How to Build the '90s DOGE

Summary

Statecraft Podcast Episode Summary

Title: How to Build the '90s DOGE
Host: Santi Ruiz
Guest: John Kamensky, Deputy for the Reinventing Government Initiative under Vice President Al Gore
Release Date: May 23, 2025

---

Introduction

In the episode titled "How to Build the '90s DOGE," host Santi Ruiz engages in a comprehensive discussion with John Kamensky, the former deputy for Vice President Al Gore's Reinventing Government Initiative (RGI). Kamensky, often referred to as "Mr. Checklist," brings invaluable insights into the longest-running government reform project in American history. The conversation delves into the history, successes, challenges, and lasting impacts of the RGI, drawing parallels and contrasts with contemporary initiatives like Doge.

---

The Reinventing Government Initiative: An Overview

Establishing RGI's Legacy
John Kamensky describes the Reinventing Government Initiative as "the longest running government reform project in American history" (01:43). He underscores its unique endurance compared to previous 20th-century reform efforts, highlighting its significant influence on government operations and the dialogue among federal employees.

Successes and Lasting Impact
Kamensky asserts that RGI was a "success," citing its achievement in transforming how government employees perceived their roles. Over its eight-year tenure, RGI not only fostered a sense of empowerment among civil servants but also left a legacy that persisted beyond its active years. Notably, approximately 40% of the civil service comprehended RGI's objectives, creating sustainable momentum across subsequent administrations (02:09). Key outcomes included the incorporation of RGI's recommendations into roughly 100 statutes and administrative actions like designating Deputy Secretaries as chief operating officers, a practice that continues today (03:23).

---

Historical Context of Government Reform

A Legacy of Reform Efforts
Kamensky places RGI within the broader tapestry of American government reform, referencing initiatives dating back to the early 20th century. He mentions pivotal commissions such as the 1904 Keep Commission, the 1937 Roosevelt effort, the 1949 and 1955 Hoover Commissions, and others under Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan (04:01). Unlike prior efforts that predominantly involved external business experts advising the government, RGI uniquely engaged civil servants directly to address operational inefficiencies.

Intellectual Underpinnings and Policy Climate
The late 1980s and early 1990s were ripe for reform, influenced by the New Public Management Theory, which advocated for applying business principles like internal competition and efficiency to government operations. Kamensky recounts how ideas from thought leaders like David Osborne, who authored "Reinventing Government," inspired the formation of RGI (06:03).

---

Launching the Reinventing Government Initiative

From Concept to Reality
Kamensky narrates the genesis of RGI, detailing how conversations with David Osborne and interactions with key figures in the Clinton transition team led to the establishment of the National Performance Review (NPR) in March 1993 (09:17). The initiative was characterized by its grassroots approach, relying on the expertise and dedication of career civil servants rather than external consultants.

Organizational Structure and Operations
Initially envisioned as a six-month project, RGI expanded into an eight-year endeavor. The team, comprising around 35 to 50 individuals, was responsible for overseeing both agency-specific and system-wide reforms. Kamensky describes the resourcefulness of the team in securing office space and technological support, highlighting the collaborative spirit that fueled the initiative's early successes (18:16).

Engaging the Workforce
A pivotal strategy employed by RGI was the organization of town hall meetings where Vice President Gore and agency secretaries listened to candid feedback from federal employees. Kamensky recounts an illustrative moment where Bob Stone demonstrated administrative inefficiencies by presenting a "can of spray paint" as an example of bureaucratic waste, prompting Gore to demand actionable reforms (15:22).

---

Principles and Strategies of RGI

Empowering Employees Over Reorganizing Agencies
Under Gore's directive, RGI prudently avoided recommending major reorganizations or consolidations of agencies, recognizing the high political costs associated with such changes (25:52). Instead, the focus was on "fixing what's inside the boxes" by streamlining processes, cutting red tape, and empowering employees to enhance customer service and operational efficiency.

Cultural Transformation and Reinvention Labs
Bob Stone championed the transformation of government culture through "reinvention labs," which acted as experimental hubs within agencies to pilot innovative practices. These labs were granted waiver authority over internal rules, fostering an environment conducive to experimentation and improvement (34:59).

---

Challenges and Criticisms

Headcount Reductions and the Rise of Contractors
One of the most contentious aspects of RGI was the significant reduction in federal workforce, aiming to cut approximately 400,000 civil servants. Kamensky acknowledges that this led to the increased reliance on outside contractors, often referred to as "Beltway Bandits," which created a shadow workforce external to the formal employee records (39:34).

Conflict with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
RGI's approach of empowering employees clashed with OMB's traditional emphasis on top-down control. This discord impeded the seamless implementation of RGI's workforce reshaping objectives, as OMB was more focused on control rather than empowerment (43:00).

Unintended Consequences on Federal Workforce Composition
Kamensky notes a demographic shift resulting from hiring freezes and reductions, leading to an older federal workforce with fewer young employees entering the system. This lack of junior talent has long-term implications for the government's capacity to innovate and adapt (46:15).

---

Reflections and Lessons Learned

Missed Opportunities
Kamensky expresses regret that RGI did not effectively foster cross-agency collaboration and failed to link performance metrics directly to budgetary processes. He highlights successful models, such as New York City's "million dollar blocks," where multi-agency teams address comprehensive social services in specific neighborhoods, as potential frameworks that RGI did not fully explore at the federal level (50:03).

Sustaining Reform Across Administrations
A significant challenge for RGI was maintaining momentum and engagement across different presidential administrations. Kamensky contrasts RGI's career civil servant-driven model with the subsequent Bush administration's politically appointed officials who pursued a more rigid management agenda (54:00).

---

Impact of External Events: The 9/11 Paradigm Shift

Counterfactual Considerations
When discussing the potential impact of the September 11 attacks on RGI's trajectory, Kamensky posits that the transformation efforts might have continued more smoothly without the seismic shift in national priorities. However, he acknowledges that the Bush administration adapted its approach to government reform, emphasizing a five-part management agenda that aligned with its strategic objectives, albeit diverging from RGI's original vision (52:59).

