Gore Likely to Revive Call for Customs-INS Merger : Government: Familiar plans for multiyear budgets, reduced red tape are expected. Earlier proposals failed.

Sixteen years ago as they struggled to find ways to make the government less cumbersome, aides to then-President Jimmy Carter proposed merging functions of the Customs and Immigration and Naturalization services. Opposed by bureaucrats and powerful members of Congress, the idea died quietly.

Tuesday, as Vice President Al Gore presents the report of his National Performance Review, the Customs-INS merger likely will be back again. So, too, will such often-advocated proposals as multiyear budgets, streamlined civil service procedures for firing the incompetent and promoting the meritorious and reduced red tape for buying goods and services.

This time, Gore’s aides and President Clinton’s advisers insist, those proposals and others actually will become law. With public disenchantment toward government at record levels, Gore’s proposals to “reinvent government” provide a crucial opportunity for Clinton to reach out to the voters he needs in order to cement a governing majority--backers of Ross Perot, conservative Democrats and independents disillusioned by government waste. The power of those voters, Clinton advisers hope, will force members of Congress to accept changes that they have rejected in the past.

Given history, however, many in Washington view the whole effort with considerable skepticism.

There is no doubt about the ambition of Gore’s agenda. Among the roughly 1,200 separate recommendations in his report are proposals to:

* Abolish many of the government’s central purchasing programs, giving individual agencies the flexibility to buy routine items--from floor polish to paper goods. Current rules are so cumbersome that some agencies are still finishing paperwork to buy computers with Intel 286-series processing chips--machines that became obsolete five years ago.

* Eliminate thousands of detailed personnel regulations that hogtie government managers and often prevent either the firing of incompetent workers or the promotion of meritorious ones.

* Change “use it or lose it” spending rules that provide incentives for agency managers to go on binges aimed at spending budgeted funds before the fiscal year ends.

* Make the government more “consumer friendly” by, for example, allowing people to pay tax bills by credit card and guaranteeing that Social Security offices respond to inquiries within a set time limit.

* Loosen the “prevailing wage” rules that mandate the payment of union wage scales on all government-funded construction projects.

* Streamline the middle-management layer of government with an eye toward meeting Clinton’s goal of cutting 100,000 jobs from the work force of more than 2 million federal workers by the end of the next four years. Gore is expected to claim that his review will allow that goal to be exceeded, perhaps even doubled.

* Cut the number of field offices of large agencies such as the Agriculture Department, which maintains more than 7,000 offices around the country, many in areas that have long-since stopped being farming regions.

* Eliminate duplication by combining federal agencies whose responsibilities overlap.

While Gore’s aides insist the last recommendation is not the centerpiece of the plan, proposals to realign federal agencies are certain to attract a disproportionate share of attention and controversy.

For example, auditors for the performance review have determined that 140 federal agencies--from the CIA to the National Park Service--have some form of law enforcement powers, many of which overlap. In addition to proposing that Customs and the INS combine their border control powers in a single agency, the report also will recommend that the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms turn over its law enforcement authority to the FBI. The FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration also would be merged, say officials familiar with drafts of the report.

The attorney general would also be given new authority to coordinate the work of all federal law enforcement agencies, much the way the director of central intelligence is supposed to coordinate federal intelligence activities.

On the regulatory front, Gore will recommend taking the food inspection powers shared by 12 agencies--including the Agriculture Department, which inspects meat and poultry, and the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for processed foods--and turn them all over to the FDA. Consumer groups have applauded that idea, believing the FDA has been far more vigorous than other agencies in policing producers.

At the same time, Gore will recommend that some regulatory activities be turned over to the private sector, giving companies the ability to carry out their own inspections under certain safety laws with government supervision.

Many of those proposals are certain to encounter the same forces of inertia and opposition that killed most of Carter’s government reform proposals.

On Thursday, for example, as officials of the performance review task force scampered to get final drafts of their report ready for printing, two secretaries at the task force switchboard struggled to keep ahead of angry calls coming in every 20 to 30 seconds.

The day before, a union representing railroad workers had published the task force’s telephone number, urging members to protest a proposal that the government’s railroad retirement benefits program be merged with Social Security. All day long, the phone had not stopped ringing.

“They’re getting pretty well beat up today,” said Billy Hamilton, an aide to Texas Comptroller John Sharpe, who has been helping run the project. “We’ll get beat up a lot more.”

Sharpe’s experience with the Texas Performance Review in 1991 has been instrumental in shaping the Administration’s approach. The Sharpe plan, which recommended a thorough reorganization of the state’s government, drew howls of outrage from entrenched interests, applause from the state’s voters and national attention from Democrats, such as Clinton and Gore, looking for ways to help convince Americans that their government can be made more responsive and efficient.

But as Hamilton noted, Sharpe possessed an advantage that Clinton and Gore lack. Texas legislators had to produce a balanced budget and, to get there, they either had to accept Sharpe’s recommendations to cut spending or pass a new tax bill. Sharpe used the vehicle of budget cutting to propose a number of overdue steps to reform government services, but ultimately, his project was driven by budget deadlines that the Legislature could not escape.

This time around, the priorities are reversed. Clinton and Gore hope to use their plan to significantly reform how government works--changing its underlying culture and the incentives that encourage bureaucrats toward wasteful practices.

As a byproduct, they also hope the review will yield some short-term savings that would help Clinton fulfill his promise to members of Congress last month that he would propose a second round of budget cuts this fall.

But in the absence of a Texas-style budget deadline, Clinton has no way of forcing Congress to act.

“This is one of the most important initiatives of the Clinton Administration,” insisted Al From, a Clinton adviser and head of the Democratic Leadership Council. Clinton will be able to rally support for his activist government philosophy only if he can convince skeptical voters that he is taking steps to make government work, From said.

The problem, Administration supporters conceded, is that Clinton has only limited time. The President plans several days of events immediately after the presentation of Gore’s report that he will use to rally support for it. Included among those events will be the signing of several executive orders designed to put some of Gore’s recommendations into action. Other recommendations will require legislation that the Administration plans to submit later.

But after a few days focusing on the reinventing government project, Clinton will have to change the subject to begin the battle for the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. And the week after that, Clinton plans to unveil his huge health care reform plan.

Inevitably, officials conceded, dealing with three such controversial matters at once will detract from the public attention that can be focused on Gore’s report.

Indeed, during the transition last fall, a senior Carter Administration official--ruefully remembering the problems his boss encountered--offered two pieces of advice to Clinton’s team that Gore and his staff may in the end wish they had taken:

“Avoid reorganizations,” the Carter official said, and “don’t take on too much at once.”

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.