Gore pledges new phase of reinventing government

Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday he would launch a new phase of his reinventing government effort if elected President, and pledged not to add a single job to the federal workforce.

Gore said he would cut federal spending to reduce the size of the government as a share of the national economy to its smallest size in 50 years by 2008.

In the process, Gore "would not add to the number of people working for the federal government, not even by one position," according to a campaign briefing paper.

Meanwhile, the Gore campaign touted an independent study released Tuesday by a nonpartisan group estimating that Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush would need to hire thousands more federal employees at the IRS and Social Security Administration to implement his proposals.

"Together we took a government that was out of control and brought it under control," Gore said in Little Rock, Ark. "I'm for a smaller, smarter government that serves people better, but offers real change."

On the campaign trail, Bush continued to portray Gore as the candidate of big bureaucracy. "He wants to increase the size and scope of the federal government," Bush said.

2030 Action, a nonprofit public policy group for young people, released a new report focusing on Bush's Social Security privatization plan. The report estimates that 50,000 to 100,000 new federal workers would need to be hired to implement Bush's proposal.

In the report, Francis Cavanaugh, former head of the federal Thrift Savings Plan, criticized the Texas governor's plan, saying it would take at least 10,000 "highly trained federal employees" to simply answer the telephones at the Social Security Administration to field questions from customers.

In his announcement, Gore also said he would push electronic government initiatives and would require that federal managers be paid based on performance evaluations, which would in turn be based in part on customer satisfaction.