Performance Review Needs To Be Recreated

If President Clinton and Vice President Gore are interested in “reinventing government” in their second term, they’re going to have to improve on some pretty disappointing results from their first term. Dozens of reports from the government’s own watchdog agencies - the General Accounting Office and various Inspectors General - show that the National Performance Review led by Gore failed to make federal agencies “work better and cost less,” as promised. In short, it needs to be reinvented.

These government reports reveal at least five problem areas:

1) Shady Bookkeeping. “Financial audits have … shown that agencies often do not follow rudimentary bookkeeping practices. These audits have identified hundreds of billions of dollars of accounting errors - mistakes and omissions that can render information provided to managers and the Congress virtually useless.”

At the Department of Agriculture the IG found “inadequate documentation, pervasive instances of error, and material control weaknesses when accounting for approximately $7 billion of plant, property and equipment.”

The federal government is having serious difficulty accounting for how taxpayer dollars are spent. All told, 13 agencies had trouble keeping their own books straight, including the Internal Revenue Service, whose financial deficiencies were so profound the GAO could not even audit its books!

2) Mismanagement. The NPR called for transforming federal agencies into “entrepreneurial organizations” able to adapt to changing customer (read: taxpayer) needs. Yet management at many agencies remains second-rate, resulting in fraud, waste, cost overruns and minimal accountability for the performance of government programs.

Of the $28 billion spent by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) each year on food stamps, for example, nearly $3 billion - more than 10 percent - is lost to waste, fraud and abuse, according to the USDA Inspector General. The IG also found that out of 5,000 randomly sampled stores participating in the food-stamp program nationwide, one-sixth were ineligible.

At the National Weather Service, a modernization program launched in 1985 was supposed to cost $350 million and be completed within 10 years. Yet the Commerce Department’s IG now believes it “will probably cost over $625 million and take nearly twice as long as originally planned.”

Since 1989, the Department of Energy has received roughly $10 billion for “environmental restoration projects” at its 130 facilities. Although intended to clean up 10,500 specific waste sites, according to the GAO, much of the $10 billion “has gone to study waste sites and develop an approach to their remediation … rather than to actually clean them up.”

3) Obsolescence. The NPR did nothing to end many bureaucracies that were created decades ago for purposes long since forgotten.

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA), for example, was created in 1935 to assist local utility companies in bringing power to isolated areas. But that job was largely completed in 1949. Then REA’s mission was expanded to providing loans to rural telephone companies. Today, the agency lives on as part of the new Rural Utilities Service, created by the Clinton administration and the 103rd Congress. It hasn’t abandoned any of its original missions, but has added a new one: To give grants and loans to improve rural water and sewer service.

4) Redundancy. The prevailing theory in Washington seems to be that if one program is good, 100 programs doing the same thing are better.

There are 72 federal programs managed by eight different agencies for the purpose of improving water quality; 131 programs administered by 16 different departments and agencies to help “at risk” youth; and 15 separate departments and agencies spend $20 billion a year on more than 160 employment and training programs, only half of which even collected data on whether participants found jobs.

5) Asset decay. Many of the 337 dams built by the Bureau of Reclamation are more than 50 years old and desperately need repairing.

The Forest Service says it needs almost $650 million to maintain trails and recreation sites - this from an agency whose “weaknesses in the internal controls for financial management result in a lack of accurate and reliable financial information,” according to the GAO. The National Park Service has a $4 billion maintenance backlog. Nearly 20 percent of the bridges in the National Highway System are “functionally obsolete.”

And the Federal Aviation Administration has completed only 36 of the 200 upgrades needed by the nation’s air-traffic control system by the year 2000.

The picture that emerges from these reports - drawn by the government’s own watchdogs - is of an embarrassingly irresponsible bureaucracy unable to perform even rudimentary functions efficiently. In short, when it comes to “reinventing government,” we’ve barely scratched the surface.

xxxx