[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[September 11, 1993]
[Pages 1469-1474]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session on the National Performance 
Review in Houston, Texas
September 11, 1993

    The President. Thank you very much. Mr. Vice President, Governor 
Richards, Mayor Lanier, and my good friend Gary Marrow and all the rest 
of you who are here.
    The first thing we decided to do was to reinvent common sense by 
coming to Houston and having a meeting in a building that wasn't air 
conditioned. [Laughter]
    When I heard John Sharp--I want to brag on ol' John Sharp--when I 
heard John Sharp saying that, you know, he had been involved in this 
program to promote humility in Texas and that we had ruined it by giving 
you so much credit, which is justly deserved, for what we're trying to 
do, I began to wonder if the cost benefit was worth it. And then I 
realized that there are some things that even a President can't do, and 
promoting humility among folks

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like John Sharp is one of them. [Laughter]
    Let me tell you, I am very proud to be here today and deeply 
grateful to John, to Billy, to all the people who played a role in this, 
and also profoundly grateful to the people that I have known over the 
years in State and local government who have done what folks wanted them 
to do. You can go all over America, you know, and take some surveys 
among people, and they'll tell you: I trust my mayor; I trust the 
Governor; I trust them to solve this, that, or the other problem, in 
various places based on personal experiences.
    As soon as Bob Lanier got in office, he told me what he was going to 
do with police officers. He did it, and the crime rate went down. That's 
what people want to see happen. We talked the other day about a program 
he's got to promote more housing here, not just for people that can 
afford nice houses but for low-income people who were working, and he'll 
get that done. And when that happens, people will feel good about it 
without regard to their incomes, to know that people who are trying to 
play by the rules have a decent place to go home to at night.
    But this country has a big trust deficit in the National Government. 
And that is a huge problem, because we're living in a time of profound 
change, and the American people absolutely cannot meet the challenges of 
the future unless the National Government can take initiative, can be 
partners with the private sector and partners with State and local 
government and seize by the throat some of these things that have been 
bedeviling us for so long.
    You heard the Mayor talk about how much money the City of Houston is 
going to save because we passed the deficit reduction program that's 
driven interest rates to their lowest level in 25 years. Millions of 
Americans have gone out and refinanced their homes at lower interest 
rates or at shorter mortgage terms because the deficit's going down.
    We are going to be able to do all kinds of things we couldn't do 
otherwise. But all over the country we found widespread cynicism, when I 
was trying to pass that economic program, that the Federal Government 
could do anything right; people didn't believe the deficit was going 
down, even though the interest rates are dropping like a rock, that ``I 
cannot believe the National Government will spend my money to bring the 
deficit down and to really invest in long-term economic growth.''
    So what happens is, we're facing a time where we not only have a 
budget deficit and an investment deficit, but because of the performance 
deficit in the Federal Government, there is a huge trust deficit in the 
American people. And unless we can cure that, it's going to be very hard 
for us to face these other issues.
    You know, I'll just say Texas is probably the only State in America 
right now where there's overwhelming public support for the trade 
agreement with Mexico and Canada, which I strongly support. But let me 
just give you an example. One of the problems we've got--that trade deal 
has two aspects that no other trade agreement's ever had. It's got a 
commitment on the part of both countries to dramatically increase their 
spending on environmental cleanup along the border, and it's got a 
commitment on the part of Mexico to raise their wages every time their 
economy goes up. Nobody has ever agreed to that in a trade agreement 
before. And it's a blip on the screen. Why? Because a lot of people in 
this country whose jobs are at risk do not trust the National Government 
to do anything right. So what Al Gore is trying to do here affects that.
    We've got to fix the health care system in this country. Do you know 
that we are spending 35 percent to 40 percent more on health care than 
any nation in the world, and yet we're the only advanced country that 
leaves tens of millions of people uninsured? Do you know that we're 
spending about a dime on the dollar more in administrative costs for 
health care, blind paperwork, than any other major country? The only way 
it can get fixed is if we take initiative. But a lot of people say, 
``Oh, my God, can they be trusted to do anything right?'' So what we 
have to do with this reinventing Government thing is not only save you 
money and give you better services but restore the trust of the American 
people that, together, through our elected officials, we can actually 
solve problems.
    This is a big deal, and it goes way beyond just the dollars 
involved. I kind of backed into it when I was Governor, because we just 
started, just every 2 years to see if we could do it, we'd eliminate 
some government agency or department and see if anybody squealed, and no 
one ever did. It was amazing. We didn't eliminate the department of 
education or anything; we took a little something, but it was just 
interesting, just sort of an acid test to see if that

