Running on Empty

epublicans have to be wondering what it will take to get Americans angry about government waste again. After all, they have spent the past three months releasing report after report showing significant vulnerabilities across the federal hierarchy and have no public outrage to show for it.

Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., released a report in December showing that federal agencies made more than $19 billion in improper payments in fiscal 1999 and barely received a mention from the national press. Thompson upped the ante in January with a report showing that the federal government had wasted $221 billion over the past two decades, including $90 billion in uncollected taxes, and got the same result. House Republicans have hardly fared better. They released a report in late February on the "urgent need to address government fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement" and could not make the front page anywhere in the nation.

Perhaps Americans simply believe the war on waste cannot be won. Congressional investigations come with such regularity that they reinforce the notion. So do the government's promises to get better, the new laws guaranteeing immediate action and the next round of damning reports. Tell people enough times that government is plagued with fraud, waste and abuse, and they come to believe it. "Only $221 billion?" Americans might have asked Thompson. "We thought it was more."

Americans also may no longer trust the Republicans to lead the fight. Democrats now own the war on waste. They won it from Republicans by changing how candidates talk about big government. During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan accounted for all but one of the times either candidate used the words "fraud," "waste" and "abuse." The proof is in the University of Pennsylvania's database of every word uttered in recent presidential campaigns. Locked in the Rose Garden during the Iran hostage crisis, Carter was virtually silent on the issue. When voters heard someone talk about the evils of big government in 1980, they inevitably heard a Republican.

In 1992, however, it was a Democrat, not a Republican, who dominated the conversation about bureaucracy. Although both candidates were equally likely to use "fraud," "waste" and "abuse," President Bush almost always linked the words to the people who work in government-meaning the arrogant bureaucrats who steal power from the people. Clinton linked the words to red tape and unworkable programs. The only time Clinton used the word "bureaucrat" during the campaign was in a stock speech promising to fire them. The war on waste was no longer so much about waste, as it was about good people trapped in bad systems.

Running as an incumbent, Clinton changed his rhetoric slightly in 1996. Instead of attacking bureaucracy again, which would have undermined the reinventing government effort, Clinton simply claimed that the era of big government was over. "Yes, the government cannot solve all your problems with a big bureaucracy," he told a crowd in Albuquerque, N.M., in October 1996. "That government is gone. It was our administration-not our friends in the other party-that cut the size of the federal government to its lowest since John Kennedy was President." Republican candidate Bob Dole used fraud, waste and abuse nearly five times more frequently than Clinton, but to no avail. The war was over.

There is no evidence that Republicans will do any better with those three words this year, especially if they continue with the harsh attacks on federal bureaucrats that characterized the Bush and Dole campaigns. Nor can they succeed by merely turning up the volume, as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, did in promising to attack the mismanagement that "plagues" the federal bureaucracy. That is not how a party that has controlled Congress for six years talks about its own role in making government work better.

Republicans would be well advised to take a different tack. They need to recognize that government has gotten better.

Republicans have to start using words like "value," "results" and "investment." Although Americans still favor Republicans over Democrats when asked which party would do a better job managing government, voters also blame the party for the disastrous 1995 government shutdowns. Republicans have to invent a language for reassuring the nation that they will use their business acumen to reshape government, not to gut it.

Republicans could take the lead in talking about how the federal government can rebuild its demoralized workforce in today's overheated labor market. They could easily argue that the recent federal downsizing was so sloppy that it has jeopardized the government's ability to do its job. Doing so would commit the party to helping government compete for its fair share of talent, even if that means higher salaries for hard-to-fill positions.

Just as Nixon confounded the Democrats in 1972 by going to China, Republicans could reclaim the war on waste by declaring an end to the hostilities. That is a promise that would make the front page and stay there. And it is one the Democrats would do well to copy.

Paul C. Light is the author of The New Public Service (Brookings Institution Press, 1999).