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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 8, 1995                   TAG: 9503080052
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GURU'S ADVICE

WHEN IT comes to reinventing government, says management guru Peter Drucker, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have it right. Incremental reform, the Democrats' answer, is not enough. Indiscriminate downsizing, the Republicans' answer, only makes bad situations worse.

The right answer, according to Drucker in the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly, is genuinely fundamental restructuring. This entails not only abandonment of activities that no longer (or never were) necessary or productive, but also improvement and sometimes expansion of productive activities that work well. The remaining 30 to 40 percent in between, where it's hard to tell what's wrong, requires intelligent analysis and, if possible, more information.

Some of Drucker's examples:

nMission accomplished: the Veterans Affairs system of hospitals and nursing homes system. Accredited hospitals are no longer scarce in small towns and rural areas. Today, the VA should contract the work out to local hospitals and health-maintenance organizations

Still needed, and worth improving and perhaps expanding: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Safety in the work place remains an essential mission. But because we now know that behavior is the chief cause of work-related injuries and illness, OSHA should be refocused on eliminating unsafe behavior rather than unsafe working environments - even if it means expanding the agency.

Unproductive in general, but with just enough occasional successes to merit a few controlled experiments to try to find out what's wrong: the welfare system.

Unproductive anywhere, so ready for the scrap heap: peacetime military aid to foreign countries.

Not working but impossible to dislodge, so don't waste effort trying: the war on drugs, because it's a moral crusade. "What lies behind it," says Drucker, "is not logic but outrage."

In our view, Drucker gives the Clinton administration's reinvention efforts too little credit: Improvements so far may be low-hanging fruit, but nobody's picked it before. Surely he's correct, though, in arguing that the public hungers as much for more effective government as for less government - and that a few scraps won't be enough to satisfy the appetite.

by CNB