---

Looking Forward: Forecasting the Influence of Doge

Potential Consequences of Contemporary Reforms
Kamensky expresses concerns about the ongoing Doge initiative, predicting significant strains on government capacity and a further erosion of public trust. He fears that accelerated headcount cuts and centralization efforts could lead to service delivery gaps and diminished citizen confidence in governmental institutions (55:26).

Advising on Future Reforms
In contemplating how to rectify the challenges posed by Doge, Kamensky emphasizes the impossibility of reversing established reforms but stresses the necessity of developing innovative approaches to restore functionality and trust in government services. He underscores the need for leveraging technology and fostering new collaborative frameworks to address the systemic issues that have emerged (57:10).

---

Conclusion

The episode culminates with Kamensky's poignant reflection on the state of government reform efforts, emphasizing the delicate balance between efficiency and accountability. His insights into the successes and shortcomings of the Reinventing Government Initiative offer valuable lessons for contemporary and future reform endeavors, underscoring the enduring challenge of transforming large bureaucratic systems in a manner that truly serves the public interest.

---

Notable Quotes

• “We had to fix what's inside the boxes. Empowering employees to get their jobs done and improve customer service was the mantra.” — John Kamensky 02:09

• “The Defense Department hires chemists with a chemistry degree, and their job is to make sure that each of these spray cans of paint is still useful.” — John Kamensky 15:22

• “Don't move boxes, fix what's inside them. We've got good people trapped in bad systems.” — John Kamensky 25:52

• “You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We need to develop a whole new approach or new system.” — John Kamensky 57:10

---

This summary provides an in-depth exploration of the discussions between Santi Ruiz and John Kamensky, capturing the essence of the Reinventing Government Initiative and its implications for contemporary government reform efforts.

Transcript

[John Kamensky]

Foreign.

[Santi Ruiz]

I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. We interview top political appointees and civil servants about how they achieved a specific policy goal. You can find the transcript for this conversation and many others at www.statecraft.pub@statecraft pub. Today's guest is John Kamensky. He served as Vice President Al Gore's deputy for the Reinventing government initiative for eight years. Kamensky was colloquially known as Mr. Checklist and the Reinventing Government Initiative for his work making sure the trains ran on time. We're going to get into the history of the Reinventing Government Initiative on this episode today, but we're also going to look a little bit closer at the parallels between it and Doge. There are some places where the two really seem similar and then some obvious places where the projects take very different turns. I also appreciate in this episode Kamensky is not hedging about what he thinks were the failures or the missed opportunities of the Reinventing Government Initiative. He's a really clear eyed observer. In some ways, the Reinventing Government Initiative was a once in a lifetime opportunity at the end of the Cold War, an opportunity to cut headcount spending regulation, to change the way the government operated. It's very of its time in a way. Let's get into it. John Kamensky, thanks for joining Statecraft.

[John Kamensky]

Thank you. I appreciate the invite.

[Santi Ruiz]

I'm very glad to have you on. You served as Vice President Al Gore's deputy for the Reinventing Government Initiative, which took a couple different formal names for eight years. And as I understand it, the Reinventing Government Initiative was the longest running government reform project in American history. Is that right? Is that a fair characterization?

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, that's how I understand it. I have done research on previous reform efforts over the past century and I haven't seen anything that's had that kind of endurance before.

[Santi Ruiz]

We get into the history of these reform efforts because that was very interesting to me in prepping for this call. Just at a very high level, would you call the Reinventing Government Initiative a success in broad strokes? How would you characterize in broad strokes.

[John Kamensky]

I would say yes, it was a success. It changed the dialogue inside the government among employees in terms of what they saw their jobs about and the goal was to empower them to be able to get results. And I think that they felt that in many cases. We did a survey over the years and found that 40% of the civil service after eight years really understood what we were trying to get at and that is enough to create some momentum and even years later in future Administrations, people still talked about some of the things that came out of that initiative. There were some things. There were about 100 different statutes that included bits and pieces of our recommendations. And there were a number of things that were done administratively, like designating the Deputy Secretaries as chief operating officers and having them meet government wide as a President's Management Council. And that has continued to, I believe, until today. I don't know what the current administration's approach has been.

[Santi Ruiz]

Will you put the Reinventing Government initiative in this context of the history of government reform efforts? Because one thing that you flagged in your public writing is that reinventing Government, or doge, to take another example at a high level, this kind of attempt at government reform is a pretty recurring feature of American policy.

[John Kamensky]

Yes. When I was researching the government reform initiatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s, just on my own while I was at the GAO, I identified 11 in. In the 20th century.

[Santi Ruiz]

In the 20th century alone.

[John Kamensky]

In the 20th century alone, starting with the 1904 keep commission. And then later on you have the 1937 effort that was undertaken under President Roosevelt. The most famous was the Hoover Commission in 1949. And that led to probably the largest organizational changes that from any of the government reform initiatives. And then in 1955, there was a second Hoover Commission. The first Hoover Commission focused, I would say, more on how government does its work. So it led to the creation of the General Services Administration. Part of the effort was to create the Defense Department from the different military services into a single overarching framework, the National Science Foundation. So it brought together a lot of functions in the 1955 version of the Hoover Commission that was more on what should government be doing. And that led to competing functions that were being done in the government with the private sector, with the idea of them being able to be transitioned to being run by the private sector. That didn't go over quite as well as the efforts in 1949. And then there were others. There was stuff under Johnson, under Nixon, under Carter's reorganization effort, under Reagan, with the Grace Commission. So there. There was just this long history of different approaches to government reform. Typically it was from outside government coming in to advise government on best practices in business. But the reinventing government initiatives was different. It was turning to civil servants and asking them what needed to be done to fix the operation of government. Again, focusing on the how, not so much on what should government be doing.

