    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [June 9, 1995]
    [Pages 835-837]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the National Performance Review
    June 9, 1995

        We brought Paul Condit up here as a part of the Vice President and
    my continuing cultural education of Secretary Rubin. We found out that
    even though he's very brilliant, there are serious gaps in his
    knowledge. When I met him, he didn't know who Aretha Franklin, B.B.
    King, or Rod Stewart was, and he had never met a redneck in his life.
    [Laughter] We are correcting that, part of our reinventing Government.
    [Laughter]
        Do you know what Paul Condit was saying to me when the Vice
    President was talking? He said, ``Mr. President, this stuff is great.
    But you need to reinvent communications; it ain't getting out.'' He
    said, ``Nobody knows anything about this.'' I said, ``Well, you'd have
    to be here awhile for me to explain it to you.'' [Laughter]
        The greatest compliment I have received since I have been President
    was when we were in Montana the other day and--I didn't get it
    directly--you may have seen the--I went out to a farm to talk about
    agriculture because we have to rewrite the farm bill as we're trying to
    reduce spending. And I insisted that we go to a Republican farmer's farm
    and that we have equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the
    crowd. One of my staff members was standing next to one of these
    farmers, and we were talking about all this, you know, all this
    agriculture. And he asked the farmer, he said, ``Well, what do you think
    about this?'' And the farmer looked at him and said, ``He ain't nothing
    like they make him out to be, is he?'' [Laughter]
        You learn to speak maybe in a way that people can understand if you
    spend more time on a John Deere tractor. And Paul Condit has, and we
    thank him for being here. I also thank the Vice President for the
    incredible job he has done on all these projects. And I thank Secretary
    Rubin and Commissioner Chater, Commissioner Richardson, Deputy Secretary
    Glynn, and all the people who have worked on this.
        We do have an obligation to communicate what we're doing, but we
    also have an obligation to do the right things and to stop doing the
    wrong things. And our SBA Director, Phil Lader, is going to--we're going
    to have this White House Conference on Small Business next week. I'm
    very excited about it. I hope it is an opportunity to talk to the
    American people and to talk to the small business community about what
    we're trying to do. But I hope it's also a chance for us to continue to
    do more of the right things and to keep changing.
        The truth is that--as the Vice President said, I could have listened
    to that story all day, analogizing what if the Federal Government was
    running a John Deere dealership. I wish I had thought of that myself.
    [Laughter] The truth is that one of our big problems is that almost
    everybody who works for the Federal Government is honest, hard-working,
    well-meaning, and really wants to serve. But we are trapped inside a
    system that there are some things we can't change, and one is we
    basically have guaranteed revenues and guaranteed customers, and that

    [[Page 836]]

    means that we change less quickly than the private sector that has
    neither. But if we don't change, then the voters eventually will try to
    find a way to get through the elected officials to the permanent
    Government. And in a way, people's perceptions are not all that specific
    even if they're generally accurate. We might wind up going from one
    extreme to the other.
        So what we tried to do when we got here was to prove that it was
    actually possible for the institutional Government to change, something
    that most people simply didn't believe. Most people believed that
    politicians would come and go, but the Government would go on forever.
    And interestingly enough, in the last several years I have noticed
    politicians beginning to adopt the same rhetoric in an attempt to be
    popular with the people, so that people would be in control here for 7
    or 8 years and still be cussing the Government as if, ``What do you
    expect me to do? I'm just the President,'' or ``I'm just the Secretary
    of the Treasury'' or, you know, ``What do you expect me to do?''
        In the course of that I think that we have been less sensitive than
    we should have been, as I have said repeatedly--and I'm a guilty party--
    to treating Federal employees like people. And we must never contribute
    to this atmosphere of resentment of the people who work for the Federal
    Government, because most people who work for the Federal Government are
    like most people anywhere. Given the choice between productive or
    unproductive, most people would choose to be productive. Given the
    choice between being relevant or irrelevant, most people would gladly
    choose to be relevant. Given the choice between building and tearing
    down, most people would choose to build.
        And what we have tried to do with this national performance review,
    which the Vice President has doggedly pursued--what we have tried to do,
    even though we couldn't get it out and we knew there was probably never
    any way to make it a popular, big headline-grabbing issue, is day by
    day, week by week, department by department, agency by agency, employee
    by employee, to chip away at the habits and institutional conduct of the
    Federal Government that is not good for America and not going to take us
    into the 21st century in good shape and to flip it around so that our
    public institutions could do the public's business in a way that
    maintained the trust of the people who are paying the bill.
        And all of you who have been a part of that deserve a lot of credit
    for what you've done. And I just want to urge you to keep doing it.
    We'll keep trying to figure out how to get it out, to use Paul's
    expression. But the main thing we need to do is to keep doing what has
    been done.
        Some of this involves changing laws. You know, I recently signed the
    Paperwork Reduction Act. Last Congress, we passed the procurement reform
    which the Vice President was able to popularize on the David Letterman
    show by trying--by breaking the ashtray. But that broken ashtray was a
    way of getting out the idea that we were wasting, at a minimum, hundreds
    of millions of dollars a year with antiquated procurement practices.
        The Paperwork Reduction Act, when Paul waves that around, it's a way
    of illustrating the burden that is on us to make sure that we are not
    asking people to spend their time, their money, and their resources on
    fooling with us if they don't have to and if there is no public purpose
    served by it.
        Now, that is one of the things, it seems to me, that if you talk to
    anybody about what they really resent about our Government, if they have
    any kind of success in life, they'll normally talk about regulation and
    paperwork, even before taxes. And we are trying to do something about
    that. Small businesses and big businesses, too, have been screaming at
    us for years to do something about it, and we are trying to do it.
        Now, the Department of Treasury has taken the lead by spearheading
    the Simplified Tax and Wage Reporting System. Because of that, today we
    are announcing a plan that should lead to the elimination of the need to
    file W-2 forms in multiple places. You will only need to file once, and
    you will have a single point of contact for customer service. This will
    save time and hassle and about a billion dollars a year--which is real
    money even up here, Paul--a billion dollars a year. When we free people
    from the burden of paperwork so that they can create jobs, opportunity,
    services, and products for the American people, we have saved much more
    than that.
        In addition, I am going to send legislation to Congress that will
    remove the legal barriers that keep Federal and State agencies from
    working together in commonsense ways to ease the paperwork burden on all
    taxpayers.

