Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

The Republican Congress's recent crusade to dismantle much of the federal government has caused the Clinton Administration considerable heartache, not least because it has obscured the White House's own ongoing efforts to "reinvent" government. By focusing its energies on defeating Republican bills such as a measure to require elaborate, peer-reviewed cost-benefit analyses before new regulations are issued, the White House has inevitably come off looking like a defender of the regulatory state. But the truth is this administration doesn't like much of the big-government machinery it inherited, and it hates creating the appearance that it does.

Still, the Republican assault on government does have the advantage of casting the rather ho-hum accomplishments of Vice President Al Gore's reinvention team, formally known as the National Performance Review (NPR), in a decidedly more favorable light. Okay, so the government hasn't become sleek and super-efficient. But it is still there, doing (perhaps slightly more efficiently) the work on which the public relies.

Donald F. Kettl and John J. DiIulio, Jr. of the Brookings Institution deserve much credit for keeping a watchful eye, in various books and reports, on NPR since its advent. Their findings, presented with those of other Brookings scholars in this volume, are not startling. But they are informative, and Inside the Reinvention Machine is as good an update on the Clinton reinvention record as government-management junkies are likely to find.

The most highly publicized aspect of NPR has been its downsizing of the federal workforce. But as several of the book's contributors point out, laying off federal workers isn't necessarily a formula for making government work better, and if done carelessly, it could make the situation worse. NPR's goal of reducing personnel by 252,000--later revised by Congress to 272,900--was a number pretty much pulled out of a hat, with little more than symbolic meaning. Anyway, Kettl points out that two-thirds of the crowd-pleasing personnel reductions achieved in the reinvention's first year weren't much to write home about because they came from the Defense Department, which was already downsizing because of the end of the Cold War.

Is the civil service bloated? Probably. Certainly it would be helpful if NPR found a way to make it easier to identify and fire (or relocate) those federal employees who are incompetent (or who have little to do); the Clinton...