Word: gore
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vice President, this is his big chance to become more than "the other guy on the platform" at Clinton's speeches, as one of his aides puts it. To that end, Gore in the past six months has held 16 town-hall meetings around the country to hear federal employees bewail the silly rules they work % under and the money they fritter away. Gore has recruited a full-time staff of 200 mostly young aides (supplemented by about 800 part-timers from inside and outside government), who have torn into their job with remarkable zest. The atmosphere last week...
...nothing else, the Gore team has produced the most readable, at times almost breezily written, federal document in memory. Sample prose: "It is almost as if federal programs were designed not to work. In truth, few are 'designed' at all; the legislative process simply churns them out, one after another, year after year." Which leads into a penetrating analysis -- confirmed and supplemented by many other experts -- of just what is wrong with the government...
...departments and agencies. Is a department or agency obsolete (some are still operating under directives signed by President Theodore Roosevelt)? Create a new one to do some of the same jobs. Does a new problem arise? Set up another new agency. Says Robert Stone, the project director for Gore: "As a rule, virtually any task being done by government is being done by 20 or more agencies...
...Gore and many others insist that the vast majority of civil servants are competent and willing workers who are endlessly frustrated by the system. By ) making raises and promotions dependent almost entirely on seniority, the system rewards those who timidly follow the rules and gives no incentive to creativity. Managers have no way to reward outstanding work: a brilliant chemist, for example, who has reached the top of the pay scale in her classification can be given a further raise only if she is promoted to a supervisory position -- and that would take her away from her test tubes...
What to do? For one thing, Gore will recommend, and Clinton will no doubt order, that some government departments try to measure how well they do their jobs. That so screamingly obvious a step should have to be commanded from the Oval Office in itself speaks volumes about the federal mind-set. But it is a fact that many Executive agencies are so obsessed with following the rules and staying within their budget that they never try to measure how well -- or if -- they serve the public. Gore and Clinton will insist that they commit themselves to specific performance standards...