[Santi Ruiz]

Tell me about the intellectual and policy conversation that was happening in the late 80s and 90s before the reinventing Government initiative. What was in the air at the time?

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, this was towards the tail end of what Reagan was doing was called Reform 88, which was largely administrative reforms. And in the late 80s, when the first George Bush was president, the focus wasn't quite that, but it started to be framed around things like how do we improve performance in government, how we improve financial management. And that led to the passage of the Chief Financial officers Act in 1990. And I was at GAO and was working on something sort of parallel to the financial disclosures, to have performance disclosures. And I was tapped to look at how do you improve performance in government and measuring performance. And so I wound up looking up what was going on in other countries as examples.

[Santi Ruiz]

Can you say a little bit more about what the insight was that you were looking at?

[John Kamensky]

Well, there was an effort in Congress under Senator Bill Roth, who was chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee in the Senate, to have legislation to create performance measurements in government. And there was skepticism from OMB as to how that might be done. And the comptroller general, my boss at the at the time it was called the General Accounting Office, wanted to be supportive of Senator Roth because he was the this is Charles Bowser. He was the primary advocate of, of the Chief Financial Officers Act. And so he wanted to create the parallel how you improve performance accountability. And so I was tapped to look into how do you make this bill that was on the Hill realistic in the US Context, and that ultimately got enshrined into what's now called the Government Performance and Results act that was passed in 1993. And when I came back from some of these trips, I went to a professional association meeting and heard a speaker called David Osborne. And it was before he published his book that was a bestseller called Reinventing Government. And he had basically, as a journalist, visited a number of different states and saw how they were transforming what they were doing. So when I talked with him after his speech, I said, what you're saying is exactly what I'm seeing in these other countries. So it was so there was this in the Gestalt, Global Gestalt, this movement that academics called the New Public Management Theory. And it was using business concepts like internal competition and competition with the private sector, improve the efficiency of services and improve the ability of the government to deliver for its citizens.

[Santi Ruiz]

So you're at the GAO in the late 80s. How do you end up on the Reinventing Government initiative?

[John Kamensky]

Well, what happens is that when I talked to David Osborne, he and I started having this ongoing conversation because he was fascinated as what other countries were doing. And I was fascinated what he was finding in the states. Well, he had done a previous book, I think it was called Laboratories of Democracy, where he did a case study of Arkansas and Bill Clinton when he was governor. And so he was in the Bill Clinton circle. And during the Clinton presidential campaign, David Osborne had drafted a speech on how Clinton could reinvent the federal government. Well, that speech never got made, but the ideas were there. And when they did, the transition team, Al Fromm from the Progressive Policy Institute, was sort of leading the piece that dealt with government reform, whatever that might be. And they brought in John Sharp from Texas, and they had something called the Texas Performance Review they were doing. And it was basically more like Doge, where they went into the agencies and kind of terrorized them a bit to find savings and cut and stuff like that. So they had this team of government reform. And David Osborne told him that they needed to talk to me to get the international perspective of what was going on. And so I went over and I told him what I knew and then went away. And then in early March of 1993, I see that Clinton was giving this press conference with Al Gore and David Osborne and John Sharp, and they were talking about they're going to create this National Performance Review. So I call my counterpart over at the office management Budget. I say, what's going on? And he said, well, this is a Clinton administration. This is live and unrehearsed. We don't know what's going on. And then a few days later, I get this call from a woman by the name of Elaine Kmart. She says, I just started working for Vice President Gordon. He was asked to do this reinventing government thing. And David Osborne says, I need to talk to you and a couple of other folks. Bob Stone in the Defense Department, who I had met previously because he was doing reinvention in the Defense Department, and a fellow by the name of Bob Nisly, who is over in Transportation. And she said, can the three of you come over and tell me what you guys are seeing about the federal government? What should Gore do? And so I went and said, well, here's what's going on in other countries. And Bob Stone says, well, the Defense Department has really screwed up. And he was sort of renegade in the Defense Department, and he was in charge as a civilian of all the military installations in the Defense Department. He had a lot of people that worked for him, and he was trying to delegate authority to them rather than asking him, should they be repaving a parking lot in San Diego. He said, no, you know, whether you need to repave it, don't ask me. And Bob Nisley had worked in a lot of different civilian agencies and saw parallels there. Elaine said, oh, this is really interesting. You need to tell the vice President and Bob Nisley. And Bob Stone said, okay, well, so we got together, we met over at Bob Stone's house to figure out what are we going to tell the Vice President. This is our one and only chance as civil servants to actually say what. What needs to be done to fix the government. Clinton had actually done total quality management when he was governor of Arkansas and wanted the team to do the reinventing government to be comprised of civil servants. So he had that in his mind. It's not a presumption to turn to business executives like Reagan did. So Bob had developed a set of principles that he used for model installation program. And so he said, let's try this. And he made a little card. We eventually made something called the gold card that had the principles and had Clinton and Gore's name on the card. And we handed these out to over the years to about 100 civil servants. But the first gold card was made it in the middle of a snowstorm in Bob's house. We said, well, we're going to give him this tomorrow and tell him, you know, to do these kinds of things. And then Bob says we have to really convince him of how screwed up the government is. And Bob had. Is a storyteller at heart. And he had a box of what I would call his toys that were examples of how idiotic things were in the Defense Department. And he said, okay, so let's take this box of stuff with us. When we go to visit the vice president, which was in the actual White House, the vice president has an office over in the corner. He called it the square office as opposed to the Oval Office. So we go in and we sit down with the vice president. We're there with Elaine and the deputy director for management of Ombuds. So we're each telling our stories. And I'm like, this is what was going on in other countries. And Bob Stone started talking about, I have this. He takes out of the box can of spray paint. He says, you know, the Defense Department hires chemists with a chemistry degree, and their job is to make sure that each of these spray cans is of paint, still is useful. And they have to sign a little form that's stuck to the side of these cans that this paint is still useful. And then he pulls out of the Box a steam trap, which is a metal thing that takes dirt out of steam lines in buildings.

