What Al Gore might learn the hard way.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Reinventing government

It's early afternoon in the White House Briefing Room. Still fresh to power, the new President and his men stand in front of the famous dark blue curtains to kick off a major new initiative: reinventing the federal government.

"We must give top priority to a drastic and thorough revision of the federal bureaucracy, to its budgeting system, and to the procedures for constantly analyzing the effectiveness of its many varied services," the President had said during last year's campaign "... This is no job for the fainthearted. It will be met with violent opposition from those who now enjoy a special privilege, those who prefer to work in the dark, or those whose private fiefdoms are threatened."

Hopes are high. "Today, we have submitted to the Congress the first in a series of recommendations for reorganizing the executive branch of Government," the President says confidently, promising a 300-person review of the government's operations.

The afternoon? July 15, 1977. The President? Jimmy Carter. Thin the ties, shrink the lapels, trim the sideburns and fast forward to 1993: After a generation of bright federal moments like the $500 billion S & L collapse, this snippet of Carter and Bert Lance has all the trappings of Bill Clinton and Al Gore's September kickoff to ... reinvent the federal government.

We've been here before. Within the last 30 years, LBJ ordered Robert McNamara's Programming-Planning-and-Budgeting Systems instituted government wide. Nixon had Management by Objectives. Reagan brought in the Grace Commission. And Bush encouraged Total Quality Management. The result? Republicans - and Perot - still score points bashing government, and 80 percent of the public believes that the "country needs to make major changes in the way government works," according to a 1993 Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Now comes Gore's National Performance Review (NPR) to remake government. Despite the jargon ("It's time we had a new customer service contract with the American people"), Gore is campaigning against end-of-the-fiscal-year spending sprees, has got religion on cutting the bureaucracy, and is intent on simplifying the Byzantine, 450-level job classification system. But the forces that have killed reform in Washington since the days before Sherman Adams grew fond of vicuna coats are lying in wait. Ah, says the Gore team, this time will be different. Why? Because of "one of the major thrusts of what we're doing is measuring and controlling results, not inputs," says Bob Stone, the Pentagon reformer who's directing the Gore review. "Too much of the time in government, we spend a lot of money on a problem and think we're fixing it."

This is promising talk, but turning talk to action means compelling bureacrats and politicians to do what they have ducked in years past: Report, in a real way, what they're really accomplishing. There's much more at stake here than the fate of another presidential commission. If Washington picks the administration's pockets on reform, then the core Democratic principle - that we, in John Kennedy's phrase, can do better - becomes suspiciously squishy. And Democrats will find it harder and harder to convince voters that they know what they're doing.

When Clinton first announced Gore would lead the NPR in March, the President said, "We|ll challenge the basic assumptions of every program, asking does it work, does it provide quality service, does it encourage innovation and reward hard work?" Consider, however, the Carter experience. In the seventies, he deployed zero-based budgeting (ZBB) to force every agency to reevaluate its reason for being. In Cart er's ZBB, every federal agency sent three plans to the White House every year, one assuming a 20 percent funding cut. (Carter thought bureaucrats would fess up about what didn't work if faced with declining fortunes.) Agencies complied, but overburdened the system with reams of forms: 10,000 annual "decision packages" poured in from every corner of the federal map. Nobody could even read it all, much...