Making Government a Quality Product : Gore Commission wants to improve efficiency and speed delivery of federal services. Panel gets 2,000 horror stories a week.

In the offices that serve as the headquarters for Vice President Al Gore’s crusade to bring badly needed efficiency and economy to the federal government hangs a quotation from the former plant manager of a communist-era Soviet machine tool factory:

“I can’t stand this proliferation of paperwork. It’s useless to fight the forms. You’ve got to kill the people producing them.”

What a bracing thought! It almost certainly was shared by the federal worker who wrote to Gore complaining that 23 people had to sign 23 forms before she was able to get a personal computer for her desk.

Similar horror stories about government inefficiency are piling up at the rate of 2,000 a week at Gore’s National Performance Review panel, which occupies rented space above President Clinton’s favorite downtown McDonald’s.

The initiative--also known as RIGO, Veep-speak for “reinventing government”--has become something of a nationwide suggestion box for federal employees. It’s overflowing.

There are the predictable tales--the Justice Department paying $40 to a landscaping service to cut the lawns of seized homes in Atlanta when local teen-agers are willing to do the job for $10 each; the Defense Department refusing to pay $30 for meals for an employee who saved $500 on air fare by staying over a Saturday night on a business trip.

But achieving small economies is not what really inspires the 200 denizens of the RIGO office. Their quest is nothing less than remaking the federal government in the image of the nation’s most successful private businesses.

“Our federal agencies were designed in the 1930s as copies of modern Industrial Age America. Things are different today,” says Bob Stone, project director for the National Performance Review, which ultimately will probably be known neither as RIGO nor NPR, but as the Gore Commission.

“The country has seen the transformation from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. We’re trying to bring the government into the Information Age and the 21st Century,” Stone says.

The group hopes to find ways to empower federal employees and improve the delivery of government services, whether it involves reducing the waiting period for receiving environmental permits or bringing competition to a host of functions now monopolized by government agencies.

In the government of Gore’s vision, if the manager of a post office can find a more efficient way to sell stamps or sort packages, he should be able to implement his ideas without going through a dozen layers of bureaucracy.

The idea, Stone says, is for government to put the customer--not the rule book--first.

The enterprise is under orders to produce a report by mid-September recommending ways to accomplish its mandate. The rent is paid until Sept. 15, after which the staffers will return to the government agencies or private businesses whence they came.

The final report will likely find a worthy place on a shelf next to its forebears, the reports of the Grace Commission of the early 1980s and the Hoover Commission of the 1940s, both of which recommended hundreds of largely ignored ways to improve the way government operates.

“A lot of these things we’re doing have been thought of before. Everything’s been thought of before,” concedes Stone, who is on loan from the Pentagon, where he has been a senior civilian official for more than 20 years. “The secret is to think of it again.”

While the goal of the Gore Commission is to find ways to streamline government, don’t expect to see any agencies eliminated or merged.

“Gore’s guidance was not to move boxes around. He wants us to lay out what kind of government we ought to have for the next century, describe the impediments along the way and recommend what we ought to do to get there,” Stone says.

So what is the Gore Commission after?

Total quality management--the byword of business consultant W. Edwards Deming, who for more than 50 years has preached a single-minded devotion to quality in manufacturing, management and business culture. TQM, which is as much a state of mind as a way of making widgets, has been adopted by scores of companies.

It puts a premium on shop-floor-level decision making, greater cooperation between labor and management, timely delivery of parts and finished products, elimination of layers of bureaucracy and a vast reduction in paperwork.

The models for the Gore Commission--the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, Southwest Airlines and GM’s Saturn Corp.--are all managed by avowed disciples of TQM.

“Gore has said that he wants to bring the quality revolution that swept America over the past 15 years to the federal government,” Stone says.