[Santi Ruiz]

Okay.

[John Kamensky]

And he said that these cost about a hundred dollars, and when they start leaking steam, they leak about $50 worth of steam a week. But the procurement people, they won't buy one until they get a bulk order because then they can get them for $90, but it takes about a year to save up enough orders to get a bulk order. Meanwhile, you're losing $50 worth of steam a week. And Gore said that is idiotic. Says, yeah, we should be able to let the engineers on the base buy small items with a credit card themselves as opposed to having to go through the procurement system. So we go on and on. And then at the end, Gore says, well, can each of you come in and work for me for the next six months? I need your help. And we were like, I had no idea. Who's going to ask? This was a job interview. I thought it was, you know, just.

[Santi Ruiz]

Giving him civil servant presentation and then you're out, right?

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he asked each of us, can you come? And BOB St. Well, I'm, I'm running the base closure effort in the Defense Department.

[Santi Ruiz]

And sure, we've talked about it on statecraft before.

[John Kamensky]

Well, and so Stone says, I don't know if I can do that. And, and Gore says, well, I'll talk to Les Aspen. I'm sure he'll let you go. And Bob, nisly, he was saying, well, I am the acting director of a brand new agency that Congress created. I don't know if. And that was the Transportation Statistical Agency or something. I can't remember the name right now. And he, Gore said, well, I'll talk to the secretary. And then I said, well, I, I think I need to ask my wife because I knew that this would not go over well at GAO for me to be detailed from the legislative branch to the executive branch. And sure enough, a few weeks later, Senator Ross on the floor of the Senate said that this is a violation of the separation of powers. And so I resigned from GAO and was picked up in the executive branch.

[Santi Ruiz]

Fascinating. So Vice President Gore was initially tasked with turning around a report on reinventing government in six months. That was the initial brief for this whole project. And he brought you guys on. He had a temporary task force of about 250 career civil servants. But as it turns out, you didn't stay for six months. You and this program stuck around for eight years. So tell me about those six months and then what happened after.

[John Kamensky]

Well, we also Brought on board Billy Hamilton, who was the director of the Texas Performance Review for John Sharp in Texas. So Billy came up and needed to get started. And it was like creating a new agency from scratch. And we had nothing.

[Santi Ruiz]

What did you have? Just the president's mandate and no office space, nothing.

[John Kamensky]

So we had some temporary space over in the new executive office building. And we went over there and started making calls to people in agencies to try to recruit people. And so we came up with the idea that we have a staff of about 35 to 50 people and that we would have that Billy Hamilton will oversee a set of teams that looked at agencies, and I would have a set of teams that overlooked the systems of government. Because one of the things that I learned while I was at GAO was that agencies are so constrained in what they do that agencies can't fix themselves, that they need to fix the broader systems, personnel, procurement, it, all those different kinds. So I was overseeing the systems teams and Billy was overseeing the agency teams. By April 15, we had our launch and we went to the old executive office building to have a public launch of what we were doing. I drafted charters of what each of the teams would do. And there were about 14 teams. So that we had and systems. And Billy had about the 24 major agencies. And he was going to have teams for each one of those. And so we get to the old executive office building and there's this loaming outside. And I said, because it was the same time that Hillary Clinton was running her healthcare task force. And I said, are you guys here for a healthcare task force meeting? And they said, no, no, we're here to reinvent the government. And so I get inside and the place is packed. So there was this powerful thing that went. 250 people showed up. We don't know where they came from.

[Santi Ruiz]

You planned on. You said 35 to 50.

[John Kamensky]

35 to 50 is what? So that was the office space that we had too. And one of the things that was interesting is Bob Stone turned to one of his friends at the Defense Department, this Air Force colonel who had a job responsibility of standing up military bases in hostile situations. And he went to this guy and says, I need more office space. Can you find me office space? And sure enough, he did. He found the old transition headquarters for the Clinton presidential transition team. And we commandeered the building. He also went to GSA and said, we need computers. And GSA said, well, we don't have that many computers handy. And there was a shipment that was coming in for the new White House staff, and this guy commandeered that shipment.

[Santi Ruiz]

Wow.

[John Kamensky]

And the White House staff always thought GSA was incompetent, but no. Anyway, we began breaking out into teams. And then Billy Hamilton had this process, what he called tollgate, where once a week, every single team. And so those 24 plus 14 would go before a board of myself and Bob Stone and Bob Nisley and Billy Hamilton and just say what they're doing, what they're finding, where they're headed. And we began reconstituting some of the teams and moving things around because some people had overlapping things or were finding. But while we're doing this, the vice president says, well, I want to get involved. Bob does. Well, we kind of need to have him out of the way so we can do our work. And Bob had this brilliant idea, well, let's send them out to the agencies to have town hall meetings with employees. And it turns out that was a really big deal because why did that matter? The vice president? Never been into a vice president. Any vice president has never been to most of these agencies in person. And this created enormous buzz in the agency. So go from Agriculture to HUD to the central courtyard in the Pentagon, and there were huge crowds of employees that showed up that were enthusiastic about what was going on and stuff. And the vice president was there to listen, and he would have the secretary on the stage with him, and these people would say some of the most embarrassing things about some of the stupidest stuff that was going on in their departments that the secretary, of course, knew nothing about. And the vice president was sitting there taking notes. And so in the end, when we were done with our draft report, Gore would say, well, you know, I heard this in thus and such agency that needs to go into this report, and I want a recommendation on this. So he was absorbing stuff that says, you need to change these reports to reflect some of the stuff that we're seeing from employees out there.

