[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 23 (Monday, June 12, 1995)]
[Pages 1002-1004]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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. [Laughter] 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 a while 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 
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

[[Page 1003]]

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.
    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

[[Page 1004]]

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.