Looking Back over My 45 Years of Involvement with Government Reform Efforts

• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12921
• Published date: 01 March 2018

Looking Back over My 45 Years of Involvement with Government Reform Efforts 305

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 2, pp. 305–310. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12921.

Viewpoint

Stephen E. Condrey,

Associate Editor

John M. Kamensky is a senior fellow

with The IBM Center for the Business of

Government. He previously served as deputy

director of Vice President Al Gore ’ s National

Performance Review (later renamed the

National Partnership for Reinventing

Government) and as special assistant to the

deputy director for management at the U.S.

Office of Management and Budget. Before

that, he worked in the U.S. Government

Accountability Office. He is a fellow of the

National Academy of Public Administration.

E-mail: john.kamensky@us.ibm.com

Looking Back over My 45 Years of Involvement with

Government Reform Efforts

Abstract: This Viewpoint presents a typology of options for future government reformers to help guide the design

and implementation of a reform initiative, based on the author ’ s experiences and observations over the past 45 years.

Successful reformers need to be clear up front about what they are attempting to achieve and frame their efforts in

ways that maximize the success and sustainability of the effort. In this article, the author offers a series of questions

and answers to help future reformers choose among various design and implementation options and to help them chart

their paths .

P AR ’ s Viewpoint editor invited me to summarize

lessons on government reform based on my

experience. I was honored by the request,

and the following reflects on reforms in which I ’ ve

participated or observed.

Looking back, nearly my entire professional career has

been spent on some variation of government reform,

starting with a class assignment to propose revisions

to the Texas State Constitution in late 1973. While

everyone else was fixated on Vietnam and Watergate,

I was an outlier. Instead, I was mesmerized by the

dynamics of the Texas Constitutional Convention of

1974, serving as an intern.

The experience was exhilarating, but it ultimately

ended in a colossal failure. The draft constitution

failed adoption by the convention by three votes—

and a year and a half of effort and emotion on

my part went down the drain. My only tangible

reminder is a nice nameplate, which I used during the

convention, that today sits on my desk as a reminder

that thoughtful research and reform efforts can be

trumped by politics in an instant.

For some unexplained reason, I was undeterred

by this experience, and my career then led me to

work for the U.S. General Accounting Office (since

renamed the Government Accountability Office)

in Washington, DC, in 1977. Although I was not

working on the government reforms of the day,

there were opportunities to observe President Jimmy

Carter ’ s reorganization efforts (also largely a failure,

but they did result in the Departments of Education

and Energy), the Grace Commission under President

Ronald Reagan (which resulted in many headlines but

little action), and Reagan ’ s subsequent “Reform ’88”

initiative (which focused on administrative process

improvements that received few headlines but did set

the stage for future reforms; see OMB 1983 ).

By sheer luck, I was given the opportunity to work

on President Bill Clinton ’ s reinventing government

initiative in 1993, under the direction of Vice

President Al Gore, where I served as a deputy

director until 2001. In that role, I was able to be

a player in the government reforms of the day.

Afterward, I returned to observer status for reforms

under the next three presidents: George W. Bush ’ s

President ’ s Management Agenda and his Program

Assessment Rating Tool; President Barack Obama ’ s

implementation of the American Recovery and

Reinvestment Act and his Open Government

Initiative; and the Donald Trump administration ’ s

evolving streamlining and reorganization efforts.

I ’ m typically not a reflective person. I prefer action

and the concrete, not the abstract. But sometimes

I find myself in a position in which I ’ m asked to

stand back and look at the big picture—such as the

invitation to pen this Viewpoint. My perspective is

that of the U.S. federal executive branch. However,

my observations and lessons may be useful to state

and local reformers, and possibly those in other

countries.

I ’ ve chosen to frame what follows as a series of eight

questions that a prospective “reformer” needs to ask

and be ready to answer:

• What is “reform,” anyway?

• What is the worldview of reformers?

John M. Kamensky

The IBM Center for the Business of Government