[Santi Ruiz]

One of the. Maybe this is an obvious lesson that I've learned from running Statecraft over the past couple of years, but it's really remarkable how much political cover matters. You know, it's one thing for the president to say, go do this, and that's it, but to have kind of a clear signal that high up political leadership cares about this project and whether that's, you know, in the Partnership for Reinventing Government version or the DOGE version, but the fact that you have clear public sense of like, yeah, the politicals own this, they care about seeing this through to completion makes a huge difference.

[John Kamensky]

Now, what was interesting was in the first six months of most administrations, you don't have the political appointees there.

[Santi Ruiz]

Right. They're not confirmed yet.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah. Or the lower level haven't been appointed, either Schedule Cs or stuff, because there's about 2,000 of those or about 3,000, and about 600 are confirmed by the Senate. So there's a lot of.

[Santi Ruiz]

So not. Right. Not just Senate confirmations, but just the deputy under secretary for X or Y has not been picked.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it was basically the career civil servants that were actively involved as opposed to the political people. Now, what was interesting was the second Bush, George W. Bush, actively involved his political appointees, whereas the Clinton administration did not start with the political appointees. It sort of ended with the political appointees. So it really was the voice of career civil servants that were actively involved in crafting the recommendations on the teams. I consciously mixed in the systems teams. People that were experts on the system, like procurement, with people that were users of the system. And there were oftentimes many clashes between them as to how they saw the world and what changes needed to be made. And that was a creative dynamic in financial management, in budget, et cetera. And basically my job was referee more than anything else. In fact, we had one team that had an internal divorce because they couldn't agree on something. And so we created two separate teams out of some stuff. So it was a fascinating dynamic.

[Santi Ruiz]

So in its initial version of the six month version, it'd be interesting to hear what you prioritized and what you didn't prioritize. I mean, to take one example, there was nothing in that first set of recommendations about moving around agencies or consolidating or moving different functions. You guys on purpose left that off the table. Tell me about why.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, well, Gore had very few dictates as to what we should or shouldn't do. And one of them says, I don't want any recommendations that say, we need to study this more. I want recommendations that do something. And the other one is don't move boxes, fix what's inside them. And that was really sage advice because typical government reformers are, well, let's make the org chart look rational and move things around and all that, but politically it's really hard to reorganize. And that just costs so much. And just look at the creation of the last major department was the Department of Homeland Security. And that was more than 20 years ago. And that was really painful to create and took years for it to actually become functional. So he said, don't do that. Fix basically the systems. He says, we've got good people trapped in bad systems, which was the total quality management, Edwards Demings type thing. And that was sort of the mantra.

[Santi Ruiz]

Do you think that gave the npr, which is what I'll call it, for the duration, but do you think that gave it a longer political Runway than say, Doge has had? Because Doge has tackled some of these reorganization and moving things around things, and those just have a much higher political cost. It seems like you engender a lot more opposition.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah. In the second round of reinvention, which was in 96, which was after Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the House went Republican, the NPR was asked to regenerate and do a new report and new study. And that was focusing more on the what as opposed to the how. And much like the second Hoover Commission didn't quite land very well. I mean, there were agencies that were eliminated. The Interstate Commerce Commission was eliminated. My favorite was elimination of the Tea Tasting Board that was created in the late 1800s.

[Santi Ruiz]

Wait, how do I get a job at the Tea Tasting Board? What would it have taken?

[John Kamensky]

It was located in New York City. I have no idea what they were doing there. It's where they were importing the tea.

[Santi Ruiz]

There was another one, which this is showing my age, but I had to look up. The NPR resulted in the cancellation of mohair subsidies.

[John Kamensky]

Yes. And that was one of the things from the Korean War. There was a really. It was. Yeah, the Korean War. Mohair was what they call a critical material. And it was to make gloves and socks for the troops that were in Korea. And so that's where that started. And the subsidy never went away. And we managed to eventually kill it. But it actually came back after the Clinton folks left office.

[Santi Ruiz]

Did it really? How much did the Clinton Gore admin tout or hold up? The kind of most egregious examples of waste in public. Because that's something you've seen from Doge a lot, a real laser focus from Elon, among others, in holding up really egregious examples of government spending, whether. Whether they're overhyped or. He's taking them out of context. But that's been a really big element, is just showing 20 million people on Twitter. Look at this thing that we're cutting. How much of that was an element of the npr?

[John Kamensky]

We didn't do that during the first six months. That was sort of a quiet period. And then we issued the main report and there was a big event on the South Lawn and all that. And then there were collateral reports for each of the agencies and each of the system, about 38 additional accompanying reports that came out that was to how do you implement what was in the main report? And that wasn't promoting big deal things that were screwed up. I mean, the GAO was finding a lot of those things, but things like there was the equivalent about seven agricultural field offices in every county in the United States. And is how do you reduce the number of field offices? Well, that started under George H.W. bush.

[Santi Ruiz]

Say that. Say that again. Say it again. How many field offices?

[John Kamensky]

Either 5 to 7 Department of Agriculture field offices in every county. So there's like 3,000 counties and that even included Brooklyn.

[Santi Ruiz]

That's incredible.

[John Kamensky]

And places like that. And it was because you have these different agencies in the Agriculture Department and never co located field offices. And we found that trying to close field offices politically really, really hard because members of Congress wanted to keep the field offices. The story that we got was that the reason there were so many field offices was that President Abraham Lincoln said that no field office should be any further than one course ride a day from any farmer. And so each field office was about 20 miles apart from each other.

[Santi Ruiz]

I live in Brooklyn and there's, you know, there's a few chicken coops in my neighborhood, but that's about as, that's about as agricultural as we get. That's really incredible. So after that six months, what was the political appetite for going further? I mean, obviously this extended into a much longer project. But what was the reception politically?

