    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 7, 1995]
    [Pages 1317-1321]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the National Performance Review
    September 7, 1995

        Thank you very much. I have to tell you that those of you here who
    have the privilege of being seated probably missed what almost became
    the newest example of our reinvented, full-service Government. Just as
    the Vice President was becoming most eloquent about how we were
    providing a full-service, high-quality Government, the people who were
    suffering in the sun standing in the back almost got a shower along with
    their press conference when the garden spray came on there. [Laughter] I
    saw them moving closer and closer and closer; I thought, well, maybe
    they can't hear. And then I finally realized they were about to get a
    shower. [Laughter] You come back tomorrow, we'll start with a shower.
        Let me begin by saying a special word of thanks to the Vice
    President for the absolutely extraordinary energy and discipline and
    dedication and quality of effort that he has put in over 2\1/2\ years
    now. This has been an exceptional achievement. There's nothing quite
    like it in the history of modern American Government, and it would not
    have happened had it not been for his leadership. And I am profoundly
    grateful to him for it.
        I also want to join in thanking the supporters we've had among the
    Members of Congress, the people in our administration who have had to
    implement a lot of these recommendations. It's a lot easier to talk
    about than to do, and they have had a difficult job to do. And I thank
    the Cabinet especially and the agency heads for the embrace that they
    have given this.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to the reinventing Government
    staff and especially to the Federal employees and to their
    representatives. They have worked very, very hard at this difficult job,
    and they have done it remarkably well.
        Finally, I'd like to thank David Osborne and Tom Peters and Philip
    Howard for the books they have written and the inspiration they have
    provided. The Vice President and I and many

    [[Page 1318]]

    of our team have read them all with great care and have done our best to
    be faithful to the ideas and principles which they have espoused.
        When we were running for office, the Vice President and I, back in
    1992, we said that, if elected, we would do our best to give this
    country a Government that was smaller and less bureaucratic, that had a
    lower cost but a higher quality of service, that devolved more power to
    States and localities and to entrepreneurs in the private sector, that
    was less regulatory and more oriented toward incentives, that had more
    common sense and sought more common ground. We have surely not succeeded
    in everything we have tried to do, and I am certain that there are areas
    where people could say we have erred. But we have certainly been
    faithful to the effort and we have made, I think, a great deal of
    progress in keeping the commitments that we made.
        I wanted to do this because I thought it was important for more than
    one reason. First of all, it was important because we had a huge
    Government deficit, we had quadrupled our debt in 12 years, and we still
    needed to invest more money in certain critical areas of our national
    life, in the education and training of our people, in research and
    development, in new technologies, in helping people to convert from a
    cold war economy to the 21st century global economy. So it was
    important; we needed to do it.
        Secondly, we needed to do it because the level of anxiety and
    alienation about people's relationship to the Federal Government needed
    to be mended. We needed to make the Government work better.
        Thirdly, we needed to do it because of this historic era in which we
    live. We, after all, have moved through a rapid transition now at the
    end of the cold war and at the end of the traditional industrial economy
    into a global economy with new challenges, new conflicts characterized
    by a high rate of change; rapid movement of money, technology, and
    capital; and revolutions in information and technology. In that
    environment, the model that we use to deliver Government services and to
    fill public needs was simply no longer relevant to the present and less
    so to the future. And so we began to try not only to cut the size of the
    Government, to cut the number of programs, to cut the number of
    regulations but to change the way the Government works and to develop
    new partnerships and to devolve responsibilities to others who could
    more properly make the decisions.
        There are so many examples of that that are not properly part of
    this particular report now but that have been driven by the philosophy
    of the Vice President's reinventing Government. We've given every State
    in the country now the opportunity to reform it's own welfare system
    without waiting for legislation to pass. It's a dramatic thing. There's
    nothing like it in the history of modern American Government. And the
    philosophy of doing it grew out of the work we have done with
    reinventing Government.
        When the Pentagon reformed its procurement procedures, America
    laughed when the Vice President cracked the ashtray on the David
    Letterman show, but the taxpayers are better off and the national
    defense is more secure because the money we're saving there can go into
    making our people safer and more secure and fulfilling the objectives of
    the United States all around the world.
        And there are many, many other things. The Secretary of the Interior
    is not here, but he's done his best now to try to resolve some of the
    thorniest conflicts between the Federal Government and various groups in
    the western part of our country by pushing more of these decisions down
    to local councils of people who can make them a long way from Washington
    but very close to where everyone has to live with the consequences. And
    there's so many examples of this in every Department of every leader in
    the Government here present. And I thank them all for that.
        Fundamentally, this is a question, though, about our values. If you
    go back and read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,
    you understand that the American people from our beginnings meant for
    the Government to do those things which the Government needs to do
    because they can't be done otherwise; meant for the Government to be an
    instrument of the public interest.
        And we have a moral obligation to make sure that we do this right,
    that we take the money earned by the hard efforts of the American people
    and use it in ways that further the public interest. If we can't justify
    doing that, we can't justify being here, and we can't justify taking the
    money. And we have a moral obligation to prepare the future for our
    children and our grandchildren.

