Gore Workforce Reinvention Claim Challenged

Oct. 6, 2000 -- 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.

And the Gore campaign contends that the cuts would not have occurred as fast — or perhaps at all — without Reinventing Government.

Charges of Embellishment

Republicans are quick to point to his work force reduction claim to build on their claims that Gore stretches the facts.

The vice president’s “misstatements and overstatements have been proliferating in this campaign. And now we’ve got another one here,” says Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who recently critiqued the 300,000 number on the Senate floor.

Gov. Bush and his supporters have long questioned Gore’s claimed successes with the Reinventing Government initiative. They cite a July 1999 report by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office that found it hard to attribute most of the budget savings under the Clinton administration to Gore’s initiative.

“Former Clinton-Gore officials like Leon Panetta and the nonpartisan General Accounting Office have rejected Al Gore’s exaggerated claims of reinventing government,” said Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett, in a press release in June.

“They haven’t reinvented the government bureaucracy, they have simply reshuffled it,” Bush said that month.

Reinventing Government workforce reductions also have been criticized for taking things too far, stripping agencies of skills and institutional memory. NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin, for example, attributed the loss of two Mars probes and other agency failures to workforce reductions, stating, “We probably cut too tight.”

According to the White House, Reinventing Government has saved $136 billion since 1993 and reduced the federal workforce by 337,000 employees, making it the smallest it has been since President Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office.

The Gore campaign and the vice president’s office contend that when temporary workers brought on for the decennial census are factored out, the real drop is 377,000.

The reinvention program, also known as the National Performance Review, of course, has involved more than financial and personnel cuts. It has been applauded by Democrats and Republicans for trying to introduce a sort of business culture into the workings of government, including treating citizens as customers.

“Agencies that have the most contact with the public are reforming themselves to deliver better and faster customer service,” says a White House Web page touting the program’s successes.

Note: The term “full-time employee” in the statistics above refers to full-time personnel plus the number of additional full-time personnel there would been if the hours of all part-time employees were totaled. For instance, two half-time employees equals one full-time employee.