Our guest serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University where he teaches Program Evaluation and statistical methods to graduate students. Please join me in welcoming david more housing. Clocks good morning and welcome to Heritage Foundation auditorium. For those of you online, we are organizing the federal government that to be done and how to do it. Today we have panelists with extensive experience in the workings of the federal government. Rachel is a Research Fellow in economics. She is leading the Heritage Foundation reorganization project, that is the subject of todays events. She was a senior economist from the staff of the joint economic committee. Donald is the senior scholar at the fund for americans dollars. The served as Ronald Reagans civilservice direct your. During that time, the Washington Post labeled him reagans swift sword. He cut bureaucratic excesses and reduced billions in spending. His new book is a guide to reforming. You can purchase this online. I look forward to reading it. Last is robert, a principal at the center. He leads the communications and is a member of the performance transition team. He was appointed to the commission in policymaking. Previously, he was associate director for administration and government performance at the office of management and budget are in budget. It administered the Program Rating tool. He served as counsel for the committee on government affairs. Rachel its my pleasure to be here today. I am working on production of our blueprints for reform. We begin with the blueprint for balance. The blue plant for reform and new administration, we will put in a plug at the beginning. The blueprint for balance was the first one. We spelled out 100 different recommendations that lead to 10 trillion lesson federal spending. What we done here is a lot of those recommendations we included in the blueprint are part of the blueprint for reorganization. We set aside the pathways you can have reforms. We noted if the president has the authority for what would need to be done. That would need to take ways to implement the recommendations weve presented here. With 4 trillion in annual spending and 19 trillion in public debt and 22 different cabinet level agencys, americans are in need of a government wide reorganization. Our government does few bounds. We did the government to focus on core constitutional responsibilities. We need a government that is looking out for the interest of everybody. We need one that is providing Efficient Services with accountability attached to it. In his blueprint, the first one is focused on the analysis of federal departments. We have 100 different recommendations. I will give you examples of those. I wanted to clarify that not everything in here is something that the executive department has the authority to take on. A lot of the things will require buyin from congress. Our second edition of the blueprint specifies what the executive can do already, what changes can be made and what things will need congressional buyin. We also look at some cost cutting issues. In the second one, we look at reforms like modernizing changes to personal policy. Among our 110 recommendations we include, i will start with eliminating coal departments, such as the federal Housing Administration and the Financing Agency and the Consumer Financial protection bureau. There are often some Core Functions we would hold an transfer them to a more appropriate department or agency. There are some functions we consider nonfederal should he transferred to state and local government, such as low income housing. State and local governments have utter knowledge of their own local communities and more are providing services. We have departments and services we recommend eliminating. The v. A. Has 42 different offices. These things have been a bureaucratic nightmare for veterans. They need one shop to go to for all of their needs instead of 42 different offices, taking documentation from one office to another. Without shutting down entire agencies, we recommend closing some offices like the department of educations 24 field offices. We did not have the net in the Tech Knowledge he we do today. Technology we do today. These offices are no longer necessary today. We recommend streamlining functions within agencies. The department of justice as four separate criminal divisions. These are located they have their criminal Section Group in the division itself. In certain cases, programs like efficiency because they are in the wrong agency. We recommend things like moving the food and Nutrition Services from the department of agriculture into the health and Human Services with other welfare programs for taking programs out of education and putting them in treasury, treasury has the information they need and they are distributing the funds. What we dont recommend our cuts to defend spending. There is room to optimize irs highest priority luncheons first. We suggested eliminating excess infrastructure that is costly to maintain. We dont take the department of defense should be spending money on nondefense programs like Ovarian Cancer research. Too many of the programs benefit a select few instead of working across all americans. Thats why we recommend eliminating programs, such as community services, public broadcasting, the arts and humanities, the import export bank, minority business development. Efficiency isnt just about rightsizing the government and eliminating and moving programs around. Its making sure the government is doing its job through oversight and accountability. Regulation should be subject to meaningful review. We also recommend evidence based on policymaking. We do have places where there are plenty of accountability programs, such as the v. A. There are 31 different programs there and yet they are scattered. If you put them into one