    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [January 15, 1999]
    [Pages 45-48]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Global Forum for Reinventing Government
    January 15, 1999

        Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Vice President, Madam Secretary, Mr.
    Nye, Prime Minister Shipley, Vice President Bell, to the
    leaders of other nations and international organizations; Mr.
    Smith from the Ford Foundation and all the
    others from the private sector in America; and I want to say a special
    word of thanks to the employees of our Government

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    who are here, without which none of this could be done.
        I was glad to hear the joke that the representatives from Thailand
    told yesterday. I have cut a lot of redtape sideways in my life. I was
    glad to hear you laugh at the Vice President's remark about using plain language in Government
    regulations. I think that must be a common problem throughout the world.
    But mostly, I'm glad to see you in such a good frame of mind about this.
        You know, one of the problems with having a continuous reinventing
    Government effort is that it almost never gets any headlines in the
    newspaper, and most people who cover it think it is about as exciting as
    watching paint dry. [Laughter] So I think that means that if you're
    going to do this, you need sort of an extra dose of determination and
    good humor, because I believe it is truly one of the most important
    things that those of us in public life today can do.
        I've been interested in this for a long time. When I was the
    Governor of my State, we had what I believe was the first State
    governmentwide ongoing effort in the country. When I became President, I
    knew we had to change old policies and old ways of doing things.
    Besides, we were flat broke and running a huge deficit. And even worse,
    the American people had a very low level of confidence in the
    Government. I used to say that everyone in America thinks that our
    Government would foul up a two-car parade. We wanted to change all that.
    We knew it was important for our economy. We knew it was important for
    our political success. We knew it was important for the integrity of our
    democracy.
        Fortunately for me, Vice President Gore
    agreed. And he approached this task as he does everything he really
    cares about, with an astonishing amount of energy, determination, and
    intelligence. And I'm sure you have seen, he has absorbed about
    everything there is to absorb about this subject. And if you hang around
    long enough, he will give you a chance to know everything he knows about
    it. [Laughter]
        We have a theory about this; most people think it's so boring we
    have to have a joke every 3 minutes when discussing it. [Laughter] But
    it is very serious. When the history of our time here is written, the
    leadership of the Vice President in doing
    this will be one of the signal achievements of this administration, and
    I am very, very grateful to him for a superb job.
        We also are heavily into reinventing speeches here; you see I
    crossed out the first paragraph, and I go from page one to page three.
    So you'll be out of pain before you know it. [Laughter]
        Let me also say to you we have a selfish reason in hosting this
    conference. We've not tried to reinvent the wheel. We have tried to
    borrow good ideas wherever we could find them. We very much want to know
    what is going on in every other country in the world, just as we want to
    be helpful to every other country in the world if we can.
        I'd like to make just one or two points if I might. First is one you
    know, but I think it bears repeating: This will not work if it is a one-
    shot effort, if it is something that happens for a month or 6 months or
    even for a year. In fact, I think you should measure your success in
    part by whether you have put in a system so integral to the operation of
    government--a process--and whether you have embedded in the public's
    mind the importance of this to the extent that all your successors in
    whatever offices you hold will have to follow suit. That, I think, is
    the ultimate measure of whether we are successful. Because no matter how
    long you serve, no matter how hard you work, you will either leave
    things on the table that are undone, or new opportunities will emerge
    with the revolutions and technology in human organization that are
    constantly unfolding.
        Our basic theory has been that we ought to have a Government for the
    information age that is smaller, that lives within its means, but that
    actually is capable of doing more of what needs to be done. We believe
    what needs to be done is that we should focus mostly on giving people
    the tools they need to solve their own problems. We should help people
    who, through no fault of their own, can't get along through life without
    help. But most of what we should be doing is creating the conditions and
    giving people the tools to make their lives as dynamic as the world in
    which we live.
        I also want to emphasize again how important it is to be able to
    stand up and say that we are giving people good value for their tax
    investment, because I found that our people tend to judge the
    reinventing Government sometimes not by what we think they would. It
    sounds

