Obama could follow hybrid approach to government reform

Fifteen years ago, President Clinton launched a bold, free-wheeling initiative to cut red tape and improve government efficiency. Eight years later, President George W. Bush introduced a more structured and targeted reform platform to strengthen agency-level management capacity and boost program performance and results.

These two initiatives could now serve as models for President-elect Barack Obama.

Management specialists, some of whom worked on the reform efforts of Clinton and Bush or served as advisers, expect that Obama will design a plan focused on transparency, outcome-driven results and increased coordination with Congress. But, unlike his predecessors -- who generally scrapped the work of the previous administration -- Obama is apt to cherry-pick the most successful and applicable aspects of Clinton's National Performance Review and Bush's President's Management Agenda, observers said.

"The world has changed so much that neither the Clinton nor the Bush model would work right now," said John Kamensky, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, who served as deputy director of the National Performance Review. "We need a third model. There have been tectonic shifts in government, and we need a model that captures that whole notion."

Clinton ran the National Performance Review out of the office of Vice President Al Gore, who, for the most part, shunned help from agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. Clinton officials felt that OMB and OPM's one-size-fits-all approach had been unsuccessful so they formed their own dedicated staffs and agency-based teams.

Bush, on the other hand, relied heavily on OMB and OPM to implement his reform effort. Clay Johnson, OMB's deputy director for management, was charged with leading the President's Management Agenda.

"OMB is the White House's institutional memory and its deepest source of expertise," said Robert Shea, who until recently served as associate director of administration and government performance at the office. "If the president and his team want to get anything done, they should rely on OMB's deep expertise, talent, and institutional memory."

But, the Obama team is likely to take a hybrid approach, several observers said, using White House staff for leadership of his reform agenda and OMB for operational support and expertise.

In September, Obama announced plans for a "SWAT team" that would work with agency leaders and OMB to improve results for government programs while eliminating waste and inefficiency. Obama said the team would be made up of "top-performing and highly paid government professionals" and would be headed by a new chief performance officer, who would report directly to him.

The president-elect has not indicated whether the chief performance officer would serve as a management czar in the model of Gore and Johnson, or if the duties of this yet unnamed official would be limited to agency reviews.

It is also not clear how broad of a management reform program Obama plans to embrace. With the exception of his SWAT team initiative and his vow to "fundamentally reconfigure" Bush's Performance Assessment Rating Tool, Obama's management plans have been lacking in details.

He promised a line-by-line review of the federal budget, to cut spending on contracts by 10 percent and to fire managers of poor-performing programs. But Obama has given no indication of the time frame for these proposals, who might execute them or whether they will be integrated into a larger reform plan.

Shea said stovepiping smaller initiatives and failing to incorporate them into a larger management plan could be a mistake.

"This has to be integrated into how you do business and not just an initiative you comply with separate from other policy initiatives," he said. "If you don't have the management competencies integrated into all of your objectives then they won't be as successful as they could be."

In addition to management personnel, Obama must select a method of engagement and encouragement for front-line employees, Kamensky said. Clinton officials communicated directly with those involved in the National Performance Review, handing out "hammer awards," advocating reinvention labs and creating e-mail networks.

Bush used a more systematic chain-of-command approach in which policies were implemented directly through agency political leaders. And, rather than handing out tokens of achievement, Johnson tried to prod agencies into improving poor performance by publicly releasing quarterly traffic-light-style score cards.

While past reform efforts have focused on vertical approaches to management -- top-down or bottom-up operations -- observers said the next reorganization must be approached horizontally, across not only federal agencies, but state and local governments and nongovernmental organizations.

"You can't solve the fiscal crisis or fix food safety or address a hurricane with just one agency," Kamensky said. "It reaches across agency boundaries and often across public and private sector boundaries. So it's about, how do you create a system or an approach around an outcome that no one agency controls?"

Kamensky and Jonathan Breul, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, recently wrote a report recommending that Obama start early on any government reform efforts, define the scope of initiatives in advance and secure top-level support from stakeholders. The authors also advised the incoming president to invest in a long-term implementation strategy, including selecting dedicated staff to carry out the mission, creating a roadmap for action and obtaining support from Congress; a failure to engage lawmakers was a weakness of both Clinton and Bush's plans.

But, while a lessons-learned approach may help Obama avoid past pitfalls, questions remain.

After 14 governmentwide reform efforts in the past century, there is no obvious big idea or ideological prescription in management reform, said Don Kettl, a political analyst and University of Pennsylvania professor who has written extensively about government reform.

"We have essentially reached the natural, logical end of the strategy of management reform," Kettl said. "We had a whole series of efforts to empower government employees and to measure the performance of programs and we've essentially run out the string … So what we are likely to have, and what we need, is an effort to polish up and burnish the efforts of both previous administrations, but also to think about what the next steps ought to be in a much more creative way."