For three reasons, many conservatives welcomed the advent of Bill Clinton. To begin with, they greeted the new administration as a kind of national emetic. Appalled by the Bush jaundice, they recalled how the Carter years had purged us of bad humors. The Reagan tax plan was prepared in those years, in a Democratic Congress. The Reagan defense policy was foreshadowed in the Harold Brown Pentagon. Carter proved to be a wonderful set up man. Under him, liberals got distemper, and conservatives got well. That is his legacy.
Then too conservatives looked forward to what President Bill would say. Maybe he would, like President Jimmy, wring his hand in public as he discovered that his kind of government does not work. Or maybe he would actually go around talking conservative, about how government is too big, taxes too high, and only the military can do anything right. He did talk something like that in the campaign, which helped to prove that conservatives had "won the war of ideas" and "changed the debate forever."
Finally, conservatives were not too sad to see Clinton come in because they so looked forward to his going out, promptly and by acclamation. After that conservatives would have a real majority, and they would have the chance to use it without the distractions of the Cold War.
This optimism is so far partially vindicated. In a wave of elections at the local, state, and federal levels, Republicans have been sweeping into office. A number of Republican governors, mayors, lieutenant governors, U.S. and state senators, assemblymen and local representatives have lately won seats. In several states both houses and the governorship belong to the GOP, and most everywhere candidates distance themselves from the president or lose. Vouchers are coming to Jersey City. Gay rights are on the run. A property rights movement is growing at the grass roots, especially in the South and Northwest. People of color in big cities have voted for white Republicans. We may be on track for a big win.
Before we consign the Clintons to the death that Carter died, we should however note some important differences between them. Both were southern governors, given no chance to win the presidency in the early going, and elected on anti-Washington themes. Only Clinton seems to understand what this means.
Clinton is formidable politically for many reasons. They begin with his appreciation of the first fact of public opinion today, its disaffection with government. Each of his major domestic initiatives begins with an assurance that this is not business as usual. His economic plan recites the White House jobs he has cut, the executive dining rooms he has closed, and the limousines he has cancelled. He describes Washington as a city of "intrigue and calculation." His faith in God, which he avows often, serves for him and for "each of us—President, Vice President, Senator, Congressman, General, Justice—as a source of humility. To remember that, as Bishop Sheen said, we are all sinners." We are all sinners, but in Clinton's rhetoric the politicians are the sinners who get called by name.
Clinton is striving to remain apart from the system while commanding it. In this he reveals a deeper political understanding not only more than that of Jimmy Carter, but also George Bush's, who looked and acted what he was, a member of the establishment: A brave soldier, a good husband and father, a dutiful citizen, Bush managed to conceal these qualities behind a remoteness that seemed at one time cold, the next insensible, the third weak or stupid. He did not know, as Lincoln knew, the importance of the common touch. George Washington was revered almost as a monarch, but he assumed the simple title of Mr. President. Even Churchill, the grandson of a Duke and offered the same title for himself, knew that only a commoner could rule a democratic people. This knowledge is essential to representative politics, and never more so than now, when the government itself is mistrusted deeply by those who have the right if not the means to control it.
The depth of the Clintons' appreciation of this point is apparent nowhere more than in Al Gore's exercise in reinventing government. Although the document, entitled the National Performance Review (hereafter NPR), was prepared by Gore, it was announced by the president himself and received by him with full ceremony. Several writers have greeted the NPR as an empty promise. More likely it marks a path that the Clinton administration will faithfully tread.
The NPR identifies itself with the most powerful movement in American business today. Led by Michael Hammer and James Champy, authors of Reengineering the Corporation, a generation of scholars, consultants, and managers are guiding industry in a relentless transformation. This transformation is made both necessary and possible by the combined influence of technology—above all computers—and competition. It seeks to locate and destroy every activity in the business that does not contribute tangibly to serving customers. In this process, no activity is seen as neutral: whatever does not serve the mission is the enemy. Everywhere businesses are adopting flatter structures, reducing their logistical tail—and eliminating jobs. This process is both urgent and painful. Even—or especially—companies that are doing well operate in constant apprehension for their survival.
The NPR adopts this tone for its own and applies it to that most wasteful, privileged, and protected of sectors—the federal government and its official legions. The NPR regales the reader with stories of agencies forbidden and commanded to do the same things at the same time, of money scattered to the four winds, of bureaucrats moving at the pace of semi-molten lead. Spiced with quotations from General Patton and Werner von Braun, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Tom Peters and Peter Drucker, NPR actually makes fair reading. It has some fun at the expense of the system, and then with earnest and upbeat tones it promises to fix it.