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    very impressive to say we have the smallest Federal Government since
    John Kennedy was President, because we are a much bigger Government. But
    people want to know, ``Well, how does that affect me?''
        If you say we've saved $138 billion that helped us balance the
    budget, bring interest rates down, and lower their mortgage rates,
    that's something people can understand. If you say we reformed welfare,
    that sounds good. But if you say we have the smallest welfare rolls in
    29 years, and we have gotten a lot of people into the work force but
    helped them with child care and education and transportation--so we're
    not just putting out numbers and behind it there are human people
    suffering because they are cut out of the safety net--that means
    something.
        If you can say to a small-business person, ``It used to take weeks
    or months for us to process your request for a loan, and now it takes a
    matter of days,'' and the form was once an inch thick, and now it's a
    page long, that means something to people because it affects their
    lives.
        And so I would say to all of you--I made a lot of jokes about it,
    but I do think we have to find ways to talk about this that make it
    interesting to our people and that bring it home to them, because that
    is the best guarantee of our continuing to work.
        One other point I'd like to make is for national governments--most
    national governments have regulatory and other relationships with the
    private sector and also have financial relationships with local
    government. I believe a very important and increasingly important aspect
    of this whole reinventing Government issue will be, how do national
    governments relate to their private sector. We're trying harder and
    harder to do less regulation and instead to create incentives and
    frameworks to solve problems that meet national goals. How do national
    governments relate to local governments? This is very controversial in
    our country from time to time. My theory is, just because we gave out
    money last year in the way we've been giving it out for 20 years, in
    education, law enforcement, or any other issue, doesn't mean we should
    continue to give the money out that way if it doesn't work anymore.
        We had this huge argument back in 1994 when we tried to pass a crime
    bill because, interestingly enough, our conservatives argued that it was
    wrong for the Federal Government to give money to local governments only
    if they would agree to hire police officers and put them on the street
    and have them work in a certain way. But we had learned from local
    governments that work that that was all that works to bring the crime
    rate down. So we jammed through this bill, and the people who were
    against it screamed and hollered that I was presuming to tell police
    chiefs what to do. Nothing could have been further than the truth. The
    police chiefs told me what to do. And what we told the people, between
    the President and the Congress and the police chiefs, was, ``You can't
    have this money unless you do what they say works.''
        And we now have the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest murder
    rate in 30 years, partly because of the improvement in the economy but
    partly because law enforcement works better. We have gone 30 years in
    which we had tripled the crime rate--violent crime rate--and increased
    our police forces only 10 percent.
        So I think that there is a way in which we should look not only to
    the internal operations of our own Government, how our systems work and
    how they serve the people, but how the relationship between Government
    and the private sector and national governments and local governments
    can work more effectively.
        Finally, let me say that I think that we have--and I'm sure all of
    you already know this--but I think we have a very strong vested interest
    in each other's success. If we didn't learn anything from 1998 and the
    financial turmoil we experienced all over the world, it is that, in the
    world we live in, competition is good, but failure of our competitors is
    bad. Competition is good, but the failure of our competitors is bad. We
    want competition to work within a framework in which we all do better,
    in which we urge each other on, economically, socially, politically,
    every way, to higher levels of humane development--so that the United
    States, for example, clearly has an interest that when the Government of
    Russia tries to put in place a system that will fairly assess and
    collect taxes.
        Quite apart from the obvious interest we have, and all of you do, in
    having a system that will help us to continue to reduce the nuclear
    threat, the United States has an interest in the success of governments
    in Asia developing regulatory systems that will minimize the spread of
    financial contagion. We have an interest in nations in Africa and in
    Latin America and elsewhere who are trying to develop with limited

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    resources the very best possible education and health systems. We have
    an interest in learning from nations all over the world that have done a
    better job than we have in managing their natural resources and
    developing sound environmental policies while growing their economy.
        We have an interest in seeing how the European nations are trying to
    adapt their social welfare systems that were created after World War II
    to the demands of the information age, so that they can lower
    unemployment, increase job growth, and still maintain the integrity of a
    genuine social safety net--big issue for developed countries. We have
    lower unemployment and greater inequality; they have more equality and
    higher unemployment. How can we bridge the gap? And we're interested in
    the experiments in Great Britain and the experiments in the Netherlands
    and in other countries. We have an interest. And if those countries
    succeed, we are not threatened; our lives are enhanced. And I think we
    should all have that attitude.
        Finally, let me say that this is about more than economics. It's
    even about more than having our customers happy, although I must say one
    of the biggest kicks I've gotten as President is when a major national
    business magazine said that the Social Security agency was the best
    large organization in America, public or private, at providing telephone
    service to its customers. I like that.
        This is about, in my judgment, the preservation of the vitality of
    democracy. In some countries that are new democracies, it may be about
    the preservation of democracy itself. But in the end, every one of us
    serves because people believe in the possibility of self-government
    through representatives. To the extent that people do not believe their
    representatives will handle their money for public purposes the way they
    themselves would, democracy itself is diminished; human potential is
    diminished; the capacity for worldwide cooperation is diminished.
        So I say again, you may not get the headlines back home for this.
    You may have to tell your own jokes because you won't be able to make
    anybody else laugh. But never underestimate the profound and enduring
    importance of what it is you have come here to discuss. We are honored
    to have you here, and we thank you for your contribution and your
    dedication.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:50 a.m. in the Dean Acheson Auditorium at
    the State Department. In his remarks, he referred to Joseph Nye,
    president, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government; Prime
    Minister Jennifer Shipley of New Zealand; Vice President Gustavo Bell of
    Colombia; and Bradford Smith, vice president, Ford Foundation.