THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE

The complexities of management are rarely of great interest to politicians, whose primary passion is usually policy. Even Jimmy Carter, the President probably most interested in the science of government, confessed that he found the minutiae of civil service reform boring. Yet, George Nesterczuk, who served in Ronald Reagan's Office of Personnel Management as well as in Cabinet departments, declares that it is essential for the President to appreciate the importance of his commitment to a management agenda. Failure to do so, Nesterczuk says, will make it difficult for the President to mobilize the government around his policies:

Holding [political leaders] accountable is the natural way of managing government. You do not need to micromanage those people. If you've entrusted them with your agenda, if you keep them in the loop through Cabinet meetings, through senior-level staff meetings, then you don't need to manage the agenda. If you go off track, you always have the option of letting them go and replacing them with someone else. Unlike a career civil servant who is there long after you're gone, political leadership can be changed. That's really the way we do manage a political agenda: that ultimate accountability of replacement, losing the job.

The extent to which that kind of flexibility could be extended into the federal workforce will depend on a President's management agenda. Just as every President comes in with an agenda with some vision for the world order, some vision for social policy, economic policy, tax policy, you need to devote some attention to the management side of the picture.

In order to appreciate the President's proper role as head of government, it is useful to distinguish between two broad approaches that have been taken by most occupants of the Oval Office. Charles Kolb, who served in both the Reagan and Bush Administrations, believes that Presidents can be divided into two broad types: conviction or managerial leaders. This distinction, Kolb believes, predicts the degree of success Presidents have in achieving their agenda:

I have a bias that the most successful Presidents, at least in the 20th century, have tended to be "conviction Presidents," as opposed to what I call "managerial Presidents." It doesn't mean that all managerial Presidents are failures; but conviction Presidents, I think, tend to have a longer impact on the affairs of the country. As conviction Presidents, I would rate [Franklin] Roosevelt, [Harry] Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan. As managerial Presidents, [Dwight] Eisenhower, [John F.] Kennedy, [Richard] Nixon, [Gerald] Ford, [Jimmy] Carter, [George] Bush, and [Bill] Clinton.

Still, adds Kolb, a conviction President will not necessarily achieve the restructuring of the government that he may want:

Let me give you an example. Ronald Reagan, I think, was an outstanding conviction President, but many of you will remember when Ronald Reagan came to town, he wanted to abolish the Department of Education, crusaded with vigilance to eliminate the Department of Education.

When Ronald Reagan came to Washington, there were 150 separate federal education programs. The first couple of years there was a block grant that consolidated a number of those programs, it went from 150 down to 120. When Ronald Reagan left Washington and George Bush became President, how many federal education programs were there? Anybody remember? 208.

Kolb maintains that such failures occur because new administrations inherit a governmental structure that does not focus on the new President's agenda. This does not mean that civil servants are bad people, Kolb emphasizes, but that they simply have no particular commitment to the new President's perspective on government.

As a result, says Robert Maranto, who taught at the Federal Executive Institute, the President must understand something basic: He is not the top manager or classic CEO of a corporation; but he is a leader:

The President is not a manager. One manages an office. One does not manage the 2 million-person executive branch of government. It's a big elephant. You try to push it and pull it. You don't really manage it. I think what a President can do is set the conditions for good management....

Instead of managing, what the President does, one hopes, is lead. Presidential leadership skills are very different from management skills. A great President--and I think all the previous speakers have mentioned this in one way or another--knows his goals, sells those goals to the administration and to the American people, and selects people who can implement those goals. A President does not get down in the weeds to figure out exactly how his goals are being implemented.

In contrast, a manager is someone who can adapt and adopt someone else's vision and implement that vision. A good government manager is patriotic, hard-working, honest, and politically astute but has to be flexible enough to implement either Democratic or Republican visions of the national interest.

This perspective, adds Maranto, explains why a President like Ronald Reagan was relatively successful in running the government:

Ronald Reagan, in my view, would have made a very poor government manager.

He was very inattentive to detail, arguably even occasionally lazy. Because Reagan had strong convictions, it's impossible for me to imagine him implementing, say, Jimmy Carter's fiscal policy or Richard Nixon's foreign policy. He just couldn't have done it.

Reagan would have made a very poor career government manager, but he was, I think, a pretty good President. He knew what he wanted to do. He was able to persuade both his own Administration and the American people that it was the right thing to do. He was good at picking people to implement his vision.

LEADING THE CIVIL SERVICE

The President's senior officials must echo his leadership and dedication in order for a sense of commitment to permeate the government. Don Devine directed the Office of Personnel Management under Ronald Reagan and is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. Like others in the Reagan Administration, Devine argues that the universal sense of commitment was a key element in the success of the Administration in motivating a skeptical civil service. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese notes that the top White House staff and the President urged senior agency appointees to make every effort to impart Reagan's mission to their civil servants (see Chapter 3).

Both Meese and Devine, however, concede that in many administrations--even in the Reagan Administration--this charge was not always achieved, in part because there are always appointees who do not see the enactment of the President's program as their highest priority. As Devine explains:

A very large percentage, even in the Reagan Administration, did not have [Reagan's program] as their first priority. As someone said in a later administration, comparing it to Reagan, "What do you think about Reagan's recruiting people on a basis of ideology?" This personnel officer said, "We don't believe in ideology in this administration. We believe in resumes."

