HUD to Streamline by Dropping Regional Offices

Following up on the Clinton Administration’s “reinventing government” initiative, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans Wednesday to eliminate its 10 regional offices, the bureaucratic middlemen between Washington and the department’s field offices.

HUD and the Agriculture Department have been prime targets in the past for charges of bureaucratic excess and waste and are now in the forefront of the restructuring program. HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros said that no layoffs will result from the closings but that some employees may have to move to keep their jobs.

No direct cost savings are expected from the reorganization. Over the next six years, however, the department expects to save $150 million by cutting about 1,500 of its 13,500 employees through attrition or by inducing them to retire or resign by offering financial incentives, which first must be approved by Congress.

Vice President Al Gore, who is spearheading the Administration’s reinventing government crusade, had suggested that HUD close its 10 regional offices and shift employees to its 71 field offices.

The department instead decided to abolish the positions at those regional centers that were connected to regional oversight functions of the department but to keep the branches themselves open as field offices to serve the metropolitan areas where they are located. The number of field offices thus will increase to 81.

The branches in question are in San Francisco, Seattle, Ft. Worth, Kansas City, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

“There may be offices that will be closed but it’s too early to tell,” Cisneros said. “There will be, I expect, a pretty good amount of trauma, because people will be changing jobs.”

Gore applauded the plan as a “major step in de-layering and streamlining the HUD bureaucracy” that will increase the “responsiveness and accountability of the agency to its customers.”

The reorganization will enable the agency to improve its services without expanding its staff because it will reassign workers from bureaucratic posts to jobs dealing firsthand with those served by the department, primarily low-income Americans, Cisneros said.

It will give more authority to the department’s field offices and open direct lines of communication between the field office coordinators and the department’s top officials in Washington, Cisneros said.

“Some people say we are turning HUD upside down. I’d like to think we are turning it right side up,” Cisneros said.

The announcement puts HUD with the Department of Agriculture as the first agencies to announce their reinventing government strategies. Under Gore’s proposal, which he introduced in September, 252,000 federal jobs would be eliminated, agencies would be consolidated and red tape would be cut across the board to save $108 billion.

“There are two agencies that have gotten out ahead on reorganization--HUD and Agriculture,” said Elaine Kamarck, senior policy adviser to Gore.

Cisneros said that his department will try to find jobs for the 1,500 employees whose positions will be eliminated in the cities where they now work but that some will be asked to move to branches of the department in other cities. No one will be laid off because the department was shorthanded after cutting 4,000 positions in the 1980s.

Employees who are unable to adapt to positions serving agency clients, however, will be let go, Cisneros said.