What's wrong with the Gore report.

• Author: Segal, David
• Position: Poor quality of civil service

A couple of hard truths that Gore & Co. need to face for their plan to overhaul the government to work

The Gore report on reinventing government lacks the aerated graphics of the latest Mirabella and the prose won't exactly give Bellow night sweats, but for a book on good government, reading it is hardly the drear you'd imagine. The chapters are divided helpfully, gray-boxed quotes from the likes of Emerson, Patton, and Werner von Braun pepper the text - and, most importantly, there is page after page of sound thinking about how to revamp the federal bureaucracy. The absurdities of life and work in the civil service are striking, after all, and the Gore report is a litany of right-sounding solutions, as commonsensical as they are overdue.

But by the time you get to about the middle of the document something begins to seem... off. Hard to tell what it is, really, until you get to page 68 and read this Al Gore quote:

Our bedrock premise is that ineffective government is not the fault of the people in it. Our government is full of well-intentioned, hardworking, intelligent people - managers and staff. We intend to let our workers pursue excellence.

Ah ha. That's it. The first of several problems with this report is that it is entirely predicated on a set of exceptionally cheerful assumptions about not just the millions of bureaucrats in the federal government, but about humanity itself. People are good, the report implies with each paragraph. Bureaucrats are people. Because bureaucrats are good, agencies want to do what benefits the Republic, rather than what benefits agencies. If it makes sense to streamline, bureaucrats will streamline; if they need to train, they'll train. The talents and fundamental goodness of all bureaucrats have been obscured, in this logic, by a perverse welter of regulations and a set of incentives that encourage mediocrity rather than excellence.

This isn't wrong, exactly. Regulations have hamstrung bureaucrats and there is often no margin for creative thinking for either managers or front line workers. But that's just part of the problem. The rest of the problem is that for years the quality of worker in the bureaucracy has been in what one Office of Personnel Management executive described to political scientist James Q. Wilson as a "death spiral." It's been thirty years since any president even tried to inspire citizens to join the government: The last time was when John Kennedy beckoned to "Let public service be a proud and lively career," a call which doubled the number of college graduates applying to work in the government. And the quality problem got worse in the eighties. Reagan and (to a lesser extent) Bush believed that populating the bureaucracy with underachievers was one swell way to curtail government activism. So recruiting programs were cut back, superior candidates weren't sought out, and mediocrity was accepted as the norm. Terry Cutler, an assistant to Reagan's director at OPM, captured the prevailing philosophy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed which argued that, "The government does not need top graduates, administrative offices staffed with MBAs from Wharton, or policy shops full of the best and brightest whatevers. Government's goals should not be employee excellence but employee sufficiency."

And through the seventies and eighties employee sufficiency is what we got. The Volcker Commission studied the quality of the civil service at the end of this period, and found that 90 percent of college honor students never seriously consider working in government. Pat Ingraham, a professor of government who worked on the study said, "I've talked with hundreds of line managers and administrators from practically every federal agency. And what I hear is the quality of new hires is just getting worse and worse."

The government thus stood on its head the first principle of any private sector venture - find the best people you can. Think about it. If you ran a business wouldn't you scour city and countryside for motivated, intelligent people? Wouldn't you even drive to a few campuses looking for promising upstarts? These days agencies rarely recruit newly-minted graduates and are especially scarce on the nation's top colleges. (Last year only the Department of Energy made a trip to the Ivies.) More work goes into filling scientific and technical posts, but with little hiring going on at a lot of agencies, many have stopped searching hard for high caliber people when entry level slots come open.

So how does the government find reinforcements? Most jobs are filled through what is essentially a buddy system: Bureaucrats give pals a heads up about what's available, help them navigate the bewildering application process, and tailor their candidacy to ideally match the job. Cronyism explains only part of this...