    [[Page 1319]]

        Now, this reinventing Government effort is much more important today
    in many ways than it was on the day I became President because of the
    choices facing us now in the great budget debate in the Congress. It is
    much more important now. If we are going to go forward and balance the
    budget, if we're going to cut spending even more, we have to be even
    more careful about how we spend the people's money and what we do with
    the time of public servants and the power that public servants have.
        I believe very strongly that we have to balance the budget. I think
    we have to do it to take the burden of debt off of future generations. I
    think we have to do it to keep interest rates down and to free up
    capital for investment now so that we can achieve higher rates of
    growth. But I think that we have to do it in a way that will achieve our
    objectives.
        And what are our objectives? Our objectives are to grow the American
    economy, to strengthen the American society, to free up investment so
    that the American people can live up to the fullest of their potential.
    That means that we cannot balance the budget in a way that will drive us
    into a prolonged recession, that will cut off our nose to spite our
    face, that will be a penny-wise and pound-foolish, that will aggravate
    the wage stagnation and the other problems that people have in this
    country today, which means we have to have the money that is left to
    invest in ways that really serve the American people and serve their
    larger purposes.
        We've reduced the annual deficit from $290 billion the year I took
    office down to $160 billion this year. The total reduction is about a
    trillion dollars over a 7-year period. We have to finish the job, but we
    have to do it in a way that honors the purpose of a balanced budget,
    which is to strengthen the future of America. We have to decide, in
    other words, what is important for us today and what's important for our
    future.
        Of course, the Federal Government was too large and needed to be cut
    back. Of course, there is still waste and duplication. Of course, there
    are still regulations that don't make a lick of sense, and they needed
    to be changed, and they still need to be changed. But we have to keep in
    mind there are still public purposes that as far as we know today cannot
    be fully discharged without the involvement of America's National
    Government: the health care of elderly citizens; protection of our
    environment; the safety of our food; the needs of the people whose
    triumph we celebrated in Hawaii last weekend who won the Second World
    War for us and paved the way for the last 50 years of the American
    Century, giving the poor a chance to work their way into the middle
    class and giving our children and now increasingly our adults access to
    the best possible education opportunities. Those are the values and
    priorities of the people of this country. They have to be reflected in
    the budget as well.
        The Vice President's report that I received today has over 180
    specific cuts in Government that will save over $70 billion in the next
    5 years. One by one, these are not the kind of cuts that make headlines
    and, I guess, I don't expect them to make too many headlines tomorrow.
    But when you put them all together, as Everett Dirksen said once, ``a
    billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about
    real money.'' [Laughter]
        These are kinds of cuts that will allow us to balance the budget
    without cutting the single most important investment we can make in our
    future: education. That's why I was able to give to the Congress a
    balanced budget plan that increases education. By contrast, the
    proposals of the congressional majority spend $76 billion less on
    education and training than I do in the next 7 years. They make deep
    cuts in education at a time when it's more important than ever before.
    That's why so many people estimate that that budget could actually slow
    the rate of economic growth over the next 7 years instead of increase
    it, which is the whole purpose of balancing the budget, to grow and
    strengthen the economy.
        If the congressional proposal is passed, fewer children will go to
    Head Start, fewer schools will be able to teach their children to stay
    away from drugs and gangs or have the resources to use the best possible
    technology or have smaller classes or set up the charter schools when
    the existing system is not working. There won't be as many young people
    who get scholarships to go on to college, and the cost of the college
    loan program to ordinary students will go up dramatically in ways that
    will reduce the number of people going to college at precisely the time
    we need to see them increasing.
        Now, that is really what this choice is all about. There was--I
    thought that chart was showing when it blew down, but you can see