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ever happened.
    Then, we were working with all of our businesses in the tough years 
of the eighties on quality management and improving productivity, and I 
realized after a while I was hypocritical, providing the services to the 
private sector if I didn't try to do that in the public sector. And one 
day, we found out we could give people their licenses that they ordered 
by mail in 3 days instead of 3 weeks. And we found out that the people 
that are on the public payroll badly wanted to do it. But there was 
nothing wrong with them except poor systems and poor management and a 
lot of political decisions that no one had ever thought through.
    So we are doing this not to fill the trust deficit, and we are 
trying to do three things. And that's why I want to get back to the 
Texas report and why we wanted to come here today to wrap up this tour. 
When John Sharp issued that report, I got a copy of it in a hurry, and I 
sat down and read it. And I was exhilarated when I read it, and that was 
before I was a candidate for President, before I ever knew I'd be here 
doing this today, because it put together all the things I had been 
feeling as a Governor for a decade.
    And so there is a way to save money, make people on the public 
payroll happier on the job, and improve the services you're giving to 
the taxpayers all at the same time. It can be done. And that's very 
important.
    And I'm going to tell you one story, I'm going to announce what I'm 
going to do, and we're going to spend the rest of the time listening to 
you. The other day I went out to Alameda, California, near Oakland, 
where there's a big naval base that's about to be closed. It's a very 
traumatic time for them. California has 12 percent of the country's 
population, 21 percent of the military budget, taken a 40 percent almost 
of the cuts in the last round of the base closings. It's a very 
difficult time. And their unemployment rate is over 9.5 percent.
    And I'm sitting there talking to--I had lunch on the aircraft 
carrier Carl Vincent with one admiral and four naval enlisted personnel, 
wonderful people. And the guy sitting to my right had been in the Navy 
for 19 years, raised his two children, had a wonderful life, and told me 
why he'd stayed in the Navy. And I started asking him about the 
Government procurement process. And his eyes started dancing, you know, 
because we were there to cut a base and to short-circuit a lot of 
military careers that we had to do.
    And this guy says to me, he said, ``Let me tell you something.'' He 
said, ``if I had to go through the Government procurement process to get 
a computer we were supposed to buy last week, I'd wait 1\1/2\ or 2 years 
to spend $4,500 for a computer that has half the capacity that I could 
buy for $2,200 at the local computer discount store.'' And he said, 
``You know something, Mr. President, I understand this defense 
downsizing. You have got to do it. But we've still got to have a 
defense. And it is wrong to ask people like me who are prepared to give 
our lives for our country to get out of the service if you're going to 
keep wasting money like that. Clean that up; then if we have to go, 
we'll go.''
    Now, that is the kind of thing that is out there that is confronting 
us every day. So, I say to you, we wound up our week on reinventing 
Government in Texas because we owe you a debt of gratitude, and we are 
grateful to you. And we want you to know we're determined to do this.
    Let me just say one other thing. People ask me all the time, ``Well, 
what's the difference in this report and all these other reports? The 
Government's just full of reports at the national level that never got 
implemented.'' I'll tell you why. Because there was never a system that 
the President was behind to push the thing through. If the Governor of 
Texas had been against John Sharp's report, could it have passed? I 
doubt it. Will there be opposition in Congress? Of course there will be. 
But there will also be a lot of support, won't there, Gene? And if the 
people make their voices heard and we stay at it, we can do this.
    Now, what I've tried to do is to determine what I can do by 
Executive order or directive and what I have to have the Congress' help 
on. And I'm going to do everything I can possibly do by Executive 
orders. So today, basically as a thank-you to Texas, I'm going to issue 
the first Executive orders here, and I want to tell you what they are.
    The first order directs the Federal Government to do what successful 
businesses already do: Set customer service standards, and put the 
people that are paying the bills first. It tells the Agencies to go to 
their customers, analyze their needs, evaluate how well the Government 
meets the needs, and operate like a customer

