Vice President Al Gore kindly sent us a copy of his newest book on reinventing government, and all I can say is, it will be a long time until "good enough for government work" turns into a compliment.
"Common Sense Government — Works Better & Costs Less" is as dreadfully earnest as the man himself (not that I suppose he actually wrote it). It's the third report of the National Performance Review, started in 1993, and it's chockfull of charming anecdotes about wonderful public servants who figured out a way to do their government work better.
Of course that's not a bad thing. No one I know of is in favor of "works worse and costs more," from government or anywhere else. But most of the hard questions concern whether a particular task should be done by government at all, and those questions scarcely rate a mention in Gore's gee-whiz tract.
One poster child is Bill Freeman, area director for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in Maine. OSHA is "perhaps the most thoroughly disliked of all federal agencies," as the report concedes, but by golly Freeman is reinventing it and the 600 people who came to listen to his speech are really truly grateful.
"As Freeman concludes his remarks" Gore gushes, "all 600 rise to their feet in a single motion. They do not boo him. They do not stone him. They cheer loudly, applaud enthusiastically."
What Freeman did, and given the ineffectiveness of most OSHA regulations, it's an improvement, was stop playing "Gotcha!" with the companies he was supposedly regulating and let them comply with the law by drawing up a safety plan that meets the law's objectives.
Safety teams in participating firms "are identifying — and fixing — 14 times more hazards than OSHA's inspectors ever could have found, including hazards for which the agency didn't even have regulations."
And one employer says, "We spent 18 years under the old OSHA program and nothing happened."
So far, so good; but the next question is, what is OSHA now doing that the companies need to do but couldn't do for themselves? Lawsuits and insurance costs are strong motivations for companies to be attentive to worker safety.
Well, it's handing out posters.
"Even inspections are changing," the report brags. "It used to be that any employer who didn't have an OSHA compliance poster on the wall immediately got slapped with a $400 fine; now inspectors carry posters with them when they visit and help employers put them up."
How do people write such stuff with a straight face?
The report takes so much pride in the fact that 16,000 pages of federal regulations have been scrapped that it cites it four separate times. But that still leaves tens of thousands of pages in effect, and it does nothing to make whole all the people who spent their time and money complying with rules that served no purpose, or those who were fined or jailed for failing to comply.
The report also says, twice, that one of the things eliminated was the 10,000 page Federal Personnel Manual, but not whether that counts as part of the 16,000 pages for which it is so eager to take credit.
The aim of all this effort is to restore Americans' trust in their government, but also to save money. Savings "in the bag" (imagine a cute little drawing of a money sack) are already $58 billion in two years, with more to come. Fine, except that's only about 3 percent of the federal budget, scarcely more than small change in comparison with the kind of downsizing that private industry has done in recent years.
Furthermore, the impulse to write impenetrable bureaucratese evidently dies hard. The notes to Appendix D say, "Savings are calculated using the current services baseline approach. They include mandatory as well as discretionary savings and revenue increases. For Treasury, savings include $1 billion in revenues resulting from debt collection reform."
I think that means the National Performance Review is patting itself on the back not only for spending less but for collecting more, and that's not what I call "saving money."
Even the way the enterprise is carried out sounds like government as usual. The president has issued 30 directives, Congress has held more than 120 hearings, agencies have created nearly 200 "reinvention labs" and 400 labor-management partnerships with their unions, and are closing more than 2,000 field offices.
Are you feeling better yet?
The reasons for this overgrowth of rules are remarkably simple, the report says, with an odd footnote attributing the statement to a New Yorker article by Michael Kelly.
"As a matter of political philosophy, we moved away from limited government toward an activist government that we expected to serve as both a national 'nanny' and a national police officer."
Now that does sound like the authentic Al Gore, who seems to believe in Uncle Sam as Mary Poppins, but he is not speaking for me and I wish he would stop including me in his first person pronouns.
The government's new assumption, Gore says, is that if you tell people what needs to be done and let get on with doing it the results are better than if you tell them how. That's only half right. Government won't really be reinvented until it stops thinking it knows better than individuals what needs to be done.