In an effort to make government work better and cost less, new partnerships between the federal, state and local governments are replacing the predominant role Washington has played in the recent past. In the following article, contributing editor Jim Fuller cites President Clinton and Vice President Gore's explanations for the realignment, and some encouraging results.




"The era of big government is over, but the era of big challenges is not. People want smaller government, but they also want active and effective national leadership. They want government that provides them the means and opportunities to meet their responsibilities and solve their own problems."

With these words President Bill Clinton, in his foreword to the Blair House Papers, proposed a new public management model for the federal government, one based on forging new partnerships with state and local governments.

The Blair House Papers, prepared in January 1997 by Vice President Gore and the National Performance Review staff, have emerged as a centerpiece of the new Clinton administration's effort to reinvent government and foster partnerships and community solutions to solve problems. The Blair House Papers were named after the historic red-brick building across the street from the White House where Clinton held the first Cabinet meeting of his new administration.

Making Government Work Better

Vice President Gore continued the theme of reinvention and partnership in the introduction to the Blair House Papers, calling on government to treat the public the way top companies treat their customers -- putting the customer first -- and removing regulatory and legal barriers so communities can solve their own problems.

"In 1993, President Clinton asked me to figure out how to make government work better and cost less," the vice president said. "We called it reinventing government. The need to reinvent was clear. Confidence in government -- which is simply confidence in our own ability to solve problems by working together -- had been plummeting for three decades. We either had to rebuild that faith or abandon the future to chaos.

"We had reason to hope we could succeed," Gore continued. "Corporate America had reinvented itself to compete and win. The same ideas and some new wrinkles were starting to work at the state and local level. But it was going to be incredibly difficult -- the largest turnaround ever -- and management experts said it would take at least eight years."

Not quite four years later, Gore can point to thousands of examples of "reinvention islands of excellence" in every government agency. And public confidence in government has rebounded by nearly nine percent since 1993, according to a recent Roper poll.

"Everyone in government knows big challenges remain," Gore says in the introduction to the Blair House Papers. "It is time for faster, bolder action to expand our islands of excellence and reinvent entire agencies -- time to entirely reinvent every department of government.... Luckily, partners are ready to help. Businesses have proven effective partners in achieving a cleaner environment, worker safety, and other regulatory compliance goals. Communities can solve their own problems with a little help and opportunity from their federal partners. And when labor and management work as partners, everybody wins."

Performance Partnerships

As part of the initiative to reinvent government, the Clinton administration is reforming the federal grant process into a system of "performance partnerships" that respond to these smaller governmental units and their local needs. In fiscal year 1996 and 1997 budgets, President Clinton proposed performance partnerships that would consolidate over 200 existing programs in the areas of public health, rural development, education, housing, transportation, and the environment. Such partnerships signal a shift away from traditional federal grant programs by moving control and responsibility back to the people.

One example of creating partnerships at the local level concerns the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which got involved in the cleanup of a contaminated toxic site in Boulder, Colorado. After several parties were entrenched in litigation over ground water contamination, the EPA asked that everyone, including citizens, accept some responsibility for resolving the disputes and cleaning up the water. Within six months, all those involved had come up with a solution and a way to pay for the cleanup locally, saving millions in federal dollars and saving the community from being immersed in an EPA Superfund cleanup program that would have taken more than a decade to complete.

Speaking at the second annual Reinvention Revolution Conference in Washington, D.C.,
April 7-9, 1997, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt explained the need for partnerships to continue into the 21st century, "not working as separate, independent agencies, but understanding that we all represent the same people, and that we can stretch our resources to get better results by working together, by sitting down and mapping out common goals."

As an example, Babbitt cited partnerships that can streamline the regulatory process in dealing with a problem like water pollution.

"It's easy for the EPA to issue permits to the local water treatment plant or local factory to stop discharges into a stream," Babbitt said. "But increasingly we're finding that the enemy in water pollution is us. Small farmers and residential development projects affect the entire landscape...and we're finding that people at the local level can actually create a climate in which these laws can be made to work. [They] have the power to create a pool of resources and public support that will get results."

Some of the most impressive examples of the way government is moving to partnership have occurred in the U.S. Department of Education.

Through a program called "Goals 2000," the Education Department has established a set of challenging academic standards for students to achieve by the year 2000. Participating states create a plan to reach these goals, but instead of reporting their progress to Washington, they report back to the people. For example, Maryland -- one of eight states in the program -- reports as much as a 52-percent leap in the number of schools whose students are doing well at various grade levels since joining the program. And 40 percent of all students statewide have met the state standards -- a 25-percent gain over 1993.

Renewing National Confidence

"We've done pretty well," Clinton observed at the beginning of his second term in office. "The federal workforce is the smallest in thirty years and the deficit has been cut by 60 percent. But this smaller, cheaper government is accomplishing more than ever. We've created more than 11 million new jobs. The crime rate is down four years in a row. So is the teen birth rate....

"But there is a great deal more to do," Clinton continued. "We must give Americans the tools to make the most of their lives, to renew national confidence that we can solve our most difficult problems when we work together, and to advance America's role as the world's strongest force for peace, freedom, and prosperity."

Today, more than 600 federal programs are administered by states and localities. There is consensus that the old top-down, centralized governing approach is not flexible enough to respond to rapidly changing environments around the United States. New partnerships between federal, state and local governments must provide greater flexibility to create a government that works for the people. Observes Clinton: "These are big jobs for a smaller government."

Issues of Democracy
USIA Electronic Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 1997