Several grudging writers have anointed this report as the one good thing (or, with NAFTA, one of the two good things) the Clintons have done in their first year. They contrast it with the tax increase and the health care plan, and they find contradiction. They claim either that the NPR is window dressing or that the Clintons are confused or schizophrenic. Neither is true.
In fact, the NPR is cut from the same cloth as the Health Security Plan. Like that plan, the NPR calls for changes that will expand the reach of the government and farther remove it from public control. Like that plan, it will treat the disease by introducing more of the virus that brought it on.
But how can it be bad? The NPR promises to cut civilian, non-postal staff by 12 percent, which it claims would bring it under two million for the first time since 1967. It promises to streamline procedures and to increase local control. It promises to save $108 billion over five years (about 1.5 percent of federal expenditures per year). Meanwhile, everybody will be happier: taxpayers, because they save; taxgetters, because they get treated like "customers"; and government workers, because they become part of a lean, mean system where everyone works really hard and gets to make plenty of decisions—for the public good, of course.
One can hardly help being charmed by this. Some parts of it sound very like the great speech that Ronald Reagan gave in 1964 that turned him into a politician and a presidential contender at the same time. But it soon parts company with the Reagan line, although it never troubles itself to admit the fact. The problem with NPR begins with its method and ends with its scope. Here is how Al Gore describes the method in the "Preface":
We organized a team of experienced federal employees from all corners of the government—a marked change from past efforts, which relied on outsiders. We turned to the people who know government best—who know what works, what doesn't, and how things ought to be changed.
NPR is then a document prepared by "insiders." This time they system will be fixed by those who work in it. The standards of business are everywhere appealed to in this document. Leading business men are quoted in it frequently. But its foundation is laid by the people who staff the existing system. The result of this method is predictable. NPR is a manual for liberating the bureaucracy:
Federal managers read the same books and attend the same conferences as private sector managers. They know what good management looks like. They just can't put it into practice—because they face constraints few managers in the private sector could imagine.
The "constraints" that federal managers face are graphically detailed in the report. Forestry workers have separate budgets for each activity they undertake: one for burning brush, another for mending fences, a third for building fences. Their budgets are "divided in to 557 management codes and 1,769 accounting lines," and they cannot make the simplest transfers from one line to the other. Navy auto repair centers must get parts from a central supply center, and delays of weeks are common. Vehicles are therefore out of service for long periods, which means that the Navy must buy 10 percent more vehicles than it actually needs. NPR unfolds a long and sorry tale of false economy, contradictory rules, and thwarted effort.
The solution to this problem is generally, in NPR, to set the civil servants free form the constraints that hamper them. For example the inspectors general, created to prevent abuse in the bureaucracy, will now focus upon a new task. In addition to assuring that rules are followed, they will now consult with the bureaucracies they monitor to help them make their work more effective. Unless new staff are added, this job will detract from the old one, which was given to the inspectors because of a certain problem.
We can see the nature of this problem by considering an example in the NPR itself related by Vice President Gore. Federal marshals are allowed to seize the homes of drug dealers they apprehend and "use the money to finance the war on drugs." How they maintain the houses, while they are up for sale, is subject to the prevailing rules of procurement. If they want to get the lawns cut, for example, they cannot hire neighborhood kids to do it. Instead, they must get bids from professional gardening services, which cost more. The bid process itself is expensive. Lots of money could be saved if this were not necessary. The NPR states that rules should be changed to permit the marshals to hire whom they please. Doubtless this is true.
On the other hand, consider the implications of such a change. Imagine one day that we have loosened the rules for procurement in these circumstances. We may well read about a ring of U.S. marshals who are using their authority to their own advantage. Many millions in real property are seized each year in major cities from drug raids. While these properties are in transition, they must be tended. Their roofs and plumbing, their carpeting and gardens all must be maintained, repaired, or upgraded. They must be sold. A fair price must be estimated, and someone must be paid for making the estimate, as another must be paid for making the sale. Of course a buyer must be found, and he will have an interest in getting the lowest price. Might be willing to pay a little money to a government employee in order to get a better price? Might a gardener or a plumber be ready to pay something back to the civil servant in order to get the business? The interest of the employee and the interest of the vendor or buyer could easily come together in these circumstances.
This is the problem with bureaucracy. This is why those complicated rules have been written. They are designed to have one employee looking over the shoulder of the other, one process canceling out or checking against the next. In government, people are dealing all the time with money and property that is not their own. "The spoils system" is a political term. It has been prominent in our politics since the time of Andrew Jackson, whose administration was a paragon of the art of political pork. In government administration, this is, quite simply, the characteristic problem. Not only at the lower rungs, but also at the top, the interest of the government and the governed are difficult to bring into accord. That is why only specific things should be done by government, and then only when specific controls are in place to prevent abuse.