[John Kamensky]

Well, the initial report was fairly well received, but there were some dynamics that were involved in it. There were a lot of things that required statutory changes. David Osborne opted for one big reinventing government bill. And those of us that were in government said, you know, that doesn't quite work because a big reinventing government bill means it has to be split up and sent to different committees for that, have jurisdiction over the pieces, and then it has to come back together and then go to the other half House of Congress and then split up and come back. And we said that'll never work. And sure enough, that bill went up and it didn't work. But what we did is work with OMB through the annual appropriating and reauthorization process. And we wove this stuff in over the next few years and eventually got a lot of that stuff passed into law. But it wasn't a big up or down single bill.

[Santi Ruiz]

And will you, will you just explain for listeners who might not fully Track that. When you say you worked with OMB to get that into legislation, say a little bit more about that.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, well, I mentioned that I left from GAO to the Executive Branch and there was tension with OMB between the National Performance Review and OMB because OMB said, you know, where the Office of Management and Budget Management is our middle name and you guys are doing it. And Bob Stone told Alice Riddle in a meeting, and the Vice President's office says, we're here to reinvent the government and you are the government. And that didn't go over too well. But eventually what happened was I became an OMB employee, so they had to treat me nice, at least give me a phone number. And so we developed a good working relationship. Working. One of the things that I did not expect or understand was that developing the report and developing the recommendations and implementing the recommendations was what I thought government reform was about.

[Santi Ruiz]

Yeah.

[John Kamensky]

Because I had researched all the previous efforts and I said, well, that's me being linear. Bob Stone basically saw that report and everything as a side story. He said, what we need to do is transform the culture of the government so that we can empower employees. And so a lot of the recommendations, especially in the systems teams, were around how do we empower employees to get their jobs done and improve customer service and thereby improving people's lives? And a few days after we released the report, Bob Stone, storyteller, said, we need to go out and start telling people about the successes. And I said, bob, you know, I just listed all the recommendations. I created a spreadsheet. I got people's phone numbers in the agencies that'll be accountable for track. We're going to have them come back in six months and tell us what their progress is. And he says, john, that's not how we transform the government. What we need to do is find people that are already transforming the government along our principles of putting customers first, cutting red tape, empowering employees and champion the heck out of them so that other people will see it and say, I can do that and thereby create revolutionary movement and the government of making it much more customer centric.

[Santi Ruiz]

Yeah.

[John Kamensky]

And I kind of rolled my eyes and he said, yeah, John, you. You keep the lists. I'll take care of this. Transforming the culture. And so he wanted to create what he called, like his model installation programs of devolving authority in the Defense Department military bases. He wanted to create something called reinvention labs. And within an agency, a reinvention lab would be piloting something that would put customers first, cut red tape or empower employees. And he said, we'll create these reinvention labs. And to do this, these reinvention labs will have basically waiver authority over agency rules. Not law or regulations, which are official, but just the internal rules. And the departments didn't really like this, and they didn't want to get involved in designating reinvention labs. So Bob did. So he had one of his sidekicks that he had from the Defense Department get on his motorcycle and drive to major federal regional centers and just talk about reinventing government to the federal executive Board and the people there and the electrified them. And people say, I can do this or I can do that. And so we, we started designated reinvention labs around the government. Departments did not like this, I bet. But when we were doing this, the atmosphere was just electric around the country of people saying we can do some sort of reforms of what we're doing internally in our local areas.

[Santi Ruiz]

To that point, about the kind of the reception, I was really shocked by this, that what some folks called the Gore report was one of the first government documents posted on the Internet. And within days, over a hundred thousand copies had been downloaded and it hit the New York Times bestseller list again. This is a federal report on government process, but it blew up. I'm guessing you guys did not expect that reception either.

[John Kamensky]

Well, when we drafted the report, the main report was drafted by David Osborne.

[Santi Ruiz]

Okay, the author of this book, Reinventing Government.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, author. And he was a journalist and he knew how to write, and he had a team of other journalists. And what they did is they was combed through all the, what we called later, the accompanying reports, the stuff from all the agency teams and the system teams that were written by career civil servants that wrote like career civil servants. And. And he teased out all the really interesting stories that he found, but also the key recommendations. And so he and his writing team came up with this really, really readable report. And we, instead of using the Government Printing Office format for publishing a dry government report, went to a private sector company and they came up with a report layout design. Now, you don't see it on the Internet because in those days, PDF hadn't quite made it public yet.

[Santi Ruiz]

Okay.

[John Kamensky]

And so if you go onto the Internet, you can find this report, but it's just like in courier font right now, but it reads really well. I go back and read it and I say, I can't believe this is a government report because it just reads really, really nicely.

[Santi Ruiz]

There's a great quote from a favorite political scientist of mine, James Q. Wilson, who said, in my judgment, the Gore report is the best White House statement I have ever read about what citizens really want from government administrators. You don't see that phrase often from outside observers about federal government projects. But let me pivot a little bit and ask you about some of the more difficult parts. The NPR famously cut upwards of 400,000 civil servants over the course of these eight years. It wasn't until I want to say in the last five years that the level of full time employees of the federal government hit the same height as it was in 1993. I guess I have two questions here. One is how did that go? How did you guys, how did you navigate figuring out where to cut headcount, actually implementing it? And then the second question for you is there's been a lot of criticism of the NPR in later years that what happened was not just the total number of federal employees dropped, but that in their place, a lot of outside contractors and what you might call the Beltway Bandits ended up doing a lot of that work instead. And so you had this kind of dark matter version of the federal workforce. It just wasn't on the books full time.

