Symposium: the national performance review and public administration

The Symposium on the National Performance Review (NPR) and Public Administration, contained in this issue of the International Journal of Public Administration, offers some insights from prominent scholars in the field. They have presented their research and assessments of a subject with enduring importance: government reform. They have critically appraised the progress of the latest effort toward such change, but they are generally pessimistic about the prospects for improving the effectiveness and economy of the federal government. However, they have not sought to evaluate the work of the NPR as a matter of what they think ought to have been examined. Instead, they explore whether it is accomplishing what it set out to do. They do not contend, as did management luminary Peter F. Drucker recently, that this commission should have explored a far different topic—namely, possible normative purposes of government at federal, state, and local levels and potential relationships with non-government sectors (non-profit, business, family, or individual).(1) They did not, in effect, ask the NPR to change the subject to the desirable goals of government, which would necessitate entering the realm of political philosophy and seeking to provide answers for one of its ancient and profound questions—no doubt a worthy purpose for a different symposium. At least two characteristics of this symposium deserve mention. One is that the articles are arrayed chronologically, covering six broad areas: the background of the National Performance Review, an overview and evaluation of the report, ideological reactions, problems of implementation, prospects for lasting success, and implications for the field of public administration. A second characteristic is that the contributions examine theoretical implications as well as practical applications of the NPR. The first contribution, “Riding the Crest of a Wave: The National Performance Review and Public Management Reform” by Steven W. Hays and Richard C. Kearney places the work of this commission into a longitudinal context: World War II period. The authors examine three components of that environment. One is that, during approximately the last half century, popular support for government performance has depended heavily on economic growth, which generated the cornucopia of funds necessary to sustain high levels of government activity and public bureaucracy. Furthermore, the writers stress that this basis for public approval was not peculiar to the United States but characteristic of other nations, including western democracies and third-world countries. When economic growth faltered globally, the anti-government and anti-bureaucratic reactions became world-wide phenomena. Moreover, the popular demand for government to accomplish more with fewer resources became international. A second component is the cluster of responses to the last demand, which take the form of “five interrelated megatrends:” privatization, downsizing, decentralization, debureaucratization, and managerialism. The authors show how the NPR's recommendations reflect these values in varying degrees, although most strongly with respect to decentralization and managerialism. A third component of NPR's environment is the potpourri of obstacles to the success of the most recent government-reform effort, such as excessive optimism about the prospects for changing complex public organizations and especially political naivete. “Most public management reform is thinly veiled political ideology masquerading under different models.” Other roadblocks include latent anarchism (a challenge to the very idea of government) and traditions in the NPR's outlook, such as seeking to empower federal officials while reducing oversight and to increase the responsibilities of public managers while thinning their ranks and adding political appointees. A second contribution, “The National Performance Review in Perspective” by James P. Pfiffner shifts the symposium from Hays and Kearney's background focus to an overview of this commission's work and an evaluation of three aspects of its report. One has been the tendency of Vice President Albert W. Gore, Jr., who chaired the NPR, and some supporters to overstate the seriousness of problems in the performance of the federal government, perhaps to justify a need for extensive change. A second facet delved into a spate of scholarly and managerial criticisms leveled at the NPR report—for instance, overpromising with regard to expected results: particularly, claims of huge fiscal savings; shifting the functions of government officials from implementation of laws enacted by the representatives of citizens to the satisfaction of customer preferences, which are frequently volatile; a “hollowing” (understaffing and underfunding) of the national government as a likely consequence of NPR-recommended personnel cuts; a failure to propose reductions in the steadily increasing number of political appointees; and a lack of official attention to the need for institutionalizing the mission of the NPR in the Office of Management and Budget. A third aspect is a nuanced defense of the National Performance Review, especially its confidence in the creative energies of federal employees and its recommendations for deregulating the personnel, procurement, and budget practices of the national executive branch. The author concludes that the results of the latest attempt at federal government reform will probably be incremental, for