Will Elon Musk Cut as Much Government as Al Gore Did?
After winning a return to the White House, President Donald Trump tapped Tesla CEO Elon Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body tasked with making the government less costly and more efficient.
It is an arduous and unenviable task. It is also not the first such endeavor: In the 1990s, then–Vice President Al Gore undertook a similar effort. What can we learn from Gore’s experience?
As president, Bill Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” Weeks into his term, Clinton had announced “a national performance review” (NPR) to “reinvent” government. He put Gore in charge of the project, which was later codified into law by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.
A dedicated website said the NPR initiative—later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government—would make government “work better, cost less, and get results American [sic] care about.”
The NPR issued its first report in September 1993, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less. It listed 1,200 recommendations across the entire government that, if implemented, it said could save $108 billion in five years ($235 billion in 2024 dollars).
“If we follow these steps, we will move much closer to a government that costs less and works better for all of us,” the report concluded. “It will be leaner, more effective, fairer, and more up-to-date. It will be a government worth what we pay for it….And perhaps the federal debt—that $4 trillion albatross around the necks of our children and grandchildren—will slow its rampage.”
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who worked as an adviser to Gore at the time, touted the NPR’s accomplishments in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2013: “We