How to cut the bureaucracy in half; understanding slot syndrome, headless nails, meeting mania, and other government gimmicks.

• Author: Shuger, Scott
• Position: Includes related information

by Scott Shuger In the summer of 1940, in order to accommodate the many new military agencies then cropping up in Washington, Franklin Roosevelt authorized the construction of office buildings all along the city's Mall. Roosevelt had wanted the buildings, which quickly became known as "tempos," to be so poorly made that they couldn't last more than 10 years. But the tempos became a perfect symbol of self-sustaining government bloat: Many of them were still standing and full of government workers 20 years after much of the need for them had vanished.

As FDR developed one alphabet-soup agency after another in response to first the Depression and then World War II, the federal government grew from its 1932 level of about 500,000 civilian employees to 1.1 million in 1940 and 3.5 million by V-J Day. Today, with no catastrophes of equivalent dimension confronting us, it's still nearly as large-3.1 million employees. Ronald Reagan won office by running against Washington; his promises to cut back the federal government included plans to eliminate whole cabinet departments. But the spirit of the tempos reigned instead: During his two terms, the number of government workers increased 7.5 percent.

Analysts of corporate performance know that the companies that came through the eighties best had learned to be leaner. For instance, over the past 14 years, Conrail has cut its workforce by 61 percent-and has gained market share in the process. Here are some other examples from a recent book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the editor of the Harvard Business Review:

>Beaten by Xerox in copiers and suddenly threatened by Japanese camera and film companies, Eastman Kodak eliminated 24,000 jobs between 1983 and 1986-a reduction of 17.5 percent-and closed its central film-processing facility. This allowed the company to reorganize, giving managers much more direct responsibility, which in turn promoted diversification and the farming out of marginally profitable work.

>ln leading Apple Computer back from the failure of its much ballyhooed Lisa computer and its first quarterly loss as a public company, CEO John Sculley consolidated the company's operating divisions, closed plants, and laid off one-fifth of its employees.

>Before Shenandoah Life Insurance combined the operations of several divisions, a particular form was being routed to 32 people, across nine sections and three departments. Afterwards, the task was handled by a team of six people who did 13 percent more work, with greater speed, fewer errors, and 80 percent less supervision.

Why can't government learn these lessons too?

And you don't need to appoint yet another Hoover Commission or Grace Commission or Volcker Commission to learn them. Instead, behold the GS-13s and GS-14s, the federal common man. In a graded pay structure that begins with GS-1 and ends with the Senior Executive Service, these 200,000 workers are the middle of the government's middle. (There are additional middle-level employees not included in this figure, such as those at the Postal Service and the intelligence agencies.) A GS-13 makes up to $55,000 a year and a GS-14 up to $65,000. GS-13 is the last stage of federal employment for those who don't have supervisory responsibilities; GS-14 is the first stage for those who do. These are the highest levels most government workers attain. Their military counterparts are the 0-4s and 0-5s, the majors (in the Navy and Coast Guard, lieutenant commanders) and lieutenant colonels (commanders). These in-the-trench bureaucrats already know what the symptoms of government's fatal overstaffings are-and most of those symptoms suggest their own cures.

"The civil service is a unique and talented mix of people with diverse skills and abilities that can't be found anywhere else in the world," George Bush said recently. "And their hard work is not only seen in Washington, but in communities across the country." That's certainly true of many federal employees, but some of those well below Bush in his overstaffed government put it differently. A former GSA employee tells me how her bureau chief made a habit of taking most of the hour before lunch every day to read aloud to his staff from the National Enquirer. And a young Department of Justice attorney complains that the most intense interest in his office seems to be directed towards something called the Porky Preakness, a weight-losing contest. "Half my employment in the past year-no, probably 90 percenthas been useless," admits Sid Finn*, a 10-year veteran of Health and Human Services, who was also at the agency's predecessor, HEW, before that. Finn describes the office he works in as a good example of the idea that "the more inspectors you have, the more mistakes you have.... The office says to Congress that we could do better if you give us more people. But ever since I've been there, I've been aware that we're understaffed in the regions and incredibly overstaffed in Washington." A GS-14 auditor with 23 years experience at the General Accounting Office sums up this different view for me: "If you're results-oriented, the government's not the place to be." *All the people ar real. None of the names are.

