Management Counts

Does it matter that John F. Kerry isn't paying much attention to executive branch management? We would answer yes. Like motherhood, good management is a laudable virtue, and Lord knows that government could use more of it. In a presidential campaign, the subject can serve as a useful proxy for candidates' views on the size and role of government.

New Democrats like Bill Clinton distanced themselves from the tax-and-spend image their party had accumulated. The White House-based National Partnership for Reinventing Government, and officials like Elaine Kamarck, Morley Winograd and Bob Stone, stood for a less bureaucratic, leaner and more responsive government. They oversaw a reduction in the bureaucracy, for which Clinton could claim credit even though the end of the Cold War made most of it possible.

In a careful parsing of the Kerry record, Jason Peckenpaugh finds little by way of a management agenda. Throwing a bone to federal employee unions, the senator pledges to stop the current competitive sourcing initiative and to eliminate 100,000 federal contractor jobs. That message is hardly New Democrat, since it ignores the basic principle that most work should be assigned where it can be done most efficiently, and seems to imply enlarging the bureaucracy by an equivalent number. His piecemeal pledges do not amount to a careful program. And thus Kerry has ceded the government efficiency platform to President Bush, at least so far.

Good management can improve government programs, as is seen this month in stories about innovative efforts to destigmatize the food stamps program and extend its reach, and to improve the performance of call centers serving veterans, education beneficiaries and people threatened by violent weather.

Conversely, bad management can hurt. The hurry-up postwar effort in Iraq showed little concern for sound organizational principles, especially in contracting for work from private-sector suppliers, as a pair of stories by Katherine McIntire Peters and Shane Harris demonstrate. Extensive digging by Harris and Deputy Editor Anne Laurent produced a fascinating glimpse of the impenetrable web of relationships in this endeavor.

Contractors sometimes underperform, but government cannot do without them. And in many cases, first-class companies conceive technological and management advances that benefit government.

In June, during a tour of Hewlett-Packard laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., I saw high-tech advances in digital publishing and radio frequency identification. In one corner of the labs was a bank of 1,000 servers set up to provide, at night, half of the computing power DreamWorks SKG needed to animate the hit film, Shrek 2. During the day, it could serve others with heavy computing needs. This was a demonstration of "utility" computing, or sharing of computing resources-a management idea offering efficiency opportunities to stovepiped federal agencies.

The tenet that management can matter is central to Government Executive's coverage, and also to the mission of the nonpartisan National Academy of Public Administration. We have invited NAPA experts to outline a salutary management agenda for the next presidential term. The first in their series of columns can be found here.