[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
[September 14, 1994]
[Pages 1543-1546]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on the Reinventing Government Initiative
September 14, 1994

    Thank you. You know, when the Vice President opened this occasion by 
saying that he would have to wear his full body suit for 2 years and 
that the Speaker of the House had been restored to full powers after his 
surgery came out all right, I couldn't help thinking, it took 
reinventing Government to get him on David Letterman--[laughter]--and 
now this terrible accident--but he's actually become the funniest person 
in the administration as a result of these two projects.
    There is no effort that he has spared to promote this project. You 
remember he even went on the Letterman show to smash an ashtray. And he 
has now been invited, as part of our followup to show we're making 
progress, to go on the show again, where he will read a top five list; 
showing that we can do more with less, he will make each one of them 
twice as funny as any top 10 list that was there. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Dr. Mendoza, Mr. Torno, Ms. Holstein for traveling 
here to tell your stories. For all the facts and figures and charts 
about the success of reinventing Government, the thing that really 
counts is that the benefits are being felt the way they ought to be by 
the American people, in a very personal and immediate way. And of 
course, we hope as a result of this occasion today and the followup 
report, that the rest of the American people will see that we are 
changing the way the Federal Government works.
    I want to thank the successful teams who made these particular 
stories possible: Erskine Bowles and the ``Low Doc'' team from the Small 
Business Administration who cut a 100-page application down to one page; 
Customs Commissioner George Weise, the Assistant Commissioner Samuel 
Banks, and Lynn Gordon for their team in the Miami office, who realized 
that becoming partners with airlines and shippers is a win-win 
situation; my old friend James Lee

[[Page 1544]]

Witt and Bea Gonzales and the team that completely reorganized FEMA so 
that all its resources are available to respond to any emergency.
    When I took office, the National Academy of Public Administration 
said this about FEMA: ``FEMA is like a patient in triage. The President 
and the Congress must decide whether to treat it or let it die.'' There 
was even a bill pending in Congress to abolish FEMA. And in 1992, as I 
traveled the country, I never went a place that somebody didn't say 
something disparaging about it. Well, the bill is gone, and it may be 
the most popular agency in the entire Federal Government.
    There's nothing that makes an ordinary taxpayer madder than to feel 
that those of us who work for the Government don't value their hard-
earned dollars. One single, simple example of the waste of taxpayers' 
money can erase in the public mind thousands and thousands and thousands 
of examples of devoted service to the same taxpayers. That's especially 
true in these perplexing times when people have such conflicting 
feelings. We're going through a period of profound change. And by large 
margins, Americans say they want Government to address our great 
national problems. But by equally large margins, they say they don't 
trust our ability to do it right, or as we say down home, most of our 
folks think that the Government would mess up a two-car parade. 
[Laughter]
    Now, this reinventing Government effort grew out of several sources: 
first, out of my experience as a Governor, where we tried to begin this 
effort; second, out of the encounters that the Vice President and I had 
with each other and with citizens all during the campaign, with the 
literature we read and the things we learned that were going on in the 
private sector; thirdly, with the enormous energy and desire we got out 
of Federal employees themselves; next, with the leadership that was 
already coming out of the Congress--Senator Glenn and Congressman 
Conyers have already been acknowledged, and there were others who really 
thought that we ought to do it.
    But finally we did it because it was necessary, because without it 
we could not fulfill the mission of the administration. The mission of 
this administration from day one has been to increase economic 
opportunity and maintain national security; to empower the individuals 
of this country to assume personal responsibility for their own futures; 
to strengthen the sense of community in America, to make our diversity a 
cause of celebration and unity, not division; and to change the way 
Government works for ordinary citizens.
    Unless we can do the last thing, we cannot achieve the other three. 
Why is that? Well, one of the reasons we have so much economic 
opportunity today is that we reduced the budget deficit. You couldn't 
reduce the budget deficit and not hurt the public interest unless you're 
reinventing Government.
    We want to empower individuals. One of the things that we did with 
our empowerment program is, through the Department of Education, to 
completely reform the college loan program so that 20 million Americans 
now with outstanding loans are eligible to refinance them with longer 
repayment schedules at lower interest rates. And starting this year, 
large numbers of new students will be able to do the same thing. We 
couldn't afford to do that except we actually save money by doing it, by 
converting the old expensive, cumbersome student loan program into, at 
least largely, a direct loan program and increasing our ability to 
recover delinquent loans, which is dramatically increasing.
    If you want to strengthen the American community, people have to 
feel like we care about each other. If every place there is a disaster 
people think that FEMA has failed them, it's hard to say they're part of 
an American community. But from the people in California who suffered 
from the earthquakes and the fires, the people all up and down the 
Mississippi River that were flooded out last summer, to the people in 
the Southeast that suffered drought last year and floods this year, I 
think they will tell you that FEMA is on the job.
    Yesterday the Vice President mentioned national service. It is not a 
Government bureaucracy; it is a movement that the Government has made 
possible. None of this would have happened if we hadn't had a serious 
approach to reinventing Government. And none of that would have happened 
if we hadn't reinvented the relationship between the President and the 
Vice President.
    Some people take it as a sign of weakness that I try to get the most 
out of everybody that lives around here or works around here--
[laughter]--and that I try to find people who do things better than I 
do. I thought that was my job. The Vice President--whether it is lead-


