The ties that bind

hen we decided last November to monitor the "midnight" regulations expected from the Clinton administration, we had no idea how large this undertaking would turn out to be. But as the weeks passed, it became apparent that Bill Clinton and his minions were not going to go quietly into the night.

The Federal Register swelled to the bursting point-nearly 2,000 pages published in four volumes just in the final two days of the administration, bringing the total in the first three weeks of January to 7,372 pages.

When the time came in January to choose a cover image for this issue, we could think of no better symbol of the incoming President's dilemma than that of Harry Houdini in chains. To the famous poster of Houdini we added George W. Bush's face and some red tape connoting the regulatory bind outgoing administration officials created for their successors. In his cover story, Cyril T. Zaneski describes both the scope of the ultimate Clinton regulatory surge and the means President Bush has to reverse it.

Gaining control of the regulatory functions of government will be an important objective for the new administration, and a more restrained view of federal regulation is likely to be one of its hallmarks. Many other management challenges await the Bush administration as well.

An interesting view of them surfaced during a Jan. 19 confirmation hearing held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee for Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the new director of the Office of Management and Budget. It came from Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who during four years as committee chairman has reached conclusions that cut across the grain of ordinary Republican thinking.

He is, not surprisingly, upset that more progress has not been made to improve performance of federal agencies despite several important laws enacted in the 1990s to encourage such results. A symbol of the failure is the General Accounting Office's annual list of "high- risk" programs exposing taxpayers to many billions of dollars of potential losses; that list is not shrinking as fast as Thompson and others believe it should.

But Thompson also has come to the unorthodox opinion that larger investments should be made to bring under-performing programs up to standard. He noted during the hearing that congressional budget cutters have long focused on the discretionary accounts that fund the operations of government, while failing to reform the mandatory, or entitlement, programs that are twice as large in the aggregate. Reform in the latter accounts, he observed, would free up resources to address problems with agency operations. Thompson complained that government is "letting our infrastructure crumble," citing in particular the national parks and weapons laboratories. He advocated more investment in research, saying this could help focus federal investment in domestic programs on issues like education and juvenile crime. "The most ardent fiscal conservative needs to recognize that there are some things the federal government ought to be doing better and more of," Thompson said.

For those of us who have long lamented the "hollow government" problem afflicting many agencies, Thompson's conclusions come as a welcome new line of analysis from an influential senator.