[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[September 8, 1993]
[Pages 1452-1454]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1452]]


Remarks to General Services Administration Employees in Franconia, 
Virginia
September 8, 1993

    Thank you very much. Mr. Vice President, Roger, Senator Robb and 
Congressman Moran, Congresswoman Byrne, and, most important, to all of 
you who have worked so hard here at this center to give the American 
people the Government they deserve. I want to begin by once again 
thanking the Vice President for the incredible amount of work that was 
done by the Vice President, by his staff, by hundreds and hundreds of 
volunteers, and by people like you who gave us the ideas that went into 
the National Performance Review report.
    I also want to say to all of you something that you all know, 
because you are both public employees and private citizens. If we can 
reform these procurement practices, we can probably do more there than 
in any other area of our national life in the short run to restore the 
confidence of the American people in their Government. Every taxpaying 
citizen who goes out in the summertime has bought insect repellant, and 
no rational person could possible believe that Federal employees need 
specially designed insect repellant. Everybody's bought aspirin. 
Everybody's filled out a form they wished they hadn't filled out. 
Everybody's bought things like folders and computer tapes. And at a time 
when we are now 20 years, 20 years into a period in our history where 
most American wage earners are working longer work weeks for stagnant 
wages, it is outrageous for the Government to have rules and regulations 
which take those people's money from them and spend it on things that 
cannot be justified.
    You heard the Vice President say some of these things. But our 
Government employs 142,000 people in the procurement system alone. We 
know we have 900 detailed procurement laws, and we're going to ask the 
Congress to change a lot of that. I've asked myself many times, as I've 
heard these stories from coast to coast, how this occurred. And I think 
there are many reasons.
    I was out the other day in a particularly wrenching encounter in 
Alameda, California, at the naval station there, which is one of the 
military facilities that's going to be closed in the base closings. And 
I talked to this man who had been an enlisted person in the Navy for 19 
years, raised a family as a Navy enlisted person. He said, ``Look, I 
hope I can stay. But,'' he said, ``I'll tell you one thing. I just tried 
to buy a personal computer for our operations.'' And he said, ``Thank 
the Lord we had some sort of waiver, because,'' he said, ``under the 
rules and regulations, I was going to have to spend $4,500 on a computer 
that had half of the capacity that I got for $2,200 at the local store 
where people buy their computers.'' And he said, ``You know, if you're 
going to ask people like me to leave the armed services because we have 
to cut back the defense budget, people who are willing to serve and 
willing to put their lives on the line, it is wrong to do that and keep 
spending twice as much for computers with half the capacity.'' The 
American people know this.
    I think there are a lot of reasons why this happens over time. 
Number one, Government rule writers never made a distinction between a 
very specialized product that was made only for the Government, like a 
bomber, for example, and insect repellant. You have to have rules for 
both. Number two, the distribution system in America has changed 
dramatically so that ordinary Americans can now access economies of 
scale because of discount distribution centers for items small- and 
medium-sized. That was not true 10 years ago. Number three, there's no 
way rulemaking can keep up with technology cycles. The Vice President 
mentioned that as it relates to computers.
    And finally--and this is the most important thing of all, I think, 
because this pervades everything we're trying to do--we spend too much 
time in Government, in my judgment, trying to keep bad things from 
happening with rules and regulations that eventually prohibit sensible 
public employees from making good things happen. If you spend all your 
time trying to keep something bad from happening--[applause]--now, I 
want to make it clear what we're talking about here. I'm not talking 
about a system with no accountability. I'm not talking about what 
happens when we change all the financial rules affecting S&L's and then 
had no accountability,

[[Page 1453]]

