Reinvention 2.0

Pretty big news out of the Obama campaign today on the federal management front: His manifesto on "the change we need in Washington" puts a great deal of specifics to his recent talk of making government "cool again."

At first glance, Obama's management reform blueprint looks an awful lot like a relaunch of the Clinton administration's reinventing government crusade. That's not surprising, given that Obama has been echoing REGO themes since his speech at the Democratic National Convention, and given that people associated with the NPR are serving on Obama's government reform advisory committee.

This section of Obama's reform plan is perhaps the most telling:

Barack Obama and Joe Biden will create a focused team within the White House that will work with agency leaders and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to improve results and outcomes for federal government programs while eliminating waste and inefficiency. This unit, a SWAT team, will be composed of top-performing and highly-trained government professionals and be headed by a new Chief Performance Officer (CPO) who will report directly to the president.

That brief description raises a series of similarities to REGO:

• Top-level involvement by the vice president.
• Day-to-day involvement by career government managers and employees.
• A decision to run the effort out of the White House, working "with" OMB -- as opposed to using OMB to coordinate the effort.

That last distinction is far from trivial. One of the key criticisms of the Clinton/Gore National Performance Review was that they set it up as a separate organization from OMB, making it difficult to integrate REGO initiatives into the standard budget and management processes. The Bush administration took the opposite approach, running its management agenda out of OMB and elevating the OMB management chief post to a much higher level of authority and influence than it had previously enjoyed. The appointment of a chief performance officer could have the same effect, but it still risks alienating longtime OMB staffers.