[John Kamensky]

So this goes back to empowering employees. One of Bob Stone, his key mantras to what he wanted to achieve out of reinventing government, and what he saw was that there were too many people in the mission support functions, the overseers, that one in three civil servants was in what we called at the time management controls. They were in procurement, budget, personnel, legal. They were middle managers. At the time it was a 1 to 7 employee to manager ratio. And Bob Stone was always inspired by the business writer Tom Peters. And Tom Peters said the average in the private sector is 1 to 15 ratio between managers and employees and that the overhead isn't 30%, it's about 15%. And so that was what we did, is we set those two metrics as targets. So it would go from 700,000 down to 350,000. And we were going to take 100,000 and, and move those to the front line for service. And 250,000 were going to be the savings that we were going to return to the government. So that was the concept and that's why we wound up with the initial target of 252,000. But what happened is over the years, agencies wound up cutting more than 252,000 in part because of the downsizing after the end of the Cold War. So a lot of this downsizing happened in the Defense Department, but there was also this move to how do we begin transferring some of these things to the private sector of cooks and VA hospitals, groundskeepers that were in charge? So those kind of functions, security guards, how do we move those to the private sector so that the government doesn't have to manage this enormous workforce. The core is delivering a service, say for epa, it's not managing police and groundskeepers and others. So that was the concept, which is what we saw in new public management in other countries was how do we have government employees focus on core government services. So that was sort of conceptually what was going on. It didn't pan out that way because when we asked the agencies to cut headquarters, headquarters cut the field. And OMB wasn't really bought into what we were doing in terms of reshaping the workforce. So they let the agencies do whatever they plan to do.

[Santi Ruiz]

Why wasn't OMB bought in? That seems like a classically OMB thing to focus on.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, well, I think part of it is that they didn't think that the reinventing government people were rational, that we were, we were kind of like not.

[Santi Ruiz]

Traditional and because you were head in the clouds folks or a bit of.

[John Kamensky]

That, but also that we were trying to empower employees. And that wasn't their shtick.

[Santi Ruiz]

It's not what they're about.

[John Kamensky]

OMB was more into control, top down control. They have changed over the years. In fact, one of the reinvention things was changing OMB so that instead of budget analysts, they became resource managers. And so it wasn't just money, it was also what else were you doing in the agencies would be management and regulations and looking at the other functions. So what happened was this didn't roll out the way we had envisioned did in different areas like in hr, the head of OMB or the Office of Personnel Management at the time, Jim King, you know, he cut the regs that the Office of Personnel Management had and got rid of the 10,000 page personnel manual that agencies were expected to abide by. And he worked with the agencies to downsize their personnel staffs. Well, you know, that resulted in a lot of cases of people of agencies freezing hiring. So you wound up without having a new cohort of people that would fall in over the years. So there became sort of like especially in procurement, this gap of experience that sort of cascaded over the next 20 years that wasn't envisioned.

[Santi Ruiz]

And is your sense that that gap is what the Beltway Bandits grew to fill?

[John Kamensky]

In some cases they did, but there's others that you just can't delegate the authority on signing contracts or coming up with the contract strategy. Now, what we were looking at was that if you simplified the HR and the procurement roles, you could do it with fewer staff.

[Santi Ruiz]

Sure.

[John Kamensky]

But the way we saw it was basically Congress ate dessert first. They cut the number of people, but didn't fix or simplify the rules necessarily.

[Santi Ruiz]

Do you think we're seeing that today with doge, starting with the headcount cuts and hoping that the regulatory cuts come later?

[John Kamensky]

No, it's not so much the regulatory, that AI will fix it all. And it's going to be hard to have AI in national parks helping people that get a sprained ankle. But I think that where we were at was you had to engage Congress on the changes to the systems. And in this current administration, we're not seeing any interaction that I can see with Congress of changing rules of the game.

[Santi Ruiz]

I've got a question for you about the npr and you're touching on this a little bit, that with those hiring freezes, you saw a shift in the demographic composition of federal employees older. So the share of Federal workers under 35 fell about 10% over the eight years of the NPR. And you combine that with the median GS grade, the median place on the pay scale is higher now in the federal government than it used to be 20 years ago. And it makes it a lot harder to fill roles with junior talent or to bring people through the ranks through from a young age. How do you think about that effect of the npr?

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, well, there's also a shift in the mix of work that's done. So for example, when we were doing reinventing government, the HR processes in agencies were manual and they have since been moved electronic. In a lot of agencies, small time procurements were manual and you had triplicate forms and they took weeks. And the administrative cost of processing these forms was horrendous. They moved to credit cards. Well, and interestingly that the current administration is reneged on the use of credit cards and it's costing the government money. In fact, when there was an abuse in, I don't know, it was a late Clinton administration credit cards. In one agency, some congressman put in a bill to get rid of the use of credit cards and the Congressional Budget Office came back said that'll cost you $100 million.

[Santi Ruiz]

Right.

[John Kamensky]

Because the credit cards were providing rebates.

[Santi Ruiz]

That's amazing. The rebates were a really substantial chunk of money.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah. Well, the thing is you have to balance risk with the ability to get stuff done. And if you want no risk, it's going to Be very expensive.

[Santi Ruiz]

Right. The current admin wants to centralize procurement at GSA across agencies and you've seen some moves in that direction. And it seems like with what you're talking about, there's this constant pendulum swing back and forth between pushing purchasing authority and management authority out lower into the system and then realizing the risk associated with that and then pulling it back and then once it's centralized, realizing that you've limited your ability to trust the outer branches of the federal government.

[John Kamensky]

Yeah, well, one of the things that we saw, and Bob Nisly talked to the Vice President about this, he says that at the time the US government was the last vestige of the old Soviet communist system, central planning and central procurement, et cetera. And that what we needed to do was to devolve some of this. And if you create choice within the government between different administrative service centers, which we created, we call them franchise funds and those still exist today, there were like six or eight different franchise funds created around the government where the Department of Health and Human Services would be able to service with contracts and hr, et cetera, other agencies and, and that way there'd be some transparency as to how much an administrative process cost as well as some choice between agencies. So if an agency head gets fed up with how their service for receiving procurement contracts is done, they can go to some other agency. By recentralizing it, you will initially have efficiencies which, which will then turn into inefficiencies over a few years because it's become a non responsive monopoly.

[Santi Ruiz]

Right.

