Gore Workforce Reinvention Claim Challenged

Oct. 6 -- Al Gore claimed during Tuesday’s presidential debate that the “Reinventing Government” initiative he spearheaded decreased the number of federal bureaucrats by 300,000 during the eight years he’s served as vice president.

But a look at federal workforce numbers prepared annually by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which supervises the administration of government agencies, tells a different story.

The end of the Cold War, it turns out, and not Gore’s initiative, has probably had more to do with the scale-back than anything he had done.

Military Scaled Back

Almost all of the net federal workforce reduction from 1993 to 2000 occurred in the Defense Department, according to OMB and Pentagon figures — just as the U.S. military was massively scaling back its personnel from Cold War levels.

From fiscal year 1993 to fiscal year 2000, the number of full-time, civilian federal employees dropped by approximately 282,000, from 2.14 million to 1.86 million, according to OMB data. Of that, 271,000, or 96 percent, were the results of a decrease in the military’s civilian workforce.

The White House says the Pentagon cutbacks, which began under President Bush, accounted for about 80 percent of net cuts in federal jobs under the Clinton administration.

As Department of Defense non-civilian personnel were cut by more than 700,000, the size of the civilian force that supported them was also cut, says a Republican Senate defense staffer.

“Vice President Gore’s claim to have reduced the federal bureaucracy by300,000 is dependant on cuts in [the defense department] that very clearly had little, if anything, to do with Vice President Gore’s ‘Reinventing Government,’” he says.

But that’s not how Gore portrays it.

“You know the size of the federal government will go down in a Gore administration. In the Reinventing Government Program, you just look at the numbers. It is 300,000 people smaller today than it was eight years ago,” he said during his first presidential debate with Republican candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush on Tuesday.