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service center.
    Now, the second order will respond to what you saw when we announced 
this report. Do you remember when the Vice President gave me the report, 
we had the two forklifts full of paper? Almost all those regulations 
were regulations of the Government regulating itself. They were 
intergovernmental regulations on personnel and things like that, costing 
you billions of dollars a year for things that happen just within the 
Government. Now, today, the Executive order I'm signing on that will 
make the Federal agencies cut those regulations on Government employees 
in half within 3 years.
    Now, remember, these regulations don't guard things like the safety 
of our food or the quality of the air we breathe. They regulate the 
Federal Government in their walking-around time every day. We're going 
to cut them in half within 3 years, save a lot of money and a lot of 
folks. The Government employees can then spend less time worrying about 
rules and more time worrying about results.
    And finally, I'm going to sign a directive today that tells 
everybody in my Cabinet that they have to take responsibility for making 
the personnel cut that I've outlined, and more than half of the 
personnel cut has to come from people who are basically in middle 
management, handing down rules and pushing up paperwork.
    Today, the National Government, on the average, has one supervisor 
for every seven employees. There are some Government Agencies that have 
one supervisor for every four employees. And the directive I'm signing 
today directs the Federal Government agencies under the control of the 
President of the United States to slash that ratio, in effect, to cut in 
half the number of management for employees within the next couple of 
years. So we're going to go on average in the Government from one 
manager to seven employees to one to fifteen. I think we can do better 
than that. That'll be a good start, and that alone when it is done will 
account for more than half of the 252,000 personnel reduction we seek to 
achieve.
    As we do these things, I hope you folks in Texas will take a lot of 
pride in the contribution you made. And I hope you will see that it will 
make it possible for us, then, to gain the confidence of the American 
people so that we can restore the economy, fix the health care system, 
expand trade, give opportunities to our people, and make people believe 
this country works again.
    If we can do it, you can take a lot of credit for it. Thank you very 
much.
    The Vice President. Ladies and gentlemen, we would now like to hear 
from you. And we call this approach a reverse town hall meeting because 
we want to ask questions about how you have done it here in Texas in the 
Texas Performance Review, other parts of the State government, the land 
office, and the city of Houston.
    Let me ask a couple of questions here first. How many people here 
are from, or worked on, the Texas Performance Review? Could you raise 
your hands? All right. Very good. How many people here work in the land 
office? Raise your hands. How many people here work for other parts of 
State government? Could I see your hands? How many people here work for 
the city of Houston? Can I see your hands? Okay, all of you. There you 
go, Mayor.
    The President. Good for you, Mayor. [Laughter]

[At this point, a participant discussed the improved response time of 
the Houston police department and its impact on crime in the city.]

    The President. Thank you. Let me say, this is one message I hope 
goes out across the country today. Millions of Americans have given up 
on the ability of their law enforcement resources to get the crime rate 
down. You can walk lots of streets in lots of places. People don't think 
it'll ever happen. You can reduce crime if you have the resources and if 
you direct them properly.
    And you heard the Mayor say, I'm trying to pass our crime bill 
which, in the crime bill alone, goes halfway toward the 100,000 more 
police officers on the street goal that I have set. But they also--the 
resources have to be properly deployed in every community in this 
country. When you do it, you can bring crime down. It is simply not true 
you can't do it. But you have to target the resources and have them. And 
I applaud you, and I thank you for that.

[The Vice President and the participant discussed direct involvement of 
workers in increasing efficiency and identifying goals to be 
accomplished.]

    The President. Give her a hand. That was great.

[[Page 1473]]

[A participant discussed how the Texas performance reviews led to State 
and local cooperation in efforts to keep criminals off the streets and 
in jail without raising taxes.]

    The President. I'll bet, too--you must have done this--but I'll bet 
you that you have--if you calculate how much money the people save by 
reducing the crime rate 20 percent in Houston, I'll bet it's a heck of a 
lot more than it costs you to hold the people.
    Q. On just purely a cost basis, it costs us roughly $1,000 per major 
crime reduced here in the city. To put that in context, car theft costs 
$4,000 or $5,000; of course, murder and rape are just infinite, but 
$1,000 per major crime reduced is pretty much a bargain, I think, for 
the taxpayers.
    The Vice President. Thank you. Could we hear from some of the 
employees of the Texas Performance Review? What lessons did you learn in 
going through your performance review work here in Texas that surprised 
you the most, and what do you think is the most important way to 
identify waste and inefficiency and cut it out? Anybody want to--there's 
one, there's a volunteer back there.

[A participant discussed Texas health and human services initiatives to 
centralize access to available services.]

    The President. I'd like to ask you a question; really, two 
questions. First of all, I'd like to ask you--my belief is that this is 
one of the biggest problems in Government, trying to reform the delivery 
of human services all over the country. And while the services are 
largely delivered at the State level or by private providers, a lot of 
the money comes from the Federal level.
    So I would like to ask you two questions: Number one is, what do you 
think the biggest obstacles to doing what you want to do are? And, 
number two, how much of a problem has the Federal Government been 
through its rules and regulations?
    Q. There's probably other folks who could answer that better, Mr. 
President, but I think for Texas, let me give you an example. For our 2-
year spending budget right now in health and human services, $13 billion 
out of $23 billion is Federal money. We obviously have to keep on top of 
how we report to the Federal Government and how we use that money. I 
think there are probably some--I noticed in the summary of your report, 
Mr. Vice President, that there's talk about empowering the employees to 
make some decisions. There are some real boring kind of things that we 
have to get into in terms of cost accounting, in terms of how we account 
for the funds. And when we talk about one-stop connection, we're talking 
about collapsing funding sources, a lot of funding sources.
    If you can give us a little trust, a little flexibility on how we 
account for those dollars, we'll account for them, but we may not be 
able to get down to each sticky pad in terms of which funding source it 
came from. We'll account for the money, we'll be able to provide the 
services, and I think we have some work going on in Texas which can 
provide you some examples of that.
    So I guess in summary it would be, trust us and keep on keeping on, 
and I appreciate it.

