A Tool Is a Tool Is a Tool
Reinventing the Executive Branch
By Betsey Culp
There’s a myth flying around the country that all our
social ills can be alleviated by applying a few good business principles
to government. Like a moth near a flame, this myth is headed for
disaster.
My summer reading has included “Reinventing
Government,” the book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler that helped to
propel Al Gore into the arms of New Democracy. First published in 1992,
its avowals of faith in the future bring back the giddy atmosphere that
was part of the dot-com “revolution.” The tone is energetic and
optimistic, befitting an era that many regarded as truly millennial:
Today’s environment demands institutions that
are extremely flexible and adaptable. It demands institutions that deliver
high-quality goods and services, squeezing ever more bang out of every
buck. It demands institutions that are responsive to their customers,
offering choices of nonstandardized services; that lead by persuasion and
incentives rather than commands; that give their employees a sense of
meaning and control, even ownership. It demands institutions that
empower citizens rather than simply serving them.
Osborne and Gaebler’s rhetoric echoes in the
enthusiastic sentiments of the young Wade Randlett, who in 1992 was just
beginning to organize the up-and-coming entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley
into a political force behind Clinton and Gore. Randlett presently serves
as president of the San Francisco business-based political action group
SFSOS. Sara Miles quotes him in “How to Hack a Party Line”: “This is
what the [Democratic] party should be about. We believe in lots and lots
of equal opportunity. We have to get out the idea that, yes, we are in
favor of an economy where a gay fat Korean immigrant engineer can make
$100,000 a year. That’s the important message: there’s just an outrageous
amount of money to be made in the New Economy if you educate yourself and
work hard."
Osborne and Gaebler argue that government has failed
in the United States. Or rather, that the continuation of a slow-moving,
bureaucracy-ridden form of government is failing the United States: “The
emergence of a postindustrial, knowledge-based, global economy has
undermined old realities throughout the world, creating wonderful
opportunities and frightening problems.” The problem is a clumsy,
inefficient, expensive “way of doing business in the public sector.” The
solution is the development of “entrepreneurial government,” where “public
sector institutions … constantly use their resources in new ways to
heighten both their efficiency and their effectiveness.” And they find
examples of success everywhere: “It is as if virtually all institutions in
American life were struggling at once to adapt to some massive sea change
— striving to become more flexible, more innovative, and more
entrepreneurial.”
It is true that governments in the United States have
had a hard time solving perennial social problems such as homelessness,
inadequate healthcare, and substandard education. But in the early 1990s,
sudden and rapid technological advances introduced a heady can-do
pragmatism into the debate. Hope for the country was on the way, in the
form of good old-fashioned American ingenuity.
Or was it? What’s the Biblical warning about serving
God and mammon? In the twenty-first century, the injunction might well be
extended to include the simultaneous service of country and company. But
in 1992 no one was thinking that far ahead.
Fast-forward to the fall of 2003. In San Francisco
mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom promised an administration marked by its
"humility in the face of good ideas." As an augury of things to come, he
set up a public lecture series called “Great Cities, Great Ideas.” The
first featured speaker was the co-author of “Reinventing Government,” Ted
Gaebler.
Newsom based his campaign on the skills he had
acquired as a businessman, not on the political lessons he had learned as
a supervisor. He won. And the rest is history. Today the media adore him
for his daring promotion of same-sex marriages and equally for the
attractive image he and his wife project. The New Democratic Leadership
Council, doubtless in appreciation of both his fund-raising abilities and
his defeat of a Green Party challenger, recently named him
“New Dem of the Week.”
The authors of “Reinventing Government” repeatedly
remind their readers that they like governments. “We care deeply about
what governments do, but this is a book about how they work….
The central failure of government today is one of means, not
ends.” Newsom concurs: "We are going to make City Hall smarter and
more connected to the people we serve and we're going to do more with
less."
It all sounds so very promising.
The problem is that means are tools, nothing more. In
and of themselves, they cannot guarantee any specific end. On the
contrary, they can only guarantee the end desired by the parties that make
the most skillful use of them.
That’s exactly what has happened in the decade since
“Reinventing Government” was written. In the interest of flexibility and
innovation — the tools of any good entrepreneur in the world of private
business — democratic principles have been damaged.
In San Francisco, for example, now that the
exuberance of last February’s same-sex marriages has faded, it’s possible
to look at the experience a little more dispassionately. It was a moment
of glorious urban theater. It affirmed a high moral position. But in a
city where public opinion overwhelmingly supports same-sex marriages, it
was the action of one man. It was an action taken with no apparent
consideration of how to proceed if the marriages were invalidated. And
forgive me for being cynical, but it was the action of the same man who,
as a member of the Board of Supervisors, was part of a minority of two
when the Supes voted overwhelmingly to oppose military action in Iraq. The
same man who was absent when the Supes voted to condemn the Patriot Act.
This is not a man with a strong record of progressive activism.
Gavin Newsom’s relationship with the Board of
Supervisors has always been strained, even when he was a member of that
body. Now, as he attempts to implement his own agenda in the face of a
resistant board, he must chafe at the lack of supporting votes he finds
there. At present, he has enough to prevent a veto override but not enough
to pass legislation. The
Chronicle reported earlier this month that Newsom, never a advocate of
district elections, has been renewing his criticism of the system: "That's
the problem with district elections.... We all get into our little
niches.''
No matter its merits, Newsom’s espousal of same-sex
marriages came out of the special niche he occupies in Room 200 at City
Hall. It was a unilateral action by the head of the executive branch of
the government, with no apparent consultation with the legislative branch.
In the same way, Newsom used his executive powers to vacate the executive
directorship of the Treasure Island Development Agency and to appoint
Supervisor Tony Hall to fill the position, apparently without looking very
hard for other candidates. (Hall’s appointment allowed Newsom to fill a
vacancy on the Board of Supervisors with his liaison to the board, Sean
Elsbernd.) Mayors can, of course, appoint their own staffs, but in this
case the legal responsibility for appointing the director lay not with
Newsom but with TIDA. The concept of executive power was stretched when
the mayor called the TIDA Commission into special session to perform a
speedy — some say hasty — approval of the appointment. The agency’s
unanimous compliance was prefaced by a reminder from commission member
John Elberling that commissioners serve at the pleasure of the mayor.
Shortly afterward, on the same afternoon, the concept of executive power
was stretched even further when the Ethics Commission convened in special
session to rule post-haste, without time for a review by the City
Attorney’s office, on the appointment’s conflict-of-interest issues. No
problem, ruled the commission, in a 4-1 vote.
Newsom has been doing what any good CEO would do.
He’s been cutting through a lot of bureaucratic dead wood to get results.
In choosing this approach, he’s not alone. Far from it. In fact, he’s
keeping some pretty high-powered company.
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