No amount of vigilance can remove the danger entirely. Only constant vigilance can prevent it from eating the seed corn of an entire nation, even a rich nation such as ours. That is why C.S. Lewis, in a famous little story about a minor tempter here on Earth and his supervising devil down below, was led to describe Hell—as a bureaucracy.
One may protest that just this kind of graft is common in the larger corporations. For example, IBM employees have recently been found stealing valuable computer boards and selling them for a tiny fraction of their worth. Some items worth $2000 at wholesale were going for $75. One employee was quoted to the effect that this practice is common. If this kind of thing happens in the private sector, why then is Hell only a government—and not also a corporate—bureaucracy?
The answer is that a government bureaucracy and a large corporation have some things in common, but the latter is not so bad as to be hellish. Stealing in IBM, or waste and abuse by its employees, are admittedly much more likely than in the corner grocery store, where the proprietor lives over the shop. He would not steal from the store because it belongs to him already. His employees might steal, but he is always watching. IBM is vulnerable to some kinds of abuse, merely because it is large.
Yet three things distinguish IBM from the government. The first is sheer size: according to NPR, the government of the United States has more than 7 times as many employees as the largest corporation in the country. If size is a problem, Uncle Sam is a behemoth of trouble. Here is a vastness, in administrative sprawl and intricacy, to make the Grand seem a baby canyon, or Everest a hillock.
The second is more to the point. It goes by the name of Apple, and Unisys, and Compaq, and Honeywell, and on and on. These are the competitors of IBM, and every one of them is out to destroy that company and take its place. They impose on IBM swift and hurtful penalties, if for a moment IBM should forget or mistake the interest of its customers.
Just lately, for example, the competitors of IBM have been taking market share at a prodigious rate. IBM, whose name has been a synonym for power and unasssailable success, has become in two short years a laughing stock and a victim. Writing off some billions in "restructuring charges," IBM is suddenly in a fight for its life. Its CEO, Mr. Akers, was three years ago the very epitome of corporate establishment. He is now dismissed in ignominy, as is much of his team. A new man is there, and he is cutting everywhere—salaries, positions, bonuses, output. IBM failed to serve its customers. That error is always potentially fatal.
The shareholders who by law are owners of this enterprise and have control of its operations now find that they have, in hard reality, that natural companion of authority—responsibility. At the peak IBM stock sold for upwards of $200 per share. Now it languishes near $50, and its owners are poorer by 75 percent. This is no impostor; this is the real article we call competition. In the waging of it, the participants bet their labor and their livelihoods. Defeat is sudden and expensive. It can be complete. There is one way to win this competition (leaving out of account the help of government). That way is to serve customers.
The NPR runs on quite a bit about inducing competition within government, and also about organizing the government to serve its customers. We see two problems with this.
The first problem is that competition in government can very seldom be made real. The NPR proposes to make agencies "compete" with one another. Right away however it excludes key parts of the bureaucracy:
Not all federal operations should be forced to compete, of course. Competition between regulatory agencies is a terrible idea. (Witness the regulation of banks, which can decide to charter with the state or federal government, depending on where they can find the most lenient regulations.) Nor should policy agencies compete. In the development of policy, cooperation between different units of government is essential. Competition creates turf wars, which get in the way of creating rational policies and programs. It is in service delivery that competition yields results because competition is the one force that gives public agencies no choice but to improve.
In other words, policy and enforcement will be, if anything, more centralized in the new plan than it has been. If we exclude the regulatory agencies and the policy agencies, we exclude the EPA, which has put a man in jail for cleaning up a dumping ground. We exclude OSHA, which harasses business for the sport of it. We exclude the Department of Interior, which classifies little low places in the ground as "wetlands" and prevents mining that will ultimately replace those low places with lakes. We exclude a lot that is important, to any real system of regulatory relief.
We do still include much that is important. We include the Post Office, which ought to be in private hands anyway. We include the welfare agencies, where the fact of the payments, and they way they are calculated and made, is at least as important as how much it costs to make them. We include, in short, a lot of places where people deal with the government because they must, or where people get something from the government for free. Efficiencies in these places, if they can be made, will be welcome, but even if they are made, they do not address the issue.
That raises the other side of the point about "competing" for "customers." The NPR says:
By "customer," we do not mean "citizen." A citizen can participate in democratic decision making; a customer receives benefits from a specific service. All Americans are citizens. Most are also customers: of the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Park Service, and scores of other federal organizations.
In a democracy, citizens and customers both matter. But when they vote, citizens seldom have much chance to influence the behavior of public institutions that directly affect their lives: schools, hospitals, farm service agencies, social security offices. It is a sad irony: citizens own their government, but private businesses they do not own work much harder to cater to their needs.
