Reinvention Lite.

• Author: Worth, Robert
• Position: Al Gore's project of reinventing government systems is failing - Cover Story

On April 30, 1998, a woman named Maureen O'Dwyer testified before the Senate Finance Committee along with six other current and former Internal Revenue Service employees. The press, weary after months of blockbuster hearings on abused taxpayers, didn't pay much attention. After all, the House and Senate were already writing legislation to make the IRS more user-friendly. But Maureen's story wasn't the usual tale of rude or threatening auditors. Instead, she told how her manager had ignored one company's $24 million tax debt because he wanted to close the case quickly so as to collect a $2,000 productivity bonus. Other witnesses told similar stories of IRS auditors who "zeroed out" multimillion-dollar tax bills because they didn't want to spend the time, or to curry favor with corporations that might offer them jobs. In short, the hearings showed that the IRS wasn't just suffering from rudeness. It had lost track of its most basic mission as an agency, it had failed to monitor the performance of its agents, and it was retaining plenty of people who should have been fired long before.

The IRS wasn't alone. In July, the Clinton administration declared confidently that our nation's nursing homes were in fine shape; only 1 percent suffered any serious health or safety problems. Then the General Accounting Office released the results of an investigation charging that one in three nursing homes in California--a state with a better enforcement reputation than most--suffered from "serious or life-threatening problems" The GAO described hallways that reek of urine and feces, and aging patients lying neglected on their beds, half dead from hunger and thirst, their bedsores festering until they become gaping, infected wounds. One woman described how her mother was both beaten and neglected for years, and that she "always seemed to be begging for food or water" in the three nursing homes where she stayed until she died suspiciously earlier this year.

What have Al Gore and his team of "reinventing government" experts done about problems like these? "We have expanded and improved service hours and phone support" at the IRS, declared Gore proudly in late July, along with a few other measures "focused on improving customer service" Magnify those comments across the federal government and you'll see far too much of what Gore has achieved since Clinton handed him the task of reinvention in early 1993. To be sure, making government a little nicer and more accessible to the average citizen is a desirable reform. And there's no doubt that some of Gore's other changes will save time and money. He's updated the government's information technology, improved its procurement policies, and trimmed some unnecessary regulations. He's also taken a thick slice out of the federal workforce--351,000 at last count since he started in 1993.

What Gore doesn't seem to understand is that these changes, while laudable, don't get to the root of America's shrunken faith in government. Serious reform starts with taking a fresh look at what government agencies should be doing in the first place, then asking how well they're doing it and who they need for the job. The IRS reform bill, which Clinton recently signed, is a step in the right direction. But improving "customer service"--the heart of the bill--won't change the fact that the agency is still failing at its central duty: An estimated $195 billion in taxes go uncollected every year. Nor has Gore addressed the fact that many of the problems at the IRS--and throughout the federal bureaucracy--stem from its inability to fire corrupt and incompetent employees. Tackling this personnel problem should be at the heart of reinvention, but so far Gore's team has been content to simply let the government get smaller by offering workers a chunk of cash to leave early, regardless of whether they're truants or geniuses. As a result, according to the government observers and federal managers I spoke with, too many of the best people left, and too many bench-warmers stuck around. The government got smaller without getting any smarter. Finally, the nursing-home scandals point to a third major area for reform: performance. Reinvention won't get very far until the government starts not only re-examining its mission, but paying more attention to how it's being carried out--in this case, by keeping closer tabs on the federal and state regulators who enforce its laws.

Overhauling the government's mission, performance, and personnel is no easy task. But if you don't want to see your parents starving to death in a nursing home or lose your life savings to a corrupt IRS auditor, you should give a damn about the fact that Gore doesn't seem to be taking it on.

Mission Improbable

Reinvention is not for the fainthearted. Anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the mission of any particular agency has to be willing to dead-lift the federal bureaucracy and the unions that support it, as well as a staggering array of special interest groups that profit from keeping the system in its present state, and the congressmen who depend on those groups for money and political support.

Let's start with the bureaucracy. Remember the Rural Electrification Administration? As you may recall from high school, the REA was one of the nobler examples of government's power to help people back in the 1930s, when FDR charged it with providing electricity (and later, phone service) to rural...