But speaker says it is not easy to reinvent government
Paul Light, a professor at the University of Minnesota, said in a speech Wednesday afternoon that the American government may need more, not less, reform.
Speaking on "Surviving Reinvention: The Hunt for Reform in Government" to an audience of 25 in the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences, Light said the federal bureaucracy has gotten thicker in the last few decades and that it resists change.
He said the problem of this "thickening" is not one of costs but one of "diffusion of accountability."
Light, one of the final candidates to succeed the center's former director, George Demko, said "past reforms leave a remarkable residue that has an incredible effect on reform."
Of 35 policy reforms recently instituted in Minnesota, 40 percent perished or were ineffective, Light said.
The research came from the Surviving Innovation Project, a group that Light heads that does research into reforming and improving governments.
Light cited the group's study as proof that many policy reforms and reinvention of governments do not last because of insufficient funding or political pressure.
Light added that often new administrations do not fully overhaul the bureaucratic hierarchy when instituting new reforms.
"Within the administration, from regime to regime, it fails to kill off reforms of former occupants of whatever regime was in play," he said.
In the past 50 years, Light said, there has been an increased infusion of fear into government which has created a situation where "bureaucrats don't take action and don't take risks."
He said the "residue" of former reforms undermine new ones. He cited as an example the maintenance of positions created specifically for one person because they would not join the administration if they did not have a higher title.
In 1960, there were eight senior management levels at the top of the federal bureaucracy and in 1992, there were 22, Light said.
The government structure resists reinvention, Light said, and he said that resistance might doom the the Gore Report, a document written by Vice President Albert Gore on reinventing government.
He added that thickening the bureaucracy is not partisan. He said
both Republicans and Democrats are equally at fault.
Light teaches at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.
