Reinventing Government.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

In 1978, the city of Phoenix began contracting its garbage collection out in phases to private companies. This "privatization" policy--radical at the time but more and more common today--has been hailed by the right as an illustration of the superiority of the free market and as a way to shrink the one thing conservatives despise above all else: government bureaucracies.

But a funny thing happened in Phoenix: The bureaucracy didn't wither away, it got stronger. At first, the city's sleepy public works department tried to bid for the trash business but lost section after section of its territory to the lower-cost contractors. So the department went on a self-improvement binge. It created labor-management quality circles. It let drivers redesign their routes and work schedules and gave bonuses to employees who suggested other ways to improve efficiency. And it replaced trucks requiring two-man crews with new vehicles a single worker can operate. Soon the department's costs were lower than the private sector's. By 1988 it had won back in competitive bidding all the territory it had lost.

Phoenix's trash tale is one of hundreds of government success stories in this ambitious and long-awaited book. (*) Journalist David Osborne and former city manager Ted Gaebler argue that a revolutionary restructuring of the public sector is under way--an "American Perestroika." Like the Soviet version, they say, this one is being driven largely by politicians and bureaucrats who, under extreme fiscal pressure, are applying market forces to monopolistic government enterprises. The difference is that in the U.S., market forces are not destroying state power. They are enhancing it.

This message, with its promise of fulfilling the public's seemingly impossible demand for more government activism without more taxes, has proven enormously appealing to members of the policymaking class in both parties. Osborne has been a consultant to Democtratic Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida and to Republican Governor William Weld of Massachusetts. He is a charter member of the "New Paradigm Society" in Washington, a loose group of policy intellectuals that includes Bush aide James Pinkerton. And he is one of several liberal New Paradigmers advising Bill Clinton. (No surprise, then, that in his speeches on the campaign trail Clinton occasionally slips in a line about the need to "reinvent government.")

Like reformers everywhere, Osborne and Gaebler sometimes push their ideas past their natural limits. Too often, they portray policies that fit their theory but that are also open to serious criticism--school choice, tenant ownership of public housing--as if they were proven solutions. Their prose style tends to be promotional when it should be measured, which leaves even a sympathetic reader wondering what land mines lie hidden on the path the authors are suggesting. One that immediately strikes me, as I read about aggressive, creative civil servants transforming their organizations, is the authors' seeming innocence about the quality of most of today's government employees--which is marginal. While there are some bright, vital individuals in every agency, there are plenty who have no wish to be creative except when decorating their offices.

But on balance, Osborne and Gaebler have tried diligently to subject their ideas to the test of reality. They have read mounds of academic case studies, visited scores of agencies, and talked to countless bureaucrats. They have assured themselves a future place in the Wonk Hall of Fame. Reinventing Government is mostly convincing precisely because the authors have not let standard ideology cloud their view of how government works, at its worst and at its best.

Rethinking shrinking

The authors have distilled their ideas into 10 jargony principles that, taken together, amount to what they call a "New Paradigm" for the collective action of democracies. Actually, elements of the paradigm will be familiar to longtime Monthly readers. They include scrapping civil service rules to make bureaucracies more "mission-driven"; rewriting government accounting standards to force lawmakers to be more "anticipatory"; making government programs "results-oriented" by toughening evaluations; and tapping the spirit of volunteerism. But where this magazine has focused, naturally, on Washington, Osborne and Gaebler fanned out to state and local bureaucracies, where most of the policy action was in the eighties. Their book is richer for it.

The authors also build on the work of the handful of political scientist who have studied bureaucratic reform efforts, especially that of James Q. Wilson, whose 1989 book Bureaucracy...