What Hillary gets (I hope).

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Hillary Rodham Clinton

In 1994, the New Republic asked me to write an article about the Clinton administration's "reinventing government" (REGO) initiative. REGO, you may recall, was the campaign spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore to improve the performance of federal agencies by encouraging innovation within the bureaucracy. It was widely considered by the national press corps to be the world's second most boring story, right behind the trade dispute over Canadian softwood lumber. But I was actually excited about the assignment. As an alumnus of the Washington Monthly, I'd internalized Charlie Peters's neoliberal prime directive (see "A Neoliberal Education," page 30)--that a journalist who believes in a strong federal government should go to the front lines of that government and report back honestly on what he finds.

The department I decided to look at was Veterans Affairs. If REGO was the second most boring story in the world, then the VA had to be considered the second most boring federal agency, right behind the Office of Personnel Management. But it was also, with more than 200,000 employees, the largest nondefense department in government and hence an important one. At the time, the VA was known for vast inefficiency (scores of facilities across the country were sitting half empty) and poor service (a reputation captured in the 1989 Tom Cruise film Born on the Fourth of July, about a wounded Vietnam vet who receives nightmarish care at a veterans' hospital). If REGO could make a difference at the VA, I figured, there might really be something to it.

So on a cool fall day I made my way to what I'd heard was a promising REGO experiment: the Central Region Contract Service Center, located on the campus of the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee. The center was housed in a converted Civil War-era domiciliary amid the rolling hills of a military cemetery. Inside, contract officers and a government attorney spent their days negotiating with private vendors for everything from bedsheets to ambulance services on behalf of eight VA hospitals in the upper Midwest. Previously, such work had been done by purchasing agents at each individual hospital, the documents often having to be sent to lawyers at VA headquarters in Washington for final approval. The idea of the service center was to centralize the contracting (buying in bulk to garner lower prices) and to decentralize the decision making (having the legal work done on-site...