place, you are better serving veterans and taxpayers. Finally, because personal has such impact on efficiency and accountability, we recommend abroad package of reform to a prove improve accountability and let managers do their jobs. We also want to bring compensation in line with the private sector, so the government is in a more Competitive Position to retain the best workers. With that, i am going to hand it over to don. Don my name is Donald Devine. I am the serious part of the program. The first thing i want to say is i very much recommend both of these books. The cost cutting one is just super, one of the best things i ever look that. I am an academic background. In some crazy way after the 1980 election, president reagan called me up and said got a job for you. It was head of the office of Personnel Management. Thats kind of a funny job for a libertarian conservative like me, running the bureaucracy. He said ive got a good sense of humor. He said i want you to cut back 100,000 nondefense employees, i want you to reduce their loaded benefits and make them work harder. Just run the harry truman said about doing a tough job in washington, in either washington when youre doing a tough job. I bought two dogs to be on the safe side. The crazy thing is we did do it. Nobody thought this was possible, to reform government. We did reduce 100,000 nondefense employees. They tried to hide it. No conservative wants to know that, but we did it. We cut bloated benefits. Even my enemy said ice a x billion dollars, which in todays money is 60 billion. We made them work harder. It was a miracle. It happened. You heard the introduction by david, they call me reagans terrible swift sword. That was one of the nicest things they said about me. They called me the rasputin of the reduction in force. Thats what we called getting rid of people. We werent clever. We did the first ones at christmas, not a good time to do this in terms of public relations. The New York Times did a big story on me, calling me rasputin. The grinch in the pinstripe suit, trying to celebrate christmas. We did that. Nobody i am a professor, nobody cares about that. All they care about is that i knew Ronald Reagan and what a guy he was. What did i learn in this . The book was mentioned. Nothing has changed very much. Thats a book i wrote almost 40 years ago. I went to my publisher and said this is still pretty much all true, why dont you republish it. Things havent changed. All the reforms we did are gone. Most of them were gone by the next administration, a republican ministration. Administration. Government today simply doesnt work. Dont take it from a libertarian conservative like me. Lets take it from a professor of public relations, many serious reviews with congressional background. The government doesnt work anymore. It cant execute its laws. Thats a basic fact. He says there are 60 levels between the secretary that set the policy and doing something on the street. Its impossible to runs such an organization unless you have some measurements. The great social sciences said they dont have one in government. In the private sector, you can have 60 levels, although they have learned cant do that. There is no private company that does that anymore. They did it back in the 30s. You can go down even 60 levels and say is that making a profit or not . If it does, you keep it. In the government, you go down the 60 levels and if they are failing, you spend more money on it. The whole thing in the Public Sector is different than the private sector. How did we get his thing . The biggest revolutionary in American History is a guy named Woodrow Wilson who said that what we have do is bring all power together in the center and we can run everything with the experts. I still had to read his phd when i went to graduate school. He went over to prussia, why does it work . All power is centered in the government and was chancellor says we do it, we do it. He wrote a book. The problem with American Government is it divides power rather than bringing power together to do good. Its got a retirement system, its got an educational system, its got a welfare state. Weve got none of that in america at the national level. He comes back, he convinces the intellectuals thats the problem. The problem is dividing it, the solution is bringing it together. He starts the American Society or administration. He changes the intellectual opinion from saying that divided the power is good and bring it together dividing is good in bringing together is good. Every president since then except my boss bought into that very. Thats why we cant run this government. Thats why we cant run it or it run it. The only thing we can do is decentralize it back to the way the founders created. Ronald reagan said the secret to the success of america is federalism. That is americas contribution to the history of freedom. Ive got a solution. Rather than relying on all these institutions and having an office of management and budget, ive got a simple solution. The first book i mentioned was this cross cutting thing. The other thing divides up the agencies and departments and goes down each one. Ive got a simple answer. Just send these out to the agencies. Tell them to do it. If you dont like it, have a good reason. These are serious recommendations they have given. Dont let this to the normal process of omb. Robert is a big exception here. If you just turn it over to the careerists at omb, this will go on for years. It will come out with some dumb thing. What we should do is go back and reinvent cabinet government. Turned to the agencies. Thats their job. You guys did it here in thats the solution. Thats what i have to say. I wonder if i could edit with just a couple of bullets. I want her in talk to me later if you want me to take out what i disagree with. It is certainly true that the government