Parable of Power

Druyun was a leader in the governmentwide movement to break the shackles of the old, excessively cautious acquisition system that was so paperbound as to give red tape a bad name. On a policy level, that movement was led from the White House by Steven Kelman, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, who pushed government to adopt more businesslike acquisition practices. After Congress authorized a series of reforms in the mid-1990s, Kelman and others exhorted federal acquisition officials to diminish their extreme aversion to risk.

As with any such reform, results would be achieved only if agency officials took up the cudgels, and Druyun was a believer. At NASA, she was a key player in Administrator Daniel Goldin's drive for "faster, better, cheaper" space systems. Then she moved to the Air Force, where she had begun her career, and became known as a tenacious defender of programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter, the F/A-22 Raptor, and the C-17 cargo transport. To keep Air Force programs moving, she devised what she called "lightning bolt" acquisition reforms to save time and money.

It was inevitable that Druyun would become involved in the most recent big Air Force initiative-procurement of new refueling tankers from Boeing. That deal again involved pushing the normal rules of acquisition-by structuring the deal as a lease to save the Air Force from having to secure a huge appropriation in the near term. The terms were controversial both in the Pentagon and in Congress. But the deal was important to Boeing, and Druyun was in a position to help make it happen.

Did the stretch-the-rules philosophy that came to characterize some of these Air Force deals spill over into Druyun's personal ambitions? Perhaps there is no connection, but investigators are now probing contacts between Druyun and high-ranking Boeing executives-reportedly with her daughter, a Boeing employee, as a go-between-about going to work for the company once her federal career came to an end. She did take a job with Boeing, but when her talks with the company's chief financial officer, Michael Sears, became public, both Sears and Druyun lost their jobs and Philip Condit, the company's chairman, resigned.

It is tempting to see this sad story as a parable about the troubles that can arise as federal agencies' business is increasingly entwined with people and institutions in the private sector. The interrelationship is on the rise, of course, for reasons including the ever-growing technological specialization in our economy and the unwillingness of successive administrations and Congresses to invest in the civil service. The hoary "revolving door" story, with its ever-present whiff of scandal, thus is gaining new life. Watch for more to come, as the Defense Department has opened a broad-ranging investigation of conditions under which other high-level Pentagon officials have been hired by defense contractors in recent years.

As Government Executive has chronicled the difficulties of the public sector over the past decade, readers have benefited from the research and writing of Paul Light. As a professor, Senate staff member and key thinker on Paul Volcker's National Commission on the Public Service, Paul developed a keen understanding of public sector problems. As director of the Public Policy Program at The Pew Charitable Trusts, he funded research to document trends and find solutions-including our own Federal Performance Project. As director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, he put its Center for the Public Service at the heart of government improvement efforts. With research on such topics as the "true size of government," he was important in making the health of the public sector an important topic for debate.

In monthly columns for Government Executive, Light pulled no punches. For example, he called on Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, "to stop the madness of random contracting out." All in all, he was a tour-de-force, a one-man Charge of the Light Brigade-the single-handed equal of the 600 men who rode into the Valley of Death at the Battle of Balaclava in 1855. The last of Light's "Last Word" columns was published last month. We will miss him.