so we got what was predictable. There was a middle ground. We didn't 
have to overregulate them to death. We don't want to overlearn the 
lessons of that. We're not talking about what happened in the scandals 
in the Housing and Urban Development Department where there was no 
oversight and accountability of what was actually being done, but that 
is different from trying to micromanage and superregulate every decision 
that you and every other public employee makes before he or she makes 
it.
    And one of the things that I hope very much that the Vice President 
and I will be able to communicate through the national media to the 
American people is that we're going to have to give our public employees 
some more elbow room to make sensible decisions to save people money and 
yet hold them accountable so that if errors are made, they're pointed 
out; if somebody does something dishonest, it's found out. But we are 
now paying far more for the system of protecting ourselves from things 
than we ever would by the occasional mistake that will be made by an 
honest, creative public employee.
    There are all kinds of accountability systems that can be built in 
out there that still don't strangle people when they go to work every 
day. That is what we are committed to. I think it will make it more fun 
to work for the Federal Government. I think it will be more exciting for 
people to get up and go to work every day knowing that they have the 
capacity to treat the dollars within their control, given to them by 
hardworking taxpayers, the same way the taxpayers would their own money 
in their own purchases in their own homes and businesses. That is our 
objective, and we are determined to achieve it.
    The other thing I want to say to you is that this rulemaking problem 
is not just a problem in procurement. For example, you know that 
diabetics can have trouble with circulation and sometimes that can 
result in an amputation of the limb. It's shocking, but a veteran with 
diabetes in some cases can't qualify for a special shoe that would help 
the circulation and maybe even save his foot from an amputation, but he 
would qualify for an artificial limb and, by the way, the cost of the 
surgery. Now, which costs more? What makes more sense? Nobody ever did 
this on purpose. But the failure to analyze this, the fact that our 
Government has basically been unexamined for so long, has led to 
thousands and thousands of examples which cannot be defended. We just 
want to make sense out of this. We want to modernize this system so that 
you can take advantage of the best products, the best technology, the 
best pricing. We want you to be able to decide to buy Off so you won't 
go buggy when you need insect repellant. [Laughter]
    I also want to say that I'm very grateful to those of you who helped 
us get this far, and I'd like to ask you to help us one more step. In 
the appropriate way, Mr. Johnson will be testifying before committees of 
Congress. But I think, as citizens, anything any of you can do, just 
write and say, ``Look, this is our life. We know how this works. And we 
want to change it. And we can be trusted to make a lot of these 
decisions. And there are also easily establishable accountability 
systems so that if we make a mistake it can be corrected.''
    When I was in the campaign last year, I often quoted a line my wife 
read to me from a psychology book, which is that insanity was doing the 
same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different 
result. [Laughter] Well, we're trying to stop doing the same thing over 
and over again. We believe we can do better by our people. We believe we 
can do better by our public employees. Our responsibility, I know, is to 
take the knowledge that you have given to the Vice President and to the 
National Performance Review and change the way Government works. In the 
process, change the way we spend the taxpayers' money and change the way 
we impact on people.
    I will end where I began. The central tenet of every democracy in 
the end is trust. It's trust. When people elect Members of Congress and 
Presidents and empower them to establish institutions like the GSA, what 
they are basically saying is, ``There is no way in the world I can do 
all this for myself, and I certainly can't make all these decisions. So 
just for the privilege of having a check at election time, I trust you 
to make these decisions in the meanwhile.''
    That's what this is all about. And I've said more and more, we have 
all kinds of deficits in our country. We've got a budget deficit; we've 
got an investment deficit; we have a performance deficit, and that has 
led to a trust deficit. The profound sense of alienation so many people 
feel in our country has got to be healed, because we've got to do a lot 
of things to get America into the 21st century, to restore a sense of 
opportunity, to be able to create jobs, and

[[Page 1454]]

to be able to support incomes again that justify the hard work people 
do. And that no society will be able to do it unless there is a real 
partnership between Government and people in their private lives. And a 
partnership, whether it's a marriage, a business, or a Government-
private partnership, requires trust.
    So in the end, this is about more than dollars, it's about more than 
the pain of filling out those forms. It's even about more than making 
you happier and more productive on the job. It is about whether together 
we can restore the trust of the American people in their Government so 
that we can move on to these large tasks that we have to embrace to make 
the changes that are going on in the world friendly rather than 
dangerous for the American people.
    I do not think you can underestimate the importance of the work that 
you and I are engaged in. Because if we can reestablish that trust, we 
can regenerate opportunity, we can restore a sense of community in this 
country, we can make other people willing to take responsibility for 
their own actions because we are doing it, and we are setting an 
example. This is a big, big thing. We must do it together. And I thank 
you for your contribution to this important effort.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 9:30 a.m. at the GSA 
Franconia Distribution Center. In his remarks, he referred to Roger W. 
Johnson, Administrator, General Services Administration.