Elaine Kamarck, senior policy adviser for Vice President Al Gore, said Gore's much-heralded National Performance Review has successfully improved the efficiency of the federal government since it was first implemented two years ago.
Speaking to about 40 students at the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences yesterday afternoon, Kamarck said the performance review aims to "begin restoring Americans' faith" in politics by creating a government that "costs less and works better."
Besides delivering a speech about reinventing government, Kamarck also plugged the Oct. 25 Random House release of "Common Sense Government," a report about fiscal policy written by Gore and given to President Bill Clinton that is about to commercially published.
The performance review is a program that sprung out of Clinton's promise to "reinvent government." It currently has a team of 260 federal, state and local employees and has a two-year budget of $2.8 million, according to Kamarck.
Kamarck now leads the second generation of the performance review, which continues to target excess bureaucracy and unnecessary regulation.
The job of the performance review is to make the government more "customer friendly," Kamarck said.
She said the project has four main goals: to bring better service to taxpayers while eliminating waste, to establish a wide base of well-educated government employees, to reduce red tape and to limit the scope of the government's involvement in the lives of private citizens.
"We have a government with high prices and lousy service," Kamarck said.
The present system is a "rigid organizational system" without enough flexibility, Kamarck said.
Kamarck said the government needs to take a lesson from private companies.
Private companies "put customers first," she said. The government should "treat taxpayers like the private section would treat customers."
Since the creation of the performance review more than two years ago, the federal government has finally started to trim costs, according to Kamarck.
The performance review has saved $58 billion and cut 160,000 government employees from its payroll and is currently one year ahead in its downsizing effort, according to Kamarck.
The project's goal is to make government agencies more efficient, Kamarck said.
Kamarck's daily duties include meeting with Gore, monitoring and writing legislation and coordinating projects with other offices.
She offered the example of the performance review's work with downsizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency as testimony of the program's success.
According to Kamarck, when the project first addressed the agency, it was a compilation of many overlapping departments that wasted government money. As a result of the project's work the agency is much more effective, she said.
Mary O'Connor '96, who interned in Gore's office and worked extensively with Kamarck, called her a "whirlwind."
"She's involved in everything," O'Connor said. In addition to heading up the performance review, Kamarck serves as the vice president's primary adviser on the Community Empowerment Board and on the Clinton administration's Welfare Reform Task Force.