[John Kamensky]

So there's pros and cons of centralizing.

[Santi Ruiz]

What do you most wish the NPR had done differently and what do you most wish had stuck from NPR that did not stick over the course of following administrations?

[John Kamensky]

There's actually a relationship between the two. One is the ability to have employee engagement work across administrations. I no idea how you could actually make that happen administratively. You can't by law encourage people to work together.

[Santi Ruiz]

What do you mean by that?

[John Kamensky]

Well, if you work across agency boundaries and you want to have people empowered to get their jobs done, a lot of times what needs to be done requires working with other agencies. If you look at Environment, it's epa, it's noaa, it's the Agriculture Department, it is the Parks Department. So you need to work across agencies in a lot of cases. And how do we create a cadre of people that have that experience of being able to work across agency boundaries? I saw that in other countries and if you look somewhat in the military with the ability to work across military services. That was sort of out of the Goldwater Nichols act that was passed back in the 1980s. So this ability of how do you create a functional approach to working cross agency boundaries in a way that sustainable that we never quite figured out. And one of the things that never quite got off the ground was the ability of linking performance information to budget information. They seem to be in different offices administratively and they don't quite ever connect. So it's not like you can consistently figure out what the unit cost is of X. Some cities have done this though. If you look in New York City, one of the things that they've done is they've come up with what they call the million dollar blocks. And a million dollar block is a city block and a neighborhood where the city is delivering a million dollars or more of social services in that block. And so then they create a team that works with that block across all the agencies that have social services. So they're dealing with the people and their problems, not with all the different programs and all the different agencies.

[Santi Ruiz]

Sure.

[John Kamensky]

So how do you do that at the federal level? I don't know.

[Santi Ruiz]

Let me ask a kind of historical perspective question. Obviously, Gore runs for president in 2000. He loses narrowly to George W. Bush, and then a few months later, 911 hits and the whole political landscape changes in a million different ways. What do you think would have been different about the impact of the NPR without 9 11? In some senses, it seems like the 21st century suddenly takes its turn in a much darker direction than maybe the Clinton admin expected. And maybe this gets back to kind of end of the Cold War, end of history questions. The world we enter is a very different one than the one that it looked like we were going into from the 90s. Do you think that there's a counterfactual there, that the picture would have looked different without that moment from the reinventing government perspective?

[John Kamensky]

Not really. Because when Bush became president, he had a different vision of how he wanted to do management reform. He created something called the President's management agenda, which exists up until, I guess, this administration. I don't know whether they're going to create one or not, but he wanted to focus on the mission support systems. And they created a five part scorecard and agenda and they engaged their political leaders in pushing this agenda as opposed to the career staff, which was what reinventing government was trying to do. And what I thought was interesting was that President Bush had Clay Johnson, who was his roommate in college and was his chief of staff. When he was governor, he became the head of presidential personnel. But Clay Johnson really cared about management. And so he wanted to make sure that everybody that came into the administration adhered to this five part agenda. Then once those people were recruited and embedded as the deputy secretaries or assistant secretaries, he then became the deputy director for management. And OMB says, okay, now that I got you appointed, you're going to help me deliver. So that was a very different approach than what the Clinton and Gore effort was in terms of 9, 11. It slowed that effort down a bit, especially in the Defense Department, but it didn't change what the Bush approach had been. The thing that people had as a bad mark on reinventing government is we let a thousand flowers bloom and then we would go in and figure out what needs to be pruned. But we kept on churning, looking for innovation. The Bush people came in and they knew what they wanted to do and they had their five things, they had their criteria and they had their management system. And they did that for eight years. They were so consistent. So I looked at that and said, that's really marvelous from the perspective of an analyst, but I'm not so much sure that American people saw the difference.

[Santi Ruiz]

John, this has been a real pleasure. I want to close by asking you to forecast the effect of Doge, say four years from now at the end of this administration. You and I are talking again and we're looking back. What are we likely to see as the net results?

[John Kamensky]

That is a good question. I've been trying to think ahead as well. I think we're going to see a lot of loss of capacity of agencies to do things that Americans just assumed happened and that they're going to see enormous holes in the safety net in terms of what government does, but also how it delivers. One of the things that the Clinton Gore administration was really concerned about was citizen loss of trust in government. And by the end of the administration, it had gone from something like 20% to 40%. And now it's really low again. And I think that with the effects that we'll see coming out of Doge, it's going to drop even further. And the concern that Clinton and Gore had was that if people don't trust their government, it's going to be very hard to maintain a democracy. And so that is my concern, is what happens when people don't trust government any longer.

[Santi Ruiz]

If you were advising Doge, and let's say it turns out Elon really is stepping back, it'll run in a different capacity from here on out. But let's say you get installed at the US Doge service and what's happened already is already baked in. There's a bunch of headcount cuts that are not being rolled back, a bunch of attempts to centralize procurement, et cetera, and a bunch more implementation of these digital systems. How would you, in your view, try to right the ship?

[John Kamensky]

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think you can go back to where we were. The question is what is government going to look like next? I think we're going to have a period of huge turmoil in terms of service delivery, answering the phones at Social Security Administration, people's trust in the immigration system any longer, with the enforcement efforts that are ongoing, that student loans, is that going to system going to work any longer? So a lot of things are going to get broken and a lot of people I think are going to get hurt. And the question then becomes how do we develop a whole new approach or new system? And I have not yet come up with that answer, but there is a group of people that seem to be trying to develop that. And that is where my hope is right now is how do we begin? And a lot of it, I think, will be using technology to do this. It's just that we've broken things so far, but we haven't come up with a plan for how do we replace what's been broken and fix it in a way that makes a difference for people's lives.

[Santi Ruiz]

Well, John, on that serious note, thank you for joining Statecraft. It's been a real pleasure.

[John Kamensky]

Thanks very much, Santik, for inviting me onto your show.

[Santi Ruiz]

It.