This gets near the heart of the problem. Not one of the functions of government listed above—schools, hospitals, farm service agencies, social security offices—would have been considered by James Madison or his colleagues in Philadelphia as a proper function of the national government. They believed that these administrative functions should be private, or when public, locally controlled. They national government, as a whole, must be accountable to its citizens, and it must be accountable to them, as citizens.
The NPR is worse than merely confused about the proper function of the government; it is at best unconcerned about it. For that reason it seeks not only to mimic the methods, but also to appropriate to itself the ends that companies serve. The NPR defines politics in the well-known Harold Lasswell phrase: "who gets what, when, how." In the American system, where the political institution of property rights give rise to a market system of distributing goods, this function is not actually carried out by government. It is delegated to a vast and competitive market, in which voluntary transactions among customers and suppliers are the staple of trade.
The delegation of this important function was made deliberately in our system, and for good cause. It was made to avoid the dangers inherent in a centralized, public system of allocating economic goods. In their relation to the government, people are not properly "customers," they are "citizens." When large classes of them become customers, their interest in the government is changed. Customers become distinct in society from citizens, and yet they still have the authority of citizenship. In fundamental respects their interests are opposed to citizens who are not customers. Today the two opposing political parties each derive their main strength from one side of this division. The tendency of this division is to convert elections into a contest over money. In that case the rights of minorities are in jeopardy. It is not by accident that we have redefined the term "minority" to mean in fact a favored majority of people, who have been qualified as particularly deserving customers of the government.
In the end this dispute between citizens and customers about how government should function, points to a dispute about what government should do.
We said the problems with the NPR begin with its method and end with its scope. That scope is too confined: "The National Performance Review focused primarily on how government should work, not on what it should do" (NPR, Preface). Since the beginning of the Progressive Era, the government has increasingly taken the view that it should do more, and ever more. Perhaps the most radical, if not the most profound, statement of the vast ambition of progressive government has been given by the current first lady. She said, at the University of Texas, that she hopes "to change what it means to be a human being in the 21st century." This radical project is a far different thing than the government we had, resting fixed upon the immutable laws of human nature, and meaning to secure to us our liberty and a fair chance. In this radical project, government does not do things for us, it does things to us.
Consider the danger of this distinction. We said that there were three respects in which IBM is different from the government. We have named two. The last is the most important. The government, dealing with a higher subject matter than the corporation, has greater powers. In the cause of justice the government has the power to command much more than the money of its citizens. It may with justice command them to fight and to die. It may arrest them and restrain their liberty or end their lives.
The example of the U.S. marshals is once again apposite. A case arose lately in Los Angeles in which the county sheriffs suspected a man of growing marijuana in his back garden. They thought they spotted the plants from a helicopter. This man's back garden happened to occupy some fancy real estate near a fine beach, and quite a lot of it. We know that one of the first steps of the sheriffs was to get an appraisal of his house and garden, to find out how much they would get if they could seize them. We know that their budget is tight, and the sheriffs want raises in pay and more help. We know that they went to the man's house and raided it in the middle of the night while he was in bed, and we know that they shot him dead. We know that they found no marijuana.
A county prosecutor formed the view that this was a mercenary raid, undertaken to support the departmental budget. Other and higher officials have disagreed with him. Whether he is right or not, the lesson here is still very clear. The sheriffs had something more than a duty to find the marijuana; in this case they had also an interest. We need institutions of government that make sure, and then double sure, that officers with guns act in accordance with their duty, and not in accordance with their interest.
Our country is blessed with the finest historic safeguards to protect its citizens from the arbitrary use of power, either by the tax collector, or the regulator, or officers with guns. In the end those safeguards all rely on one that is fundamental—the control of the government by the citizens who own it. According to the NPR, citizens today "seldom have much chance to influence the behavior of public institutions that directly affect their lives." This is a drastic problem. It is the problem of government in our time. It will not be repaired—on the contrary—it will exacerbated by a further division of our people into customers and citizens.
The National Performance Review is a dangerous document, because it is skillful, or anyway more skillful than is common from presidents today. It seeks, with partial success, to appeal at the same time to two different and usually opposed audiences, to customers of government, and to citizens who pay for it. Behind this document is a political understanding that far surpasses anything in the Carter or the Bush years. Expect from the Clinton administration no public hand writing or expression of futility. This administration will not be surprised or appalled by much that it finds while in power. It has thought the problem through.
Our government has reached the sorry point at which it is necessary to think all over again about what it should do. It is time to recover our constitutional legacy of a limited government, existing for definite purposes, founded upon clear, true and permanent ideas. Until we get that back, we cannot trust the system. Serious people may therefore prefer that the government waste money rather than use it. The National Performance Review may give us the worst of both worlds, a government more costly and more ardent in pursuit of power. Red tape may be our last friend.
