Called up from the minors, these state and local officials are having a hard time keeping their batting averages up in the big leagues.

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION

Reinvention Farm Team

Called up from the minors, these state and local officials are having a hard time keeping their batting averages up in the big leagues.

hristine Ervin glowed. And why not? The assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable resources was having a career day, a whirlwind 24 hours that would fulfill a political appointee's wildest fantasies.

That morning last October, The Washington Post had contained a story spotlighting a major Energy Department achievement, a revolutionary, energy-efficient light bulb developed on Ervin's watch.

Then came the blitz of media calls. CNN interviewed Ervin. So did CBS, National Public Radio and several newspapers. Each generated more favorable publicity for DOE and Ervin, who was director of the Oregon Energy Department before joining the Clinton Administration in late 1993. For one incandescent moment, Ervin had her chance to shine-all because DOE could build a better light bulb.

Stardom fades. Still, Ervin's accomplishment represented a victory for the dozens of creative state officials the Clinton Administration wooed to Washington with promises that they could reinvent the federal government. In virtually every federal agency, you can spot these troubleshooters from the hinterlands. Most are managers, not ideologues or policy junkies or visionaries. What works is what matters. Performance counts. They want to be judged by the bottom line, not by good intentions. They speak a language learned outside the Beltway, a blend of Silicon Valleyspeak and technocratic phrases like "inputs and outputs." Governments are "service providers," the public is the "customer," and "market solutions" are vital to government success.

These appointees were chosen to transform President Clinton's promises of user-friendly, more efficient, less bloated government into reality. If Vice President Gore is the architect of better government, these state officials are the construction workers.

Whether Ervin and people like her will succeed remains to be seen. They are finding that taming the federal government is much tougher task than winning skirmishes in state government. In interviews with Government Executive, many of these officials conceded they were having difficulty matching their state successes in Washington. The federal government is so much bigger, they noted, its problems so much more intractable. Any reinvention effort can be subverted by a rigid bureaucracy, turf wars and political partisanship-all of which are more prevalent at the federal level. And the GOP majority in Congress seems to want to demolish, not reinvent, much of government.

The odds are daunting. But who could be better equipped for the job? During the 1980s, when many top Democrats retreated to Washington law firms, these political nomads spent years honing their skills in state capitals from Montpelier, Vt., to Salem, Ore. "Their state experience is in many cases invaluable because they have already wrestled with trying to reinvent government at the state level," says David Osborne, who chronicled many of these state officials' triumphs in his book Reinventing Government (Addison-Wesley, 1992). "The assumption among some federal officials that the state experience is irrelevant to the feds is just dead wrong."

With the Reagan and Bush Administrations slashing billions of dollars in federal aid to the states, governors learned to do more with less. "Under the pressure of changing events, states and localities became the places that were forced to rethink governance," says Doug Ross, a former top state administrator in Michigan and now assistant secretary for the Employment and Training Administration at the Labor Department.

"The states were remarkably successful in turning things around," adds Donald F. Kettl, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Much of the credit for that transformation goes to the middle managers in the states. The most recognizable officials in the Clinton Administration may be the academic superstars from Harvard and Yale, the high-powered K Street lawyers and Wall Street bankers, or even the campaign twentysomethings who landed glamour jobs in the White House. But many top agency posts went to Clinton's fellow one-time governors, people like Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt of Arizona and Education Secretary Richard W. Riley of South Carolina.

More importantly, Clinton's top lieutenants peopled their departments with the stars who had revolutionized their state governments. Like minor leaguers with impressive statistics, these state officials got their crack at the big time. They had made it to The Show.

"For those of us who had been out there, talking about policies that didn't work and railing against a Washington that had ceased to be a partner, there was an opportunity to be part of the solution, to turn around 12 years of problems," says Terence R. Duvernay Sr., a onetime top official in several states who served as Clinton's deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development until last fall. "And how do you do that except by coming to Washington?"

Size Matters

The biggest differences most state officials say they noticed when they joined the federal government had to do with size. The system-wide scope of the Clinton Administration's reinvention efforts still amazes some of the newcomers. "The whole National Performance Review is directed from the White House, so the opportunity for major changes is even greater here than in the states," says Marlene Johnson, the General Services Administration's associate administrator for management services and human resources and former lieutenant governor of Minnesota.

"If you think of yourself as a public manager, the federal government's scale is much bigger than anything at the state level in terms of both dollars and the number of employees," says deputy Labor secretary Thomas P. Glynn, a key adviser in the Vice President's reinvention effort. "And it is a much more complex management job."

"I've noticed a few more zeroes on my budget figures," jokes Molly H. Beattie, director of the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service and former deputy secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources in Vermont. Beattie's office in Montpelier didn't even have a computer, so she produced a detailed budget without using one. "I personally chased two-hundred-dollar errors through a 200-page document with a pencil," she recalls.

Though Beattie's fellow students at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government called Vermont a "toy state," she says working in a small state has its advantages. One is that an official gets to know how the entire government functions. "All I can think of is one of those kid's machines with the little cogs and wheels. And it's in plexiglass so you can see how it all works. Here [in Washington] you can't see how it all works."

Yet Vermont and Washington have at least one similarity, according to Beattie. Both have a highly competent, motivated civil service. Many of the people at Fish and Wildlife see the protection of wildlife as their life's calling, Beattie says. She has found these employees generally supportive of any change that will improve the institution's effectiveness.

