Babies and Bathwater

Back in October, when my colleague Rob Brodsky wrote our cover story profile of Barack Obama, many of the people he interviewed noted that Obama's management agenda closely mirrored parts of Bill Clinton and Al Gore's Reinventing Government Initiatives. Now, he's back again today with a long piece over at Lost In Transition about how Obama is likely to build on past administration's management initiatives. The key takeaway is here:

After 14 government-wide reform efforts in the past century, there is no obvious big idea or ideological prescription in management reform, said Don Kettl, a political analyst and University of Pennsylvania professor who has written extensively about government reform.

"We have essentially reached the natural, logical end of the strategy of management reform," Kettl said. "We had a whole series of efforts to empower government employees and to measure the performance of programs and we've essentially run out the string ... So what we are likely to have, and what we need, is an effort to polish up and burnish the efforts of both previous administrations, but also to think about what the next steps ought to be in a much more creative way."

This sense that preserving at least some of the foundations of the government management structure is important is something I've heard from many of my sources in the non-profit world both leading up to and since the election. There's no particular indication that Obama intends to start from scratch, and many of the things he's told federal unions that he would roll back or change, including increasing oversight of contracting out federal jobs, aren't really core management principles. The biggest hurdle, I think, will be pay for performance, if Obama decides that he wants to move away from the General Schedule system. That wouldn't be popular with his constituents in federal employee unions, but it's something that the non-profit community and the Chief Human Capital Officers are pushing hard.