Orszag’s Gone – So Who Will Lead the War on Waste?
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June was a busy month for Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. First, he declared a War on Waste at all federal agencies. Then, he gave a major speech describing how OMB must close the IT gap in government, to modernize and reform government for the 21st Century.
Then he announced he was quitting.
While General McChrystal was facing his Rolling Stone departure, many wondered who would lead the war in Afghanistan. So it is at OMB. With Orszag gone, who will lead the War on Waste?
On June 8, Orszag sent out an OMB memo to all agency heads, outlining the administration’s cost cutting blitzkrieg. According to the memo:
[O]ur Nation’s finances are on an unsustainable course, and it is imperative that we restore fiscal responsibility… We can no longer afford the old way of doing business here in Washington.
The memo directed each agency to identify the bottom five percent to be placed on the chopping block: “Your agency is required to identify the programs and subprograms that have the lowest impact on your agency’s mission and constitute at least five percent of your agency’s discretionary budget.” The press reported this as “across the board five percent cuts.”
Of course, simply putting something on the chopping block doesn’t mean it will get chopped. Washington is famous for saving obsolete and redundant programs.
And here we should pause, take a deep breath, and revisit the inspiring story of the federal Mohair program.
Mohair is the wool taken from an Angora goat. Following World War II, when uniforms were made of wool, Congress wanted to make certain there wouldn’t be a shortage, so they established a program to subsidize mohair production. The Pentagon removed wool from its list of strategic materials in 1960, but the wool and mohair subsidy endured. In 1990, the United States Department of Agriculture shelled out $60 million of your tax dollars for the upkeep of Angora goats.
Soon after taking office, full of reformist vigor, President Clinton’s National Performance Review put the program on its hit list. On November 1, 1993 President Clinton affixed his signature to a law abolishing the mohair subsidy:
Today, in signing S. 1548, something unusual will happen: a Federal program is being abolished…. This is a departure from business-as-usual in Washington, where programs seem destined to live forever…. In the past, our citizens might well assume that Washington could not adopt this much change. But, in 1993, the American people have seen their Government fulfill its commitments on a wide variety of issues…
The mohair program was dead, and only 33 years after it had been declared obsolete. That is to say, it certainly looked dead. There was a law and everything.
Ah, but President Clinton underestimated those plucky little goats and the lobbyists who loved them. Despite being killed in 1993, the mohair subsidy is very much alive. Like something out of a George Romero movie (“Dawn of the Dead,” Night of the Living Dead,” and “Mohair Subsidy of the Dead”), government programs do seem destined to live forever, no matter how obsolete or redundant. So directing agencies to identify the least valuable five percent is a far cry from actually cutting five percent of anything.
Which isn’t to demean Orszag’s efforts. The great shame is that OMB and Orszag had been at the forefront of pushing sound management and paying attention to the inglorious work of implementation. “Too often in Washington, we spend more time developing, debating, and deciding which policies to pursue than we do actually figuring out how to implement them,” said Orszag. “But in reality, execution matters – and matters a lot.”
Taking execution seriously, navigating the arduous journey from idea to results, is not something our political system is good at. In Washington, speeches occur, but results do not always follow. This is heartening news for the bottom five percent, but bad news for taxpayers.
Most frustrating of all is that Mr. Orszag was tackling the right sorts of issues. His lieutenants, including Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zeints, CTO Aneesh Chopra and CIO Vivek Kundra, have been actively seeking to enhance the operational efficiency of the federal behemoth, particularly in the area of IT.
As Orszag noted in his speech, there is a mammoth gap between the effective use of IT in the private sector and in government. “Closing the IT gap is perhaps the single most important step we can take in creating a more efficient and responsive government.” He also offered a specific reason why this operational reform effort might succeed while those that came before have failed:
Indeed, the IT gap is the key differentiator between our effort to modernize and reform government and those that have come before. While it would be better if we did not find ourselves in this position, note that because the gap is so big, the potential upside is substantial. Our historical shortcomings in IT may ironically give us a “late-mover advantage,” by allowing us to leapfrog costly, less developed technologies and go directly to the less expensive, more powerful ones.
In other words, the biggest advantage we have is how far behind we are.
Of course, no one is behind Mr. Orszag now. Having blown the battle trumpet and issued marching orders in the War on Waste, he's now headed for the private sector, where the IT is better and where when obsolete programs are killed, they have the common courtesy to stay dead.
John O’Leary is a Research Felow at the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, editor of the Better, Faster, Cheaper blog, and the co-author with Bill Eggers of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon (Harvard Business Press).