Gore’s Reinvented Government Aims to Slash Red Tape : Bureaucracy: Vice president’s proposal to slim the federal behemoth would eliminate 252,000 jobs. The plan to save $108 billion draws wide support.

Saying that the government is choking on its own red tape, Vice President Al Gore on Tuesday delivered his report on “reinventing government,” calling for elimination of 252,000 government jobs and thousands of pages of personnel and procurement regulations and the merger of dozens of duplicative federal agencies.

Under Gore’s plan, the government would offer buyouts and early retirement to an undetermined number of workers, but Administration officials acknowledge that layoffs could be needed to achieve the 252,000-person reduction. Taken together with military reductions already under way because of the end of the Cold War, the new plan would mean that the federal payroll--roughly 3.9 million people when Bill Clinton took office in January--would be cut by approximately 650,000 civilian and military personnel, or about 17%, over the next five years.

Clinton and Gore estimated that the proposed cutbacks and consolidations would save $108 billion over the next five years, although officials conceded that many of the cost savings are speculative--based on legislative proposals the Administration has not yet completed.

The three largest components of that savings would be personnel cutbacks, $40 billion; agency consolidations, $36 billion; and reforming the rules under which the government now buys $200 billion in goods and services each year, $22 billion.

Clinton’s political advisers said they see the government reform project as key to their hopes of convincing voters of two things: that government can work effectively to carry out the ambitious Clinton agenda and that the President is the sort of “new Democrat” he portrayed in his campaign. To that end, they did their best to lend drama to the otherwise arcane subjects of government personnel, procurement and budgeting.

Clinton plans to issue a series of executive orders over the next several weeks to implement parts of the plan. But aides acknowledged that even the provisions that could be enacted by the President alone are subject to congressional review. They conceded that in the end, Congress will have to act on virtually all of Clinton’s proposals before they can be fully effective. No action is likely until early next year.

Standing with Clinton on the White House South Lawn, backed by forklifts piled high with bound volumes of government regulations, Gore said that the main finding of his six-month National Performance Review is that Washington is in the grip of an “old-fashioned, outdated government. It’s government using a quill pen in the age of Word Perfect.”

Gore aides conceded that many of his proposals to change that situation have been put forward before, only to be rejected by Congress. But “there are some moments in history when it is possible to do this,” said David Osborne, the report’s principle author. “This is going to be a long, tough slog,” but popular anger at government waste, the political force represented by Ross Perot and the pressure to reduce spending have combined to change the political dynamics that blocked earlier reform efforts, he said.

Osborne may be right. At least initially, Gore’s proposals drew support from a wide range of Washington interests that usually are at each other’s throat--from government workers’ unions to Republican members of Congress.

Written in unusually blunt prose for a government document, Gore’s report painted a picture of a federal Establishment so terrified of the possibility of scandal that every conceivable activity has been surrounded by a web of inflexible rules.

Federal workers, the report said, “do everything by the book--whether it makes sense or not. They fill out forms that should never have been created, follow rules that should never have been imposed and prepare reports that serve no purpose.”

“In the name of controlling waste, we have created paralyzing inefficiency.”

The goal for reform, Gore and his aides argued, must be to eliminate much of that red tape and give federal workers the independent authority and accountability to do their jobs.

Under Gore’s proposal, the current 10,000-page personnel code, with its elaborate 18-level pay structure, would be scrapped and replaced by a system that would give government managers broad authority to hire, fire and promote workers within a simplified set of rules designed to keep political influence out of the civil service.

The equally complex federal procurement code would be eliminated, giving agencies power to buy what they need without going through cumbersome central purchasing agencies. For example, the report noted, the government now has nine pages of specifications devoted to “the precise dimensions, color, polish and markings required for simple glass ashtrays.”

Cutting personnel and procurement regulations would improve efficiency directly and also allow the elimination of tens of thousands of workers who now enforce those rules, Gore aides argued. Some 700,000 federal workers, nearly one-third of the entire work force, are paid simply to look over the shoulder of the rest of the work force, the report estimated.

In addition, dozens of federal agencies would be merged and others would be cut back.

The Agriculture Department would see some of the largest cuts. The department now runs about 12,000 field offices around the country, most of them dating back to the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Under Gore’s plan, which has been endorsed by Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, the department would close 10% of its offices and eliminate 30% of its 42 separate agencies. The department would also give up its responsibility for inspecting meat and poultry plants, turning that over to the Food and Drug Administration.

Another proposal would consolidate several federal law enforcement agencies--eventually folding both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms into the FBI. Administration officials conceded that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has reservations about that idea, noting that the pace of the consolidation must still be worked out with her.

Assisting Gore’s National Performance Review team was Brea City Manager Frank Benest, the author of a recently released book, “Rightsizing Local Governments.”

Benest said he helped form plans to consolidate field offices, which most federal agencies now have throughout the state. Recent changes in demographics and telecommunications suggest that these outposts should be consolidated where possible, he said.

Another set of recommendations would streamline operations by taking advantage of new technology. For example, the government would begin giving food stamp recipients a card--similar to a bank money card--that would allow them to draw their benefits electronically. The idea, already in place in Maryland, could save millions of dollars by reducing fraud and eliminating the current black market in food stamps, government auditors believe.

The proposal also permits taxpayers to use their credit cards to pay income tax bills.

While some of Gore’s proposals are new, many have been suggested before, and past attempts to reform government have had a mixed record. During the 1940s and 1950s, the reform commissions headed by former President Herbert Hoover had considerable success in revising a structure of government bureaus that dated to the Civil War.

The Jimmy Carter Administration also had considerable success with a major effort to reform the civil service, although government reorganization plans that Carter put forward largely died.

More recently, during the Ronald Reagan Administration, the so-called Grace Commission proposed thousands of recommendations that chairman Peter Grace claimed would save billions of dollars. But many of Grace’s suggestions were ideologically charged proposals to eliminate government services, which died amid the partisan distrust between congressional Democrats and Reagan.

Clinton was careful, at least for now, to avoid that sort of partisan trap. “The government is broken and we intend to fix it, but we can’t do it unless we all understand that this isn’t a Democratic goal or a Republican goal. This is an American imperative, and we all need to be a part of it,” he said.

At least initially, Republicans seemed willing to take him up on that. “Democrats have been the great defenders of government. But if it took Nixon to go to China, then perhaps it will take a Democrat to reform government,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who has been a leading Republican exponent of government reform.

“I don’t know of any Republican not willing to vote to reduce the cost of government,” said Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

Indeed, Clinton may face greater opposition from within his own party, for many of Gore’s proposals would challenge directly, in the name of efficiency, time-honored congressional practices of controlling turf and directing federal spending to the districts of committee chairmen and other senior majority-party legislators.

The report, for example, proposes saving almost $8 billion over the next five years by eliminating highway “demonstration” projects. These federally funded projects, inserted into the budget by senior members of Congress, include everything from bridge repairs to new street lights in selected districts.

Another target is congressionally mandated reports. Congress requires federal agencies to produce 5,348 separate reports each year, Gore noted. The result, his report argued, is to get in the way of real oversight: “Trapped in this blizzard of paperwork, no one is looking at results.”

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