[The Vice President discussed a National Performance Review 
recommendation for a bottom-up grant consolidation program to allow more 
flexibility at the local level and promote Federal, State, and local 
cooperation toward agreed-upon goals. A participant then discussed a 
Harris County initiative to use prison labor to reclaim wetlands and 
suggested the creation of a Federal corrections conservation corps.]

    The President. Let me say before you sit down, first of all, we 
didn't really know who was going to stand up and what they were going to 
say, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you just said. The 
United States--I agree, by the way, with what Governor Richards and the 
Mayor said. You've got to keep more people in prison that you know have 
a high propensity to commit crimes.
    The flip side of that is that we now rank first in the world in the 
percentage of our people behind bars. And we know who people behind bars 
normally are, right? They're normally young. They're normally male. 
They're normally undereducated. More than half of them have an alcohol 
or drug abuse problem. And they're wildly unconnected basically to the 
institutions that hold us together and conform our behavior, whether 
it's church or family or work or education. And it's the most colossal 
waste of human potential that in the Federal and the State systems, most 
prisoners--not all, there are

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some that do really useful work and get training--but a phenomenal 
number of prisoners either do useless work that they can't make a living 
at when they get out and don't feel good about and don't learn anything 
from, or don't do anything at all. And if you're looking for something 
the taxpayers are already paying for, we're already out that money. And 
you have just said something of enormous importance, and I thank you, 
sir.

[A participant praised a Texas initiative using magnetic strip cards for 
transferring AFDC and food stamp benefits to recipients. The Vice 
President concurred and cited a National Performance Review 
recommendation for electronic benefits transfer.

  A participant then discussed Texas initiatives for innovative use of 
natural gas. Another participant discussed a Casey Foundation grant for 
local, State, and Federal cooperation to expedite services to the 
community.]

    The President. Thank you. Let me just say one thing to you. Because 
I try to follow the work of the Casey Foundation, I'm a little familiar 
with what you're doing. One of the most frustrating things to me as a 
public official is that I have been a Governor, now President, having 
oversight of programs that people are supposed to fit their needs to. It 
is absurd. You've got a lot of poor people in this country who are 
absolutely dying to get out and get some job training, go to work, get 
off welfare, you name it. If they've got troubled kids or three or four 
different problems, they're liable to have three to four different 
programs, three or four different caseworkers. I mean, you feel 
sometimes like you're a laboratory animal almost if you get help from 
the Federal Government because you've got so many different people that 
are on your case. It is absurd.

    Now, you should have, if you're in trouble, somebody to help you. 
But there ought to be one person to help you. You shouldn't be up there 
dissecting people the way these programs do. It is awful. And I really 
hope you make it and get it done. Thank you.

[A participant discussed the need for a program for crime victims. 
Another participant asked about funding for education, and the Vice 
President discussed recommended reforms to education grant programs.]

    The President. Let me just say one other thing. I asked a couple of 
questions--he's told you, right? We're going to try to change the 
funding of Chapter 1, and if what you're saying is right, that you have 
an enormously high percentage of eligible people, your district and your 
school would benefit. But the problem is that this is--that's one of 
those things we have to pass through Congress. And when the dollars 
follow the child, that is, if a rich district that has poor kids--when 
that happens, then every Congressman gets a little of the money.

    So I asked a couple of you what the biggest obstacle to implementing 
your changes are. We need your support when we come up here and we 
present these legislative packages. And we're trying to figure out now 
how--we want as few bills as we can in Congress. But we really need your 
support to ask the Members of Congress to do this in the national 
interest, to make some of these changes so that we can do this. I need 
your help to do that. People in Washington need to think the American 
people want this. They don't need to think it's Bill Clinton and Al 
Gore's deal; they need to think it's your deal. And if they think it's 
your deal, then we can pass it.

Note: The President spoke at 10:39 a.m. at the Texas Surplus Property 
Agency. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Bob Lanier of Houston; Gary 
Marrow, Texas land commissioner; John Sharp, Texas State comptroller; 
Billy Hamilton, Texas deputy comptroller and National Performance Review 
Deputy Director; and Representative Gene Green. Following his remarks, 
the President signed the Executive orders and the memorandum, which are 
listed in Appendix D at the end of this volume.