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 Efficiency work to cut spending, Republican allies liken their efforts to the White House plan of the 1990s.
More than 30 years ago, Democratic President Bill Clinton was tasked with cutting waste, traditional Chinese tape and simplifying bureaucracy to “build a better government with less cost and less cost.”
The “Reshape the Government” program cuts nearly 500,000 federal work and takes up a large number of regulations. But, according to the women who carried out the program by the Clinton administration, any similarities between the program and Doge ended there.
“We lost fat, they cut muscle. It’s simple,” Elaine Kamarck, a current senior researcher in governance research at Brookings, told CBS News. “We didn’t have any institutions crashing, we didn’t have any dysfunction, we followed the law. When we thought something went wrong, we sent it to Congress and asked them to change it.”
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Reshaping the government’s national partnership follows Clinton’s campaign commitments to make the government more effective. The project was led by Gore and officially Founded in March 1993a review of government agencies will continue to be the longest reform effort in the country’s history. It ended its work in 1998.
Gore hired Kamarck to direct the program, and the two formed a team of 400 civil servants who worked on many teams. They reviewed cabinet-level agencies with teams of partners within the agency and returned to review recommendations. Six months later, the project generated hundreds of suggestions in a report titled “Creating better and cheaper governments.”
The effort will eventually reduce the federal workforce by about 426,000 in less than eight years, while cutting thousands of pages of regulations instead focusing on saving government funds. But Carmack said it also focused on “making government better” and focused on performance and customer service standards that still exist today.
“Basically, we work with people in the government to determine where we can make it work better and where we can make it less expensive,” Carmack said.
The plan, which goes well beyond the six-month review period, focuses on implementation, involves about two-thirds of the recommendations and is estimated to save taxpayers $136 billion in savings.
Now, thirty years later, new cost-cutting work is underway. Mr. Trump Announce Musk played an important role in reelection in December last year, leading the morality of the new government (Doge) and signing Executive Order On the first day of his tenure, the Ministry of Government Efficiency was formally established. It is website Speaking of this, it has found $55 billion in savings so far, but CBS News commented on these savings Show some differences.
It took six months to work with the Clinton-era program, Doge worked with cabinet departments and agency leaders to immediately shrink the government’s workforce and suspend a bunch of government spending. Doge first shifts its focus to collecting federal contracts and spending on issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion regulations and foreign aid and has moved to other federal agencies.
The Trump administration provides Deferred resignation Plan over 2 million civilian federal employees and convince 75,000 to accept it before closing it and ordering agencies lay down Almost all trial staff.
The Governor has it too Right to use to the Ministry of Finance’s payment system. and Doge-related IRS staff Request access IRS data system that contains personal taxpayer information in recent days.
These moves sparked controversy and lawsuits over the government’s power to dramatically reshape the federal government during the compression.
Faced with censorship, Musk and his allies took the Clinton administration’s government overhaul as their own example, which seemed to be a role model for themselves. A Republican lawmaker showed a video after six months of review, including announcements from Clinton and Gore to remind Democrats of “the faith of the party.” Musk himself highlighted the comparison between his work and his efforts in the last few days and shared AI-generated postal The federal labor force decreased under the Clinton administration and agreed postal This is Clinton and Gore’s “original dodes”.
Carmack, though she has Propose The “biggest difference” between the Clinton administration plan and the Governor said that for new government cuts, earlier plans attempt to understand what’s going on in institutions, and important things about cutting with fine-toothed combs.
“If they did this the same way, they could do a lot of good for the government,” Carmack said. “But instead, they just, they threw away the baby with bath water.”
Still, Clinton’s administration cuts received a share of criticism, which caused frustration when the plan chose to close many of the regional offices considered outdated and incompatible with advances in electronic communications. Kamarck admits they didn’t win every battle. Although they successfully carried out procurement reforms, pioneered electronic filings for tax returns, and often helped bring the federal government into the Internet age, they did not have civil service. No advocate reform.
Despite their efforts to reduce the size of the government’s workforce rather than weeks rather than weeks, some believe the acquisition strategy they use is not as effective as before. “Many skills with special skills, and those who stay may be the ones we want to leave,” Donald Kettle, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, has been told. Tell the government executives 2013.
Carmack said the process the Clinton administration followed was a “harder approach” rather than a singular development process.
“They pretend they don’t have a law to manage the bureaucracy,” she said.
