chance of improvement has been written off for so long that signs of progress are unexpected and thus often missed.
Fiscal policy is one example: Growth in the deficit has been cut. Another example is fulfillment of the president's pledge to begin "reinventing" government, the current catch phrase for reforming the bureaucracy and bureaucratic procedures.
One year after Vice President Gore launched the National Performance Review, a study by the Brookings Institution has found that the initiative is making headway. But how many impatient Americans, accustomed to bureaucratic snafus rather than successes, notice such incremental improvements as, say, the Internal Revenue Service's success this past spring in reducing the average time for delivering tax refunds to below its goal of 40 days?
Like "total quality management" and "continuous improvement" initiatives in the private sector, the NPR aims not merely to save money, though reducing unneeded expenditures is part of it. It aims also to improve the quality of service.
Nor is the NPR trying to settle ideological differences. The point is to make as efficient as possible the operation of those things that Americans, through the political process, have instructed the government to undertake.
Though money savings and personnel cuts are not the whole of the NPR, they are the most readily visible goals. The plan projects savings of $100 billion through 1998 via such means as modernizing equipment, reducing internal regulations, simplifying procurement, improving debt collection and many other nuts-and-bolts reforms and updates.
For the NPR's first year, the federal fiscal year to end Sept. 30, savings from NPR reforms will be about $7 billion. Though slower than the $12.6 billion initially projected for the first year, it is movement in the right direction. NPR officials say the five-year goal has not changed.
And of the five-year savings, $40 billion is to come by eliminating 272,000 civilian federal jobs, or 12 percent of the work force - a goal, says the Brookings report, that is on target.
Since Clinton came to office, the federal civilian payroll has been shrunk by 85,000 jobs, to about 2.1 million. If the five-year goal is met, the federal bureaucracy will be the smallest since John Kennedy was president. When size of the total population is taken into account, federal civilian employment already is less than then.
But beware: Such advances can be easily sabotaged. The danger lurks not only in resistance from within the bureaucracy, but also from without, if a diverted public fails to pay attention to incremental improvements at the margins of government.
by CNB