How Clinton's "reinventing government" compares to DOGE's approach: "We cut fat and they cut muscle"

CBS News

20-02-2025

As President Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency push to slash spending, Republican allies have pointed to a White House program from 30 years ago as akin to DOGE's efforts.
Over 30 years ago, Vice President Al Gore was tasked by Democratic President Bill Clinton to cut waste, red tape and streamline the bureaucracy to "create a government that works better and costs less."
The "reinventing government" program cut nearly half a million federal jobs and dispensed with a massive number of regulations. But according to the woman who ran the program under the Clinton administration, any similarities between that program and DOGE's end there.
"We cut fat and they cut muscle. It's as simple as that," Elaine Kamarck, now a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, told CBS News. "We didn't have any meltdowns of agencies, we didn't have any dysfunction going on, and we obeyed the law. When we thought something was wrong, we sent it to Congress and asked them to change it."
The National Partnership for Reinventing Government followed through on Clinton's promise on the campaign trail to make the government more efficient and effective. The project was spearheaded by Gore and officially created in March 1993, kicking off a review of government agencies that would go on to become the longest-running reform effort in the nation's history, wrapping up its work in 1998.
Kamarck was hired by Gore to direct the program, and the two put together a team of about 400 civil servants to work across a number of teams. They conducted reviews of Cabinet-level agencies with a partner team within the agency and returned recommendations for review. Six months later, the project had yielded hundreds of recommendations bound in a report titled "Creating a Government that Works Better & Costs Less."
The effort, which would ultimately trim the federal workforce by around 426,000 in less than eight years while cutting thousands of pages of regulations, focused on saving the government money. But Kamarck said it also focused on "making the government work better," with attention toward performance and customer service standards that remain today.
"Basically, we worked with people in the government to identify where we could make it work better, and where we could make it cost less," Kamarck said.
The program went on well beyond the six-month review period to focus on implementation, acting upon around two-thirds of the recommendations, and yielding an estimated $136 billion in savings for taxpayers.
Now, more than three decades later, a new cost-cutting effort is underway. Mr. Trump announced in December that Musk, who played a major role in his reelection effort, would lead DOGE in the new administration, and signed an executive order on his first day in office to officially create the Department of Government Efficiency. Its website says it's found $55 billion in savings so far, but a CBS News review of those savings shows some discrepancies.
Unlike the Clinton-era program, which took six months to make its recommendations, DOGE, in under a month has worked with Cabinet department and agency heads to shrink the government workforce immediately and pause swaths of government spending. DOGE first turned its focus to excising federal contracts and spending on issues like diversity, equity and inclusion provisions and foreign aid and has moved on to other federal agencies.
The Trump administration offered a deferred resignation plan to more than 2 million civilian federal employees and convinced 75,000 to accept it before shutting it down and ordered agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees.
DOGE has also gained access to the Treasury Department's payment system. And an IRS employee associated with DOGE requested access to the IRS' data system that includes individual taxpayer information in recent days.
The moves have sparked controversy — and lawsuits — over the administration's authority to carry out its dramatic reshaping of the federal government in a compressed period of time.
Facing scrutiny, Musk and allies have held up the example of the Clinton administration's government overhaul seemingly as a kind of model for their own. During a hearing held by the House's newly created DOGE subcommittee last week, one Republican lawmaker showed a video featuring Clinton and Gore's announcement after the six-month review to remind Democrats of what their "party believed in." Musk himself has highlighted the comparison between his work and the effort three decades prior in recent days, sharing an AI-generated post on reductions to the federal workforce under the Clinton administration and concurring with a post that called Clinton and Gore "the original Doges."
Kamarck, though she has advocated for new government cuts, said the "big difference" between the Clinton administration program and DOGE is that the earlier program sought to understand what was going on in the agency and what was important — using a fine-toothed comb to make cuts.
"If they were doing it the same way we did it, they could do a hell of a lot of good for the government," Kamarck said. "But instead, they're just, they're throwing out the baby with the bath water."
Still, Clinton's government cutting received its share of criticism, sparking frustrations when the program chose to close many regional offices deemed to be obsolete and incompatible with advancements in electronic communications. Kamarck conceded that they didn't win every fight. Though they succeeded on procurement reform, pioneered electronic filing of tax returns and generally helped usher the federal government into the internet age, they fell short on civil service reform without an advocate in Congress.
And although their effort to reduce the size of the government workforce took place over years instead of weeks, there were some who felt that the buyout strategy they used was not as effective as it could have been. "Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we'd have wanted to leave," Donald Kettl, the former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Government Executive in 2013.
Kamarck said the process the Clinton administration followed is the "harder way to do it" — and not how DOGE is proceeding.
"They are pretending that there is no law governing the bureaucracy," she said.