    [[Page 837]]

        Most taxpayers currently have to fill out both a State and Federal
    income tax form. Depending on where you live and work, you might also
    have to do a local income tax form. Most of the information on the State
    and city forms is simply a repeat of what's on the Federal form. So with
    some teamwork and some modernization of the tax system, the Federal
    Government is now going to create partnerships with State and city
    governments to eliminate the need for duplicate filing.
        Since we came into office, we have permitted 29 States to have
    systems in which taxpayers can satisfy both their Federal and State
    personal income tax filing requirements with a single electronic
    transmission. More than a million and a half returns were filed this way
    this year. Next year, 32 States are going to participate. You can
    imagine what will happen to the paperwork burden as more and more people
    file electronically, one time, both State and Federal. The IRS handles 2
    billion pieces of paperwork a year.
        So we are going to reduce regulation. We are going to speed
    transmission. We're going to make it easier for the taxpayers. And as an
    extra added bonus to the Vice President, we're going to save 14 to 15
    more forests by the turn of the century by reducing this level of
    paperwork. This is a big deal. Now, what we have to do is make sure
    people know they can do it and more and more people do it.
        We're going to clear away the barriers to full partnerships with
    State and local governments for employment as well as for personal tax
    information. We estimate that with a partnership with 20 percent of the
    States by the year 2000, we can reduce the burden to taxpayers just on
    this item alone by $1.5 billion and save the Government millions and
    millions of dollars in the process.
        I invite Governors and mayors all across this country to join us in
    having businesses and taxpayers file their information just one time.
    This is the right way to fix the Government. There is no need for two or
    more filings. We are prepared to do our part in a technical way and in a
    legal way to make it possible for taxpayers all across America to have
    fewer piles like this.
        This is the kind of service the American people are entitled to
    expect from a modernized tax system, and frankly, this is the kind of
    thing we're going to have to do to get the inordinate compliance costs
    with taxation systems in America down. This is what reinventing
    Government is all about.
        I want to again say to all of you who worked on this project, I
    appreciate it very much. We now have to sign a memorandum of
    understanding which requires all these various agencies to work
    together. And we're going to sign that, and then I'm going to ask Paul
    Condit to sign it as a witness to make sure that he'll have something to
    get out when he goes home to Seminole, Texas. [Laughter]
        So Secretary Rubin, Deputy Labor Secretary Glynn, Commissioner
    Chater, Commissioner Richardson, please come up here and sign the
    memorandum of understanding.
        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:25 p.m. in the Cash Room at the Treasury
    Department. In his remarks, he referred to Paul Condit, president and
    general manager, Texas Equipment Co., Inc.; and entertainers Aretha
    Franklin, B.B. King, and Rod Stewart.