WACO, Texas — Al Gore spent much of his vice presidency reinventing government and being the latest in a long line of politicians who saw common sense and good politics in battling bureaucratic bulge.
Now, it is President Bush's turn.
In his radio address Saturday morning, and in a 71-page report issued by the White House, Bush declared that it was time for more government reform. The first president to hold an MBA, which he received from Harvard, Bush calls his program a "management agenda" that intends to put more government services in competition with private-sector suppliers. The program would also make more use of what Bush calls "electronic government" and clean up programs long plagued by fraud and mismanagement, including student aid and public housing.
"My administration takes a new approach," Bush said in his radio address from his ranch near here in Crawford, where all week he has been issuing warnings to Congress against going on a fall spending spree. "We want to spend your hard-earned money as carefully as you do. And when we spend the people's money, we insist on results."
As the report prepared by the Office of Management and Budget made clear, the president's reference to results was a subtle swipe at Gore's multiyear effort to reduce the size and increase the efficiency of the federal bureaucracy.
The report concedes that the government work force has been reduced by 324,580 full-time employees, or their equivalent in part-time workers. "At 1.8 million employees, the federal civilian payroll has been reduced to its lowest level since 1950," the report says, a figure Bush was not eager to acknowledge during last year's presidential campaign.
But it cites General Accounting Office reports to criticize how the reductions occurred, arguing that the Clinton administration used across-the-board reductions rather than aligning cuts with the needs of individual government agencies. "The paradoxical result: a work force with steadily increasing numbers of supervisors and steadily declining accountability, a work force that feels more and more overworked at the same time as its skills move further and further out of balance with the needs of the public it serves." Bush also had nothing good to say about the use of computers and the Internet for the delivery of government services, a major initiative of the previous administration.
"The United States government is the world's single largest purchaser of computers and other technologies for gathering and using information," he said in his radio address. "In 2002, we will spend $45 billion on information technology. That's more than we've budgeted for highways and roads. Yet so far, and unlike private sector companies, this large investment has not cut the government's cost or improved people's lives in any way we can measure."
The report may fuel the debate over reducing the American diplomatic presence abroad.
"The U.S. overseas presence is costly, increasingly complex and of growing security concern," the report says, without acknowledging the argument of many in the State Department that there are too few Americans now poised to explain American policy to a world increasingly suspicious of Washington's motives.
It cites a directive from Bush to all ambassadors that warns them not to perform functions abroad that could just as easily be done from American shores. It also notes the high annual cost of keeping a diplomat with a family of four overseas: $339,100, the report says, quoting a State Department study.
Before the development of the next budget, the report says, the Bush administration plans to come up with a program for a "right-sized overseas presence" that better integrates the activities of State Department, defense, commerce and other personnel based in American embassies.