Turning an Aircraft Carrier

Beattie's impression of the federal workforce is not shared by some other former state officials; they say the toughest part of their jobs is getting the gigantic federal bureaucracy to budge. Almost every state-turned-federal official has noticed that it's tougher to shift the direction of an aircraft carrier than a dinghy. "A lot of people get picked because of their policy expertise," says Labor's Glynn. And then someone says, 'Oh, by the way, how would you like to manage 40,000 people?' "

At the state level, said Duvernay in an interview before he left HUD, "we weren't entrenched in bureaucracy, so we could be more entrepreneurial. We could see a problem and find a solution that matched up in less time than we can now."

"The burden at the federal level is much worse," Glynn agrees. For instance, in two key jobs in Massachusetts, Glynn says he never got a memo signed by more than three people-"whereas I have not had one in Washington with as few as three.

"Part of that is the political environment," he says. "Part of it is policy. But the civil service at the federal level is much more inflexible than it is at the state level."

Under Gore's National Performance Review, part of the job for a manager like Glynn is simply to trim personnel. But Glynn also has worked at streamlining processes that too often require huge numbers of employees to complete each task. For instance, when Glynn arrived at Labor, it took 120 work steps to hire a new department employee. Between six and eight personnel specialists were needed. After studying the matter, Labor personnel officials cut the number of works steps to 47 and the number of personnel specialists needed to three or four.

Still, curbing the bureaucracy's clout is difficult. As director of the Michigan Commerce Department, for example, Ross was able to bring in a whole new team of officials, which made it easier to implement policy changes. In Washington, he says, "essentially you must succeed or fail with the career folks you inherited." Ross has found career Labor Department personnel much less willing to experiment with new ideas than were state workers in Michigan. "They tend to have fairly fixed ideas on how to do things," he adds.

Ross does support the concept of a permanent career civil service. But he argues that a new regime should be able to add greater numbers of its own people to counterbalance the number of recalcitrant civil servants who stay on even though they remain opposed to fundamental policy shifts.

Ross thinks civil servants should pay more attention to anti-government rumblings in the hinterlands. Bureaucrats "have a bigger stake [in the reinvention of government] than do the politicos," he says. "We come and go. This is their house. And their house is going to be torn down. Paradise is going to be paved over, and they're going to put up a parking lot unless they are able to become part of the future."

Powerful Constituencies

Another factor that frustrates federal reinvention efforts is the matrix of political appointees, interest groups and lobbyists who demand their say before policy can be implemented. At the state level, decisions can often be made without every single interested group signing off on the agreement.

Washington lobbyists expect each controversy to be resolved with a compromise that leaves each side able to claim victory. But on some issues, such as discussions about renewing the Endangered Species Act, says Beattie, that approach is not even legal. In those instances, the government is supposed to base its decision on the best scientific information, not simply broker between diverse interests, she adds. Washington groups have a difficult time divining the difference, Beattie says.

The sheer number of outside players is also a factor. In Michigan, Ross recalls, he could lunch with House leaders, the president of the state AFL-CIO and the head of the state's chamber of commerce. "Here, gathering the people who need to make decisions together is virtually impossible, so assembling a consensus or a majority coalition is vastly more difficult," Ross says.

Nor are disputes resolved the same way in Washington as in state capitals. In Washington, says Beattie, the feds still believe public involvement means putting representatives from all the various factions into a room. "That is generally a recipe for gridlock," she says. "You need to get the involvement of those interests. But you don't get it just by rounding them up and putting them in a corral together."

In Montpelier, for example, agencies rely on different kinds of public involvement. Sometimes that means putting opposing interests together on task forces that held hearings on various issues before making policy recommendations. "The understanding about public involvement is still somewhat primitive" in Washington, Beattie says.

One big problem, she says, is the federal government's requirement under the Federal Advisory Committee Act that every meeting and hearing follow strict guidelines requiring detailed recordkeeping. "It's essentially a show-stopper," Beattie says. "It's something everyone is afraid to take on because people don't want to say, 'I, a government official, am opposed to open government.' But we can't ask citizens to spend their lives learning legalistic procedures," Beattie says. "Not being able to turn to a group of citizens and say to them, 'what do you think?' is the single biggest inhibitor to good decisionmaking I have faced here.

Other Obstacles

Unduly restrictive congressional oversight, or "micromanagement," is another complaint state government officials have about working in the federal government. Off the record, virtually every former state government offical interviewed for this article complained about the involvement of Members of Congress or their staffs in the minutiae of agency decision making. "They want to get a little bit more into the job of the administrator than they should," says ex-HUD official Duvernay.

Ross, a former Michigan state legislator, views at least some of the congressional oversight as overkill. In today's decentralized world, Ross warns, Washington-particularly Congress-still favors centralization. "Congress does massive amounts of detailed direction and oversight. We in turn pass resources out to the states. And if that is not enough, the Inspector General goes out and investigates the smallest digression from any rule. It's hard to imagine a system that is less organized for success," he says.

Glynn has a somewhat more even-handed take on the relationship between the executive and legislative branches. "It's a partnership in Washington," he says. "If you are not good at that, then it is hard to be successful at the federal level."

Other state officials maintain that successful reinvention efforts may hinge on the reform of the government's internal processes. For instance, says DOE's Ervin, states like Missouri and Oregon outpace the feds in establishing a coherent budget process. "I find it very curious that we can have the fiscal 1996 budget developed before we know what [Congress's] appropriation will be for the previous year," she says.

Nor is the ubiquitous Washington press corps a help to the former state officials. Most state officials have found that in Washington, where politics is paramount, it is hard to get favorable coverage of successful government efforts. "It is difficult to break through in this environment," Glynn says, "particularly with good news."

But as Ervin has shown, it can be done, at least when the achievement, like her new energy-efficient light bulb, is one that can easily be explained to the public.