Such bureaucratic self-criticism is rare, however. Bush's view prevails-and with it, bureaucratic bloat-in part because of a simple fact of human nature: People don't like to admit that they're wasting their lives. The GS-14s know what the problems are, but you have to ask the right questions to hear about them. If a government employee has the remotest chance of presenting his job to the wider world as meaningful, even inspirational, that's what he'll do.

For instance, if you met me at a party I probably wouldn't be terribly reticent about my past service as a naval intelligence officer. And it wouldn't take too much additional cajoling to get me to embark on a story or two about some of the important and exciting things I did in that capacity. But as long as you were unarmed, I would never tell you about The World's Greatest Code Book. Military Scrabble

Once during a seagoing exercise I participated in, our admiral expressed displeasure about what he correctly viewed as his aviators' poor radio security. It's really not that difficult to make improvements in this area: a few additional radio-code procedures will do the trick. But when the airwing commander heard the admiral's comments, he took the whole thing as a personal affront. He'd show that deskbound two-star a thing or two! So instead of merely doing the tactically correct thing, he decided to put together a dictionary of code words so immense, so exhaustive, that it would cover any possible radio message that the admiral or anyone on his staff would ever want to have pilots encode. And not only did this guy want the dictionary assembled immediately, he wanted it assembled in complete secrecy. He was planning for the delicious moment when his boss would ask him why his fighter pilots on station couldn't say X in a tactically safe manner, and he'd be able to produce this mammoth document and coolly reply, "Ah yes, admiral, that would be on page 1,007. The pilots already have them."

Now once such a brilliant scheme is conceived there is the little matter of execution. Who would actually assemble the WGCB? From the first rumor of the plan, every junior intelligence officer onboard the carrier knew the answer to that one. "I'll do it," said my boss. Which all the junior intelligence officers knew freely translated as "We'll do it."

So it was that the 10 or so of us were called together to "get cracking." As my boss explained it, the job broke down into two manageable tasks: a) identifying everything that you could ever want to say from an airplane, and b) making up a code word for it. Then he left, saying that he expected the results in two days. There we were-captive participants in the world's first Military Scrabble tournament. The perfect chord for the program was struck when one of my coworkers suggested that the first message we needed to encode was "My radio is broken."

For the next few days, in between our normal duties, we worked feverishly on the project. Just before the deadline, we produced a huge list. At this point it was clear that what we'd done was tactically useless, if for no other reason than if this dictionary were ever put on the actual "kneeboard cards" that pilots use, it would weigh 30 pounds. No doubt the Russians would have approved. In a matter of days, on just a few typewriters, we had developed a weapon that could herniate every aviator in the Seventh Fleet.

Nevertheless, my boss was beaming when he handed the list in. No junior intelligence officer was surprised that it was never heard of again. Spills and floods

This debacle has a number of important morals. When my airwing was confronted by a legitimate worry, its irrelevant response used up as much effort and morale as the right one would have (probably more). So it's not accidental that cockpit radio procedures didn't improve for several more months. And if there had been only, say, two or three junior intelligence officers attached to the airwing instead of 10, this nuthatch project couldn't have been mounted instantly on such a grand scale; it would have been small and slow and hence probably would have passed out of existence before it ended up consuming anywhere near as much effort as it actually did. Here's the punchline: When a bureaucracy is screwed up, it does not automatically mean that all or most of the bureaucrats are lazy or stupid-we worked like dogs and with considerable ingenuity on that code book-and a modern organization can usually do more real work quicker with fewer people and fewer tasks.

I say usually because a big enemy of efficiency is the blanket generalization. The Department of Commerce does not need more people although it probably needs some different people). But the Coast Guard could use some more-at least in the field. According to a...