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    here that we have to make these kind of choices. Should we balance the
    budget by reducing education spending by $76 billion, or should we cut
    $70 billion in Government waste and duplication? Do we want fewer people
    to go to college? Do we want larger classes in our schools? Do we want
    to scale back our efforts to keep our schools safer and drug-free? Do we
    want to say that having the highest standards for what we teach our
    children is not a proper objective for the education budget? I don't
    think we do.
        And the point I want to make to you all is we do not have to do
    this. The sacrifice of all these people in Government to promote this
    reinventing Government project must not be in vain. We must take the
    money that is left and spend it properly. We must take the money that is
    left and spend it properly.
        Let me give you some examples of the cuts in Appendix C of the Vice
    President's report. Like I said, a lot of them don't sound very
    interesting, but after you add them up, you got some real money there:
    $118 million by closing 200 weather stations with the National Weather
    Service, because computers do the job better and cheaper; $14 million in
    the Small Business Administration by consolidating their loan-processing
    operations. Let me just point out, the SBA, in the last 2 years, has cut
    their budget by 40 percent and doubled their loan volume. Don't tell me
    that we can't make Government work better--doubled their loan volume and
    cut their budget.
        Secretary Cisneros has proposed a remarkable plan for the Department
    of Housing and Urban Development. They have three basic
    responsibilities: public housing, affordable housing, and economic
    development. Instead of running 60 programs to do three things, now
    they've proposed to run three programs to do three things and save $825
    million in administrative costs alone, not money that would otherwise go
    to Mayor Rice out in Seattle or the other local leaders around our
    country but administrative costs. It is wrong, in a time when you have
    to balance the budget, for us to take one red cent in administrative
    costs that does not have to be taken when the money ought to be put on
    the streets of America to benefit the American people. And I thank you
    for that, Secretary.
        The clean coal technology project was implemented to develop a way
    to burn coal cleanly, as cleanly as it could possibly be burned. Well,
    they did it. The project was started to do that job. It did the job, but
    nobody ever closed it down. Now, we're going to do that, not because it
    failed but because it succeeded.
        The Naval Petroleum Reserve in Elk Hills, California, was created
    during World War I because America's new battleships needed oil. Well, I
    think World War I is over, and I know that the strategic need for the
    Navy to have its own oil fields has long since passed.
        By eliminating the clean coal technology program, privatizing Elk
    Hills, and doing a lot of other cuts like this in the energy area, the
    Energy Department will save $23 billion over the next 5 years. That's a
    great tribute to the Energy Department's recommendations, and it's the
    right thing to do.
        Believe it or not, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
    Administration has a corps of 400 officers who command a fleet of less
    than 10 old ships. I think that we can be adequately protected by the
    Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Coast Guard. So
    we're going to stop paying for those 10 old ships and use the money for
    better purposes.
        Well, you get the picture. These are commonsense things. We've been
    working on this hard for 2 years, and we still keep finding these
    opportunities, and we will continue to do it.
        How do people know this will work? How do they know that the savings
    on paper will become savings in the bank? Well, we have got a track
    record on that. The Vice President's first report predicted we could
    save $108 billion in 5 years by reinventing Government. After 2 years,
    $58 billion is already in the bank. That much has been implemented and
    saved, in law, in fact--more than half the savings promised in less than
    half the time.
        Two years ago, we said we could shrink the size of Government by
    252,000 positions. With the help of Congress offering us humane and
    decent buyout proposals, the Federal Government today has 160,000 people
    fewer on the payroll than it did on the day I took office. We are well
    ahead of schedule on the 252,000.
        At the same time, the people who are left are doing their jobs
    better, and they ought to get credit for it. Last May, Business Week--
    not an arm of the administration--Business Week magazine ran an article
    about the best customer service in America on the telephone. They rank
    companies, great companies like L.L. Bean, Federal Express, and Disney
    World, people who, for different reasons, need to be very

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    effective on the telephone. But do you know who they said provides the
    most courteous, knowledgeable, and efficient telephone customer service
    in the country? The Social Security Administration of the United States
    Government. I am very proud of that, and you should be, too.
        The operators at Social Security are some of the thousands of people
    who are proving the skeptics wrong, people who think Government can
    never do anything right. Because of their hard work, we know we can
    balance the budget without cutting education and risking our children's
    future. But I will say again, we have to make some decisions.
        When I became President--I just want to mention one other--I asked
    the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce to work together to
    make sure we started promoting America's economic interest overseas. I
    have had 100 business people in the last 2 years tell me that for the
    first time in their entire business lives, every time they go to another
    country, the State Department is working for them. I have never talked
    to a business person who has extensive dealings overseas who doesn't
    tell me that the Commerce Department is more effective in promoting the
    interests of American businesses and American jobs around the world than
    at any time in the past. That is also part of reinventing Government. We
    want you to get more for your money, not just reduce the size of
    Government.
        This can happen, but we need to continue to do this. This has to be
    a continuous process. Our goal, the Vice President's and mine, is to
    build this into the culture of Government so that no future
    administration can fail to embrace this. Our goal is to make this a part
    of the daily lives, the breathing, the working habits of every manager
    in the Government, every Federal employee, everybody. We want them to
    think about it because, believe me, there are still things that go on
    every day in the Government that the President can't know about, the
    Vice President can't know about, but that will affect the lives and the
    interests and the feelings of the American people.
        But we are making a difference. Now we have to decide in this budget
    debate how we're going to cut, how we're going to balance the budget.
    This is just like the productivity changes that many large American
    companies underwent throughout the 1980's. I know we can keep doing
    this. I know we can do more than even we think we can do. I know we can.
        But this is the sort of thing we ought to be doing. And it would be
    a great mistake if in the next 90 days, in the desire to balance the
    budget, which I share fully and which we started and which has taken us
    from a $290 billion deficit to $160 billion deficit, we became penny-
    wise and pound-foolish. And we forgot that one of the reasons we're
    doing this is to make sure that the money left can advance the cause of
    America's economic interest and the basic values of the American people
    to give every citizen the chance to live up to his or her God-given
    capacity, to keep the American dream alive, and to give us a chance to
    come together in a prosperous, secure, and exciting future. That is
    ultimately, ultimately, the great benefit of this whole effort.
        So I ask you to continue to support it and, as we come to this
    budget debate, to say, we do not, we do not have to make the wrong
    choices for the right objective. We can balance the budget and we can do
    it in the right way and reinventing Government proves it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:15 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Norman Rice of Seattle, WA.