[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.