President Donald Trump‘s drive to scale down the federal government by unleashing and empowering Elon Musk to indiscriminately fire thousands of federal employees, has wreaked chaos.
And while there is popular support for the notion of reining in federal spending—especially among Trump’s voters—no one imagined that it would be done this haphazardly. Nor did people expect to see so little resistance from Congress as its constitutional power of the purse is trampled over unceremoniously.
There have been plenty of demonstrations of the inefficiency of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), from having to rehire workers to being forced to admit claims of vast savings were bogus.
That’s not particularly surprising for such an indiscriminate effort.
What is surprising is how little has been made of the similarities between Trump’s efforts and those undertaken by Bill Clinton more than 30 years ago. Clinton appointed his vice president, Al Gore, to undertake a so-called National Performance Review (NPR), aimed at reinventing government. The Gore Commission (as it became known) was also aimed at streamlining and reducing the size of the federal government, but there was more to it. In many ways, what Gore set out to do was even more ambitious than Musk’s chainsaw approach.
Like Trump, Clinton and Gore used presidential directives and executive orders to implement many of their downsizing efforts. But unlike the current effort, the cutting didn’t start until they had gone through a six-month study process and developed a blueprint of how to best reinvent the federal government. Government agencies were brought into the process to determine the best ways that efficiencies could be realized. In fact, the effort was led by some 250 federal employees that remained on their agency payrolls.
There were four basic tenets of the NPR:
1. Putting customers, meaning American citizens, first
2. Cutting red tape
3. Empowering federal employees to drive results
4. Cutting government back to its basics.
In some respects, the Gore efforts were very successful. The federal workforce was reduced by close to 400,000 employees between 1993 and 2000, or about 17 percent of the total. The cuts made the government the smallest it had been since the Eisenhower administration. Layers of management were cut at agency department headquarters, 2,000 field offices were closed, and some 250 programs and agencies were eliminated. Thousands of agency regulations as well were shown the door as well.
All of this was done not to make cuts for the sake of cutting (like DOGE’s bull-in-a-china-shop undertaking), but to substantially improve government’s performance. Gore aimed at 32 high-impact agencies with the goal of measurably improving contacts—essentially customer service—with both citizens and businesses alike.
Like with the DOGE effort, both the IRS and the Social Security Administration got an enormous amount of attention. But unlike now, the principal focus was on improving customer interactions with those agencies. Efforts such as having Social Security phone centers adopt world-class courtesy practices or speeding up customer complaint resolution are totally absent now. Getting rid of the Social Security telephone helpline that assists millions of elderly and disabled benefit recipients (a recent DOGE outrage) would not have crossed the minds of anyone involved in the Clinton-era efforts.
Other DOGE efforts, such as reducing field-office personnel, will make wait times for in-person appointments untenable. DOGE’s effort appears intended to make government as unresponsive as possible, again the opposite of the NPR. When Gore’s effort tackled the IRS, the result was creating the system that allows people to file tax returns electronically, presumably helping the tax agency work faster and more efficiently, getting people their refunds faster.
The underlying theme of the Gore Commission’s work was that government employees needed permission and encouragement to change the culture from complacency to a focus on innovation. In the mid-to-late 1990s the Internet revolution was just getting going, and the Gore focus on efficiency was also about integrating information technology to speed up government and make it more accessible.
There is no doubt that a project as massive as one intended to make real progress in reducing the size of the federal government requires leadership from the top. The Clinton and Trump administrations certainly were of like mind in that regard. However, the DOGE effort assumes that simply by cutting you have achieved something, even if the cuts you are undertaking make government less responsive and less efficient. The Clinton effort, in putting customer service and government innovation at the forefront was all about reducing the workforce while improving government services.
All of this was done in consultation with the people who understood the problems best, putting faith in the expertise of top bureaucrats to build a better mousetrap. Musk, instead views the very existence of government employees as the problem DOGE is solving.
Gore gave out “Hammer Awards” to government employees—referring to the notorious $600 hammer that the Pentagon had infamously purchased—consisting of a hammer tied with a red ribbon, mounted on a blue velvet background, with words signed by the vice president saying, “Thanks for creating a government that works better and costs less.”
In addition, federal employees were encouraged to participate in “reinvention laboratories,” to catalyze out-of-the-box innovations. Sending the message that employees should not be afraid to fail in devising reforms was a key tenet of those projects. In fact, the Gore approach was much more of a Silicon-Valley-type effort than anything Elon Musk, a product of Silicon Valley, has brought to DOGE.
Another key difference between the DOGE and Gore efforts was in seeking approval from Congress for key aspects of the plan. When it came to offering buyouts to thousands of government employees Congress was asked to authorize the payments. Moreover, Clinton achieved passage of the Government Performance and Results Act, which provided a congressionally sanctioned basis for establishing measurable goals and strategic plans, allowing for accountability.
By contrast, DOGE has spent all its time focused on breaking up government—”taking a chainsaw to it” or feeding agencies into the “woodchipper”—with radical slashing being itself the goal.
The Clinton administration understood that there was a decline in trust in government—even more pronounced today—but that it could be improved if their own personal interactions with the government improved. That is a key insight into how to combat skepticism and hostility toward government, understanding that so many individuals and businesses rely on government services in their day-to-day lives.
The Gore Commission efforts certainly got plenty of criticism in their time. Just as DOGE is being criticized today, some thought the Gore efforts got rid of some key government employees with special skills, and that many government employees who stayed were the perfect candidates to have been laid off. Others thought the Gore efforts amounted to minor reform but also a lot of hype. They saw that the downsizing of the government resulted in both a lot more private contractors doing work that was previously done by government employees and failed to prevent the regrowth of the bureaucracy in subsequent administrations.
It is striking that in the 25 years since the Clinton administration the federal workforce has grown by almost 30 percent, adding some 540,000 government employees, more than building back the reduction in force that Gore had accomplished.
This enormous regrowth makes it hard not to admit there is a role for DOGE.
And while the Gore effort took place at the outset of the internet revolution and capitalized on it, Musk has, disappointingly, ignored the dawn of practical artificial intelligence. The focus should be on the enormous strides in efficiency that AI can bring about. There is no doubt enormous downsizing and employee reduction would follow if AI implementation were the north star of the DOGE effort.
What a missed opportunity given that Musk does have true expertise in AI! He could have centered his entire initiative around where artificial intelligence could make government more responsive to its customer/citizen’s needs. For such a smart guy—who sees himself as the very epitome of innovation—it is remarkable that he was not guided by the example set by Al Gore in optimally downsizing our government.
Instead, he has neglected today’s great technological innovation, AI, which should be the centerpiece of his efforts.
Tom Rogers is executive chairman of Claigrid, Inc. (the cloud AI grid company), an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC, is the former CEO of TiVo, a member of Keep Our Republic (an organization dedicated to preserving the nation’s democracy). He is also a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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