Describing his experience in the Bush Administration, Charles Kolb explains that simple everyday concerns can weaken the determination of presidential appointees:

Let me give you the exact statement that was said by one senior person in that administration: "Our people don't have agendas. They have mortgages. They want jobs." I submit to you there is a fundamental difference in perspective if your first goal is paying your mortgage as opposed to figuring out how to implement an agenda.

Kolb points out, however, that if appointees do have a sense of purpose and are willing to deal with the civil service in a straightforward and sensible way, they can gain the support of their permanent staff:

[Education Secretary William] Bennett wanted to reduce the number of regulations that the Education Department was issuing, so he put in place a task force basically to try and deregulate the department. I remember working on that task force.

One of the things we tried to do was to get the bureaucracy to examine itself--not an easy thing. We had people from 20 different offices around the department get together. I remember proposing to them one day that we go through an exercise which I literally called "dumb things that we do." This was by and large with the career bureaucracy.

They looked at me like I was crazy. You want us to do what? Examine what we currently do in terms of issuing proposed rules and other things and come back in two weeks with an example of a dumb thing that we do? Do you want me to lose my job? I went first with some stupid things we did in the General Counsel's Office. That kind of raised the comfort level.

Throughout the course of the next year, people got into this. They realized I wasn't trying to get them to report on themselves. I wasn't trying to get them to lose their jobs. I was trying to get them to be more efficient in dealing with their customers, the people they regulated or the people they shouldn't be regulating. So if you can do something like that, you can get a sense of self-perspective, step back, take a look at what you're doing.

Gerald Carmen, who was Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) in the first Reagan term, adds that when appointees work with the civil service, it is critically important that they not give in to the hysteria with which the bureaucracy will respond to change:

I met with about 50 of the key executives in GSA around a huge table to discuss what we were going to do [about budget cuts]. If you had heard the moaning and groaning around that room from every department head, from every commission head, from everybody's head. It was unbelievable.

They went around the room, and they explained how people would be in the streets. People would be out of work. Press would be bad. It was a total disaster for some 30,000 people.

I kept looking at the budget in front of me, and it had millions of dollars of training. It had millions of dollars in travel. It had millions of dollars in this. It had millions of dollars in that. None of which I probably understood, but I understood a dollar sign. Finally, they came back to me. I said, "Look, fellows and gals, we're keeping both those cuts. I'm not putting anybody on the street. You are. You've got a budget that includes a lot of things besides people. If you can handle it the way you should, people would be working for us at the end of September. If you can't, it's your fault, not mine." Come the middle of budget year, we had a surplus. Nobody was on the street. Everything ran like clockwork. ...

These obstacles that we faced in government that are thrown up by those who actually know how to run government versus those of us that didn't, aren't real. If you know what the President wants, and if you get advice from the White House as we had from Ed Meese or from Joe Wright and the others that were there, you can get this job done.

Robert Maranto notes that while cooperation with the civil service makes eminent sense, political appointees must assess who will be cooperative and uncooperative, and plan accordingly:

For the appointees themselves, I would urge them to conduct reconnaissance of their new agencies by asking all the previous appointees they can find of either party, of any administration, which career bureaucrats they can work with and which ones they have to watch. More often than not, political appointees, even of different parties, will agree on which career executives are effective, which are ineffective, and which are speed bumps, and you deal with all of those.

THE NATURE OF THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY

Although many Americans think generally of the federal government as a huge corporation, in reality it functions profoundly differently than do private institutions. It poses an enormous challenge to a President attempting to move the government in a particular direction.

Maranto explains that there are several key differences that a President must confront. For example, long-term planning is difficult, if not impossible, in government. Severe limits exist on the ability of government managers to redeploy resources and people and to hire the people they need to complete a job. Moreover, says Maranto:

A government is a fish bowl. Imagine if in a private corporation your chief competitors served on your board of directors. That's really the situation in government. That's the situation that the founding fathers gave us, and it mostly works fairly well. But it is a great vexation to those in the executive branch of government. As one of my friends who's a career civil servant likes to put it, we have a bunch of micromanaging opportunists in Congress. It's true now. It's always been true. It will always be true.

More than anything else, in business we know our goals and we know our measures of success. At least in the days before e-commerce, success was measured in terms of profits: Are you making money? How do we measure the goals of government organizations when we can't agree on what they should be doing?

In part because of the process by which Congress creates government programs, often with inadequate attention to programs already in existence, government agencies tend to be balkanized and uncoordinated. As a result, is it often difficult for the head of an agency to obtain the information needed to make good decisions. When Edwin Meese became Attorney General during the Reagan Administration, he took a number of steps to tackle this problem:

One of the things that I found when I took over the Department of Justice is that you have a lot of duchies and fiefdoms. It's hard to get them to talk to each other.