has proliferated to such a degree that it could not accomplish what we ask it to do. We ask it to do it with a lot of restrictions on the management of people, money, systems, contracts that make it almost impossible to get the job done. If you find someone who is getting something done in government, that is a true talent. It is also true that the only thing we have close to Eternal Life Fund government is government program. Its very difficult to repeal or eliminate the program. Davids work, rachels work, evaluating programs. I dont think the logical conclusion is to eliminate everything that isnt effective. We find programs not having their intended impact. There is enormous room for improvement. Every president until the 80s had the authority to reorganize the government. I think its high time we reempower administrations with that authority. It is so hard to do it otherwise. The congress, at least from the oversight committee, is supportive of this authority, where you trip up is in authorizing committees and the appropriations committees. They have jurisdiction power, money assigned with specific agencies under their jurisdictions. What tends to drive reorganization is crisis. The most recent example of that is the establishment of the department of Homeland Security. Could it be strengthened if we consolidated the programs responsible for securing the homeland. That was fought until 9 11. Youll will recall immediately after 9 11, contract workers could not adequately secure airlines, airplanes. Commercial travel. Fairly soon thereafter, we created the department of Homeland Security, bringing all of these entities together. It is true that terrorist attacks on american soil have been rare since then, im not sure we can measurably say our security has been strengthened because of the chaos the department creates. There has been an enormous struggle to combine these entities into a cohesive, well honed organization. The big issue in giving the president the authority to do Something Like that is trust. Congress would need to trust the executive to use that authority responsibly. We have not had that kind of trusting relationship and a long time. Congress in the 1990s passed a law called me government performance and results act. That was my first job, to oversee implementation of that. No one really gave a damn about it. There are people for whom we need to drive Government Agencies to think more about out come. Its too easy to come to work and satisfy yourself with just producing inputs or wants. Outputs. If you dont measure whether that has an impact on the ultimate out come, you wont know if what youre doing has a public positive outcome. Government has struggled to identify the out, they are trying to outcome they are trying to establish. David has written about that, getting insight into whether we are creating important out comes and if the programs are having the intended impact. If those evaluations show they are effective, the vast majority of programs and the federal government are not the subject of that sort of evaluation at all. During the Bush Administration, the focus on outcomes was not really institutionalized. We established to this tool because we wanted to have some basis with which to allocate funding. We insisted through this tool that agencies and programs begin a process of subjecting their programs to these evaluations. It was the beginning of what we. All now the evidence agenda i have to admit, we didnt make a lot of progress integrating this data into the budget decisionmaking process. Policymakers do not have a huge appetite listening to evidence when it comes to funding decisions. Are highlyse political. So there is room for improvement , as a matter of understatement. As far as reorganizations are concerned, among the government programs, these are the ones that share a similar mission come other common or conflicting measures of performance. Deeprea we decided to do a dive in was an Economic Development. There are programs throughout the government that are intended to improve the economic condition of the poorest communities across government. We proposed taking all those programs and consolidate them into the Economic Development administration at the department of commerce. Many programs were found to be an effective. To get anlly hard ineffective rating with this tool. But because the community and Economic Development program, the biggest of the set of programs was found to be an effective. We moved that into the economic administration. While the overall funding level of these programs combined was thought intellectually giving them a more improvement entity, it meant you could get more with less. There were people who disagreed with the president s proposal. Omalley called the ofsident the Osama Bin Laden americans cities. That was not a highlight of my political career. But he goes to show you the interests and needs to be considered when you are developing and trying to enact these kinds of proposals. So if i step back, i would say the lessons that i take from my combined experience in driving these kinds of initiatives are leadership. Leadership that gets it, that is willing to invest the time and energy and intellectual and Political Capital to get these initiatives done is absently critical is absolutely critical. Collaboration, internally, is very rough. Agencies are not enthusiastic programs,ng up funding, power to another. But it is easier to get it done within the executive branch. Plow ground ont the hill and among other stakeholders, it will be very difficult to get these things enacted, especially in the instance of a crisis like 9 11. Collaboration whether broad set of stakeholders absolutely critical, as difficult as that seems. Perseverance, there are many bites at the apple. If you are unwilling to keep going at it, you are not likely