[[Page 1545]]

ing our efforts in the environment to develop a clean car or performing 
with such superb leadership to get a compromise at the very important 
Cairo conference, dealing with reinventing Government or difficult 
foreign policy issues--is plainly the most active, productive, 
constructive Vice President in the history of this Republic. And that is 
a very important thing.
    Historically, this argument about Government that politicians had 
was something designed to play into that feeling I just gave you when 
you all chuckled, when I said most folks think Government would mess up 
a one-car parade. For example, when we had meetings on our health care 
reform initiative, people would come in opposition, and they would say, 
``I don't want Government getting into this. I'm afraid Government will 
mess up my Medicare.'' [Laughter] We actually had people say this sort 
of visceral thing. So any politician worth a flip can figure out how to 
develop four or five one-liners that will make 90 percent of the voters 
shout hallelujah.
    The problem is that this debate has normally stopped at the 
rhetorical level. Politicians garner the votes; Government grows in a 
sort of piecemeal fashion; Government employees and the citizens get 
more frustrated every year, and real problems aren't solved. We had an 
idea that we could make Government smaller, but also different: that we 
could do more and cost less, that we could have more responsibility with 
less bureaucracy if we empowered the people who work for this Government 
and paid attention to the people who pay for it. We didn't see 
Government as the savior of America, but we knew our Government couldn't 
sit on the sidelines in a period of such profound change. So we tried to 
develop a partnership that makes sense.
    This vision is at the heart of everything we're trying to do. It's 
at the heart of the national service program. It's at the heart of the 
crime bill that we signed yesterday where we made a pretty good swap: We 
would take all the savings from reducing the size of the Federal 
Government and just give it to the American people to make themselves 
safer on their streets, in their homes, in their schools.
    This has been a very important endeavor. A lot of people were very 
skeptical when we began. But if you just look at what's happened in the 
time we've been in office, as evidenced by those charts over there, 
since I became President, the size of the Federal work force has been 
reduced by 71,000 positions. In 3 years we'll have the smallest Federal 
work force since President Kennedy was here, to go with 3 years of 
deficit reduction in a row for the first time since President Truman was 
here.
    The savings already enacted by Congress or undertaken by the 
executive branch will amount to $47 billion in this budget cycle, and 
we're on the way to saving $108 billion. Most of these savings will pay 
for the crime bill and help to put 100,000 more police officers on the 
street, 100,000 serious criminals behind bars. There were those who said 
that these things would never pass through the Congress. But Congress 
has already enacted more than 20 bills that will save money and improve 
services by reinventing Government, and 50 percent of the items needing 
congressional action are already pending in Congress, many with real 
bipartisan support.
    I'm proud to announce some more good news today. At the General 
Services Administration, Administrator Johnson saved $1.2 billion by 
carefully reviewing construction projects that had been approved and not 
yet built, in other words, buildings we really didn't need. And just 
today, the GSA is announcing it saved $23 million simply by managing the 
Government's motor pools more efficiently.
    Today the Secretary of Defense set a goal to cut in half the time it 
takes to complete internal business processes, from hiring workers to 
building new weapons systems. This is very important. Senator Glenn has 
worked for years on procurement reform. If we are going to maintain the 
national security at a time when we have to impose budget discipline, we 
must find ways to make these dollars go further. We can't simply abandon 
our technological lead, our readiness, our preparedness, all the things 
that have been so carefully built up over the last 16 or 17 years.
    At the Office of Management and Budget, Director-designate Rivlin 
tells me the Federal Government will offer buyouts to another 40,000 
employees at the beginning of the new fiscal year next month. And next 
Tuesday the Vice President and I will release a report on the first-ever 
consumer service standards for the Federal Government. Over 100 agencies 
have prepared more than 1,700 specific pledges to the taxpayers of this 
country to improve the services that they provide.

[[Page 1546]]

    I am more convinced now than ever that we have to keep doing this, 
that we have to make this reinventing Government a permanent process, 
and that there are serious structural issues which still have to be 
addressed. Washington needs to work for ordinary middle class Americans. 
And in order to do that, we have got to find a way to open this process 
up so that the public interest can always overwhelm particular interest 
in matters of great importance.
    That's why Congress must also finish the job it has begun, passing a 
tough campaign finance reform bill, a lobbying reform bill, and the bill 
that requires Congress to live under the laws it imposes on the rest of 
Americans, before the end of this session. All three of these actions 
have broad bipartisan support in both Houses. Two of the bills have 
passed both Houses and await conference resolution. The House of 
Representatives has overwhelmingly passed the third one. We need to move 
forward. These are actions that Americans deserve and demand, and they 
will help them to believe that the rest of these things are also 
occurring, as well.
    Meanwhile, I assure you that we will be unrelenting in our efforts 
to continue reinventing Government, to give you a Government that costs 
less, does more, empowers employees, and listens to the people who pay 
for it. We will measure our progress not only in terms of bills passed 
and money saved but in terms of people better served. You met some of 
those satisfied citizens today. We're committed to making a lot more 
satisfied citizens in the months and years to come.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 10:45 a.m. on the South Lawn 
at the White House. In his remarks, he referred to Emilio Mendoza, 
president/CEO, Galactic Technologies, Inc., San Antonio, TX; Art Torno, 
managing director, American Airlines, Miami, FL; Alameda Holstein, 
disaster victim, East Northridge, CA; and Beatrice Gonzales, FEMA 
disaster assistance employee praised by Ms. Holstein for her help.