So I set up four boards that were crosscutting boards. One was a departmental resources board, which brought division heads for the first time into the budgeting process. I put my deputy as the chairman of that board. The Director of the FBI was on it and a couple of other people. Before that, budgets had been made by what I call the green eyeshade people, the accountants. Now, because you had management people deciding the budget for the department and making the recommendations to me, all of a sudden division heads started coming to those meetings. So you had a crosscurrent of information there from the people in charge.

I set up a personnel policy board, which did the same thing and brought people discussing what the personnel policies would be so we'd have a common personnel policy throughout the department.

A third board was our strategic planning board that was made up of the heads of all of our principal components so that they would be talking about where the department ought to be five years from now, which was one year after our administration would have left, but so that they would at least be working in that direction, be looking at e-commerce--e-commerce wasn't in the field then, but those kinds of future developments.

The fourth one, which was an interesting one to me, was a research and development board. Government does a lot of research. Every department does. We had research happening in the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons, all over, including the agencies that were supposed to do research like the National Institute of Justice. Nobody had ever coordinated the research. This board's purpose was to coordinate research projects. The first thing they did was do an inventory of all the research projects. They found the department was doing, I think, 687 different projects, many of them in the same field but without any coordination between them.

IMPROVING PERFORMANCE

Joseph Wright, who served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget during Ronald Reagan's presidency, warns that it is difficult for a President to improve the management of the federal government. Wright notes that history is littered with short-lived attempts to introduce management improvements:

Every four years, around six months before the presidential election, transition teams begin developing policy and personnel position papers for their incoming White House victors. Seldom do their efforts include recommendations on how to "manage" the vast enterprise that they plan to inherit. The President normally focuses on that later in his first year in office.

Almost every recent President eventually initiated numerous efforts to improve the management of the federal government once they realized that improvement was badly needed. But few of these efforts have survived the particular administration during which the initiative was announced. For example, President Johnson introduced a "war on waste" and the PPBS (Planning, Programming, Budgeting System) program throughout the executive branch, which was not continued under President Nixon.

President Nixon introduced FAR (Federal Assistance Review), which established departmental geographic regions, regional councils, and simplification of procurements and grants. The President also issued Circular A-44, which initiated a government-wide management improvement program. Under this program, OMB "Swat teams" held meetings with departments and agencies to set up goals for management improvement and to monitor the progress in achieving these goals. Finally, in 1974, the President established a government-wide MBO (Management by Objectives) system and announced it in his budget message. Most of these ambitious efforts established by President Nixon did not survive his Administration.

President Ford in 1976 initiated the PMI (President Management Initiatives) [program] to identify management improvement efforts, integrate these efforts into the budget process, and monitor the results. The PMI program was discontinued when President Carter was elected.

President Carter issued Circular A-117 (management improvement and the use of evaluation in the executive branch), where departments and agencies were asked to make management improvements following the best practices of both government and business and this effort was combined with zero-based budgeting. This effort was discontinued when President Reagan was elected.

President Reagan set up management reviews as part of the budget review process with the agencies. He also strengthened the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE), made up of the inspectors general in the agencies, to identify management improvements in support of their efforts to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. He also issued a management report with each annual budget; installed the first government-wide chief financial officer; initiated standardization and consolidation of government-wide financial accounting, payroll, and personnel systems; installed the first government-wide ATM and lockbox system for cash management; began the use of credit cards for government employee expenses and purchases; and worked with Congress to improve credit management and controls. He called this ambitious effort "Reform 88," but as in the past, many of his initiatives were discontinued, even the mandated management report to the Congress.

Early in 1989, President Bush established a Presidential Management By Objective (MBO) program where each major agency identified key policy priorities which were to be monitored by OMB and those priorities were listed in his FY '91 Budget. This initiative was discontinued two years later.

Then, in 1993, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore established the National Performance Review (NPR) that recommended 1,200 actions geared toward improving government services through technology. It is still underway and may or may not be continued.

Wright says that future Presidents should not think such initiatives are "boring," as Jimmy Carter once described them. They should not allow the efforts to lose steam because they are vitally important to keeping the bureaucracy in line with the will of the President and Congress. Moreover, Wright adds, Congress has been slowly giving the executive branch increased powers and obligations that the President can use to ensure that the agencies and civil service comply:

In 1982, Congress passed, at the request of the White House, the Prompt Payment Act requiring federal agencies to pay bills on time; the Debt Collection Act providing OMB with new authority to improve federal debt/credit management; the Federal Managers Financial Integrity Act, which gave OMB responsibility to oversee annual reviews of agency accounting administration control systems; and the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, which required the President to submit an annual report as part of the budget which described the status of management improvement and cost-reduction initiatives in the federal government. The first report, entitled Management of the United States Government, was sent up with the FY 1986 budget.

Later, the Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 requiring federal departments and agencies to identify, track, and report on strategic plans to improve programs, along with implementation actions and costs or savings. This legislation goes further in requiring that OMB and the departments and agencies identify and measure their goals and the implementation of those goals. It links strategic plans to annual budgets and requires a formal reporting system.

Then, earlier this year, the House passed H.R. 2883, which requires federal agencies to submit "strategic plans" to achieve agency goals and requires inspectors general to audit their agencies' performance reports. More legislation along these lines, in my opinion, will be passed in the next few years.