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CBS News
20-02-2025
- Business
- CBS News
How Clinton's "reinventing government" compares to DOGE's approach: "We cut fat and they cut muscle"
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.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Clinton initiative cut over 377K federal jobs in the 1990s. It's not comparable to Trump's effort
Claim: During his time in office, U.S. President Bill Clinton oversaw the termination of 377,000 federal employees. Rating: Context: According to testimony from Elaine Karmarck, the director of Clinton's initiative, it eliminated 426,200 federal roles between January 1993 and September 2000. Looking back on the 1990s, it's strange to imagine a time when a presidential campaign was won on a promise to balance the federal budget. Bill Clinton did it, too — the U.S. federal budget had a surplus between 1998 and 2001, the only time there's been a surplus since 1970. (The government's debt is $36.22 trillion at the time of writing). In January and February 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump began giving Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) increasing control over government services in an effort to eliminate federal government programs and dramatically slash spending. Some media outlets claimed Trump and Musk's methodology was unprecedented. In response, social media posts appeared pointing back to a Clinton-era initiative that "oversaw the termination of 377,000 federal employees," as evidence that Trump and Musk had simply "learned from the master." It's true that during his presidency, Clinton reduced the federal government's workforce by more than 377,000 employees as part of an initiative called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (initially called the National Performance Review, or NPR). However, there's a key difference between how Clinton's NPR cut jobs and what Trump and Musk are trying. In March 1993, just two months into his presidency, Clinton announced the creation of the National Performance Review, led by his Vice President, Al Gore. Its goal, according to Clinton's announcement, was "to make the entire Federal Government both less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment." The review lasted six months, and made 384 recommendations to improve the federal bureaucracy. The implementation of those policies took a lot longer, and some required legislation to be passed through Congress. For instance, in 1994, Clinton signed a bill that offered federal workers buyouts of up to $25,000 in an effort to reduce the workforce by 272,000 employees. According to an April 1995 statement from Clinton, the buyouts were largely offered to management positions in an effort to "reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micromanagement that were tying Government in knots." That statement said that about 70 of the buyouts in non-Department of Defense agencies went to managers and other individuals "at higher grade levels." The initiative continued to make recommendations for government reform. According to a 1999 article on an archived version of NPR's website, it reduced the federal workforce by 351,000 between 1993 and 1998. An archived FAQ page from 2000 said 377,000 jobs were cut between 1993 and 1999. In a 2013 appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, former National Performance Review leader Elaine Karmarck said the agency cut 426,200 jobs by September 2000. But the buyouts offered by Clinton's NPR and Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency are not the same. Clinton's buyout plan had overwhelming bipartisan support from Congress, and the law was signed after a review period. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk offered the buyouts just one week into Trump's term, with no review process. Federal employee labor unions have sued, questioning the legality of the buyout, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked the offer in order to review the lawsuit. Brief History of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. Department, Paul Richter Paul Richter covered the State, et al. "Clinton Signs Federal Worker Buyout Plan." Los Angeles Times, 31 Mar. 1994, "Fact Check: Did Clinton Set the Precedent for Mass Federal Worker Buyouts?" Al Jazeera, Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. Fiscal Data Explains the National Debt. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. Frequently Asked Questions About the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. History of the Debt — TreasuryDirect. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. Judge Halts Trump's Government Worker Buyout Plan. 7 Feb. 2025, "Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump Plan Offering Incentives for Federal Workers to Resign." AP News, 6 Feb. 2025, "Lessons for the Future of Government Reform." Brookings, Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. "Reinventing Government -- Two Decades Later." Government Executive, 26 Apr. 2013, Remarks by President Clinton Announcing the Initiative to Streamline Government. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. Statement on the Buyout Program for Federal Employees | The American Presidency Project. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. "Trump Gives Musk Unprecedented Access to Federal Systems." PBS Newshour Classroom, 4 Feb. 2025, Vice President Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Will Elon Musk Cut as Much Government as Al Gore Did?
After winning a return to the White House, President Donald Trump tapped Tesla CEO Elon Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body tasked with making the government less costly and more efficient. It is an arduous and unenviable task. It is also not the first such endeavor: In the 1990s, then–Vice President Al Gore undertook a similar effort. What can we learn from Gore's experience? As president, Bill Clinton famously declared that "the era of big government is over." Weeks into his term, Clinton had announced "a national performance review" (NPR) to "reinvent" government. He put Gore in charge of the project, which was later codified into law by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. A dedicated website said the NPR initiative—later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government—would make government "work better, cost less, and get results American [sic] care about." The NPR issued its first report in September 1993, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less. It listed 1,200 recommendations across the entire government that, if implemented, it said could save $108 billion in five years ($235 billion in 2024 dollars). "If we follow these steps, we will move much closer to a government that costs less and works better for all of us," the report concluded. "It will be leaner, more effective, fairer, and more up-to-date. It will be a government worth what we pay for it….And perhaps the federal debt—that $4 trillion albatross around the necks of our children and grandchildren—will slow its rampage." Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who worked as an adviser to Gore at the time, touted the NPR's accomplishments in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2013: "We reduced the federal workforce by 426,200 between January 1993 and September 2000," she said, "making the federal government in 2000 the smallest government since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president" while also "yielding $136 billion in savings to the taxpayer." The government did cut its workforce during the Clinton years, with the overall number of federal employees falling from 3.09 million in January 1993 to 2.75 million in September 2000—suggesting that Kamarck's cited cuts outpaced hiring. Donald Kettl, a Brookings Institution scholar who studied the NPR at the time, told a Senate subcommittee in May 2000 that while some agencies shrank substantially during Clinton's tenure, "three cabinet departments have grown: Commerce (especially to manage the census); State (to cope with international pressures); and Justice (to increase the number of guards at federal prisons)." Those cuts also weren't across the board: "Since 1993, the reduction in the executive branch workforce, not counting the U.S. Postal Service, amounts to approximately 400,000 jobs," Stephen Barr wrote in The Washington Post in October 2000. "The downsizing was fueled by the post-Cold War base closings and budget cuts at the Defense Department, where about 70 percent of the civil service cuts took place." A 1999 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report expressed skepticism about the claimed savings. "NPR claimed savings from agency-specific recommendations that could not be fully attributed to its efforts," the report found, as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) "generally did not distinguish NPR's contributions from other initiatives or factors that influenced budget reductions at the agencies we reviewed." The GAO also "identified two instances where OMB counted at least part of the estimated savings twice," including two recommendations that constituted "potentially up to $1.4 billion in estimated savings" on their own. Still, there have certainly been more profligate presidencies. During Clinton's tenure, the amount of federal debt held by the public barely budged, rising from $3.3 trillion to $3.4 trillion. The government even ran budget surpluses for several years, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars toward paying down the debt. Can Musk and Trump achieve that much? It would be a hard lift. Asked before the 2024 election how much he thought he could cut from the federal budget—which currently tops $6.8 trillion—Musk replied, "I think we could do at least $2 trillion." Such a cut would be difficult, but not impossible: The 2019 federal budget totaled $4.4 trillion ($5.4 trillion in 2024 dollars). Even adjusting for inflation, Congress could cut $2 trillion and spend only $700 billion less in constant dollars than it did before the COVID-19 pandemic. But Musk walked back his prediction after the election, admitting in January that it was just "the best-case outcome" and that "I think if we try for $2 trillion, we've got a good shot at getting 1." In a post this week on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk said he was "cautiously optimistic" he would reach his goal of $4 billion per day in savings from the budget for fiscal year 2026, which would reduce the deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion. The GOP hasn't been much help: Although entitlements are the biggest deficit drivers, the 2024 Republican platform pledged to "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE." There is similarly no guarantee that Republicans can simply grow the economy enough to outweigh the deficit. One tactic Musk has adopted is buyout-style offers to federal workers. That, as it happens, is one area where there are direct lessons from the Al Gore experience. Last week the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent a mass email to federal employees with a "deferred resignation offer." Anyone who accepted the offer could, it said, resign immediately but enjoy full pay and benefits through the end of September. (The email listed February 6 as the deadline, but a judge has since delayed it until February 10. ABC reports that 40,000 employees have accepted the offer so far.) There has been a fair amount of confusion around the proposal, as when OPM sent the message to air traffic controllers but then clarified that they weren't actually eligible for the deal. The NPR, similarly, offered federal workers "the lesser of $25,000 or the amount of the employee's severance pay" to resign. "There was an effort to reduce the number of middle-level managers. In general, however, the downsizing occurred as a result of individual employees' responses to the buyout the government offered," Kettl said in 2000. "There is little knowledge about the resulting skill mix of the federal workforce. There was little advance planning of what skill mix the federal government needs for the future." Put more bluntly, there was little assurance that they got rid of the deadweight and kept the people with the best skills. Setting aside such specific lessons of the Clinton-era effort, the NPR at least offers us an informal benchmark: If Elon Musk can't bring big government under control, can he at least reduce it as much as Al Gore? The post Will Elon Musk Cut as Much Government as Al Gore Did? appeared first on