he points out: “The successes of the NPR are more likely to come in a number of different areas than in one sweeping transformation.” A third article, “Ideological Reactions to the National Performance Review” by James A. Gazell, turns scholarly attention from the background and presentation of the report to an exploration of the ideological environment, which influences prospects for implementation of its recommendations. The writer suggests that in the months before and after the issuance of the NPR report, there was a substantial degree of convergence among moderate, conservative, and liberal observers on its basic thrust: namely, decentralization within and outside the federal executive branch through a potpourri of steps such as debureaucratization, deregulation, federalism, and privatization. There was wide acceptance of the idea, by journalistic and academic commentators, that a devolutionary model for governance of the federal public service is the most effective one. This outlook had been popularized, beginning in the 1960s, through the writings of Peter F. Drucker. According to this paradigm, for instance, the organizational edifice of federal executive agencies should be made more horizontal. Their budgetary, personnel, and procurement responsibilities should be subject to far fewer regulations. States and localities should be permitted greater discretion in carrying out public services. Reliance upon the business world and the third (or non-profit) sector should be expanded. However, such commentators disagreed about the nature of the ultimate result if the recommendations in this study were fully implemented—for instance, smaller government at all levels as conservatives envisioned, government less amenable to influence from Congress and federal employees as middle-of-the road analysts favored, or more effective government as liberals sought. The article concluded that the report signified, inter alia, the outer limit of ideological consensus since there is no agreement on precisely what the functions of the national, state, and local governments ought to be and how they should be allocated among these levels. Commentators agreed on measured steps toward vastly different ends. Nevertheless, regardless of ideology, observers still tacitly accepted the premises that in America the welfare state would largely persist and that efforts toward government reform at the federal level would involve only marginally changing the boundaries of the welfare state. A fourth article, “REGO, Organizational Architecture, and Reality” by Mary E. Guy, moves beyond historical perspective, recapitulation and appraisal, and philosophical responses to an exploration of another sequential issue: prospects for implementation of National Performance Review recommendations. After recounting the types of changes advocated by this commission, she devotes the bulk of her essay to an analysis of seven variables whose presence in federal agencies militates against the likelihood of effecting proffered changes. These variables encompass culture, trust, structure, organizational behavior, workforce composition, partisan politics, and routines. Guy contends that the culture of federal bureaucracies is dominated by an imperative for accountability, which generally subverts attempts to empower personnel. Trust is another value which presupposes loosening the bonds of accountability in order to accelerate and improve performance but which contravenes the regnant norm of accountability—that is, granting federal employees only the absolute minimum in discretion for them to do their jobs at all. Structure involves the elimination of middle management, which she views as generating resistance from federal employees who would discover that their responsibilities are growing as their authority remains the same and as their career security and prospects are jeopardized. Organizational behavior concerns teamwork and innovation, both of which confront several forces: bureaucratic proclivity toward isolating individuals, lack of incentive to make substantial change due to the monopolistic status of government agencies, and prospects of reduced budgets, personnel levels, and ability to deliver services. Workforce composition includes downsizing, which threatens the ability of the federal government to achieve racial and gender diversity as well as opportunities of minorities for advancement. Partisan politics involve control of the federal legislative and executive branches by different political parties, which hampers innovations by public servants and which makes members of Congress less likely to favor any proposals for increasing the effectiveness of the executive branch. Routines focus on streamlining the process for making claims of benefits, a matter that usually risks opposition from interest groups and employees accustomed to the status quo. A fifth essay, “As the NPR Twig Was Bent: Objectives, Strategic Gaps, and Speculations” by Robert T. Golembiewski, echoes the pessimism of Guy about the prospects of successfully carrying out the recommendations for federal government reform. His criticisms, like Guy's, are organizational. Three matters bother him. One is that the NPR “is normatively untethered” because it fails to recommend how federal workforce reductions ought to be achieved, what duration of employment should be promised, and whether federal workers ought to be expected to disclose information about their job that may lead to their layoffs and an end of their functions. A second problem is that the NPR failed to examine what kind of structure would be necessary to implement its proposals. He notes that the accompanying NPR “texts take pains to criticize the consequences of the bureaucratic model but do not replace it.” They offer no post-bureaucratic paradigm even though at least several alternatives, all of which involve a horizontal integration of work, are available. A third alleged organizational shortcoming involves what constitutes effective interactions among federal workers. He argues that the National Performance Review and its accompanying reports condemn vertical interactions but fail to suggest horizontal alternatives. He declares that the “NPR is not only unspecific about practical replacements but, worse still, [the] NPR seems innocent of long-standing and highly successful efforts to specify and develop just the pattern of interaction [the] NPR could utilize.” Furthermore, Golembiewski suggests eight possible explanations for these two strategic gaps: a dearth of knowledge about the roles of structure and interaction in effecting long-term change, a desire to postpone these matters due to the magnitude of the NPR's undertaking, ambivalence toward bureaucracy, an intent to weaken the political position of federal employees, a fostering of a truncated administrative state, a neglect of a middle-ground between result and process orientations, a reaction to unsuccessful British experiences with post-bureaucratic models, and an absence of relevant American experiences. However, he doubted the validity of any of them and declared that the commission had ignored a “substantial public-sector experience [that] exists with post-bureaucratic structures and with building their associated infrastructures.” A sixth contribution, “Why the Gore Report Will Probably Fail” by David Kirkwood Hart and David W. Hart, further explores the same aspect of the National Performance Review study that Guy and Golembiewski examined—namely, its implementation. They share those writers’ pessimism about its prospects over the long haul, albeit for different (but not necessarily contradictory) reasons. Whereas Guy and Golembiewski perceive a web of organizational impediments, the Harts see a paradigmic failure: an unmodified application of business sector outlooks to the public realm, based on the assumption that the values of public administration are essentially those of business administration. Unlike the latter, the former rests on an ethos that might be called by any of several names—”the common good,” “the general welfare,” “the public interest,” “Founding values,” or “public service.” According to the authors, the NPR acknowledged a need to articulate such a vision (the lack of which constitutes the fundamental cause of popular disenchantment with government) but, instead, concentrated its attention on practice (process rather than substance) and thus missed an opportunity to delineate a public-interest paradigm. The writers point to “the NPR's ideal of the public servant as a bottom-line fixated, customer-oriented, profit-motivated employee—no different from those the NPR presumes are found in business. . .” Besides a void in limning a conception of the public interest, the authors perceive other deficiencies: top-down reform (an irony in light of the NPR's professed desire to reduce the influence of hierarchy), the demeaning of public service due to a presumption in the superiority of business administration, a subordination of citizenship to customership, and a failure to convince cynical federal employees that reinventing government is not another managerial fad, the latest idea borrowed from the business world. A seventh contribution, “Reinventing Government and Reformulating Public Administration” by John J. Gargan, explores some implications of the National Performance Review report for public administration as a field of study and practice. The author is troubled by a situation in which public disenchantment with government is increasing despite a century of advice offered by public administration scholars and frequently undertaken by public-sector executives. Such counsel has frequently come in the form of a series of commission reports dating from 1904. While one might argue that popular disillusionment might be even greater in the absence of this advice, Gargan implies that the paradigm behind such reports, including the NPR, may be hampering government performance. He notes that underlying the latest study is a faith in a competitive market model. But Gargan suggests, this perspective ignores the complex interdependencies among numerous jurisdictions and the necessity of cooperation and accommodations among them to effect anything of consequence. With an expansion in the scope of government activities over the last six decades, with an increased resort to government by proxy, and with a continued primacy of politics over management, a collaborative model is imperative. Specifically, he advocates “governing capacity” as an alternative way of looking at the federal government and steering prospective advice. This proposal involves two features: an ability to fulfill the requirements facing a political system at a particular time and a capability of satisfying systemic expectations. Requirements include whatever is necessary to sustain an ordered society with a high degree of liberty. Expectations concern public beliefs in the susceptibility of problems to solutions through government actions. Ultimately, “governing capacity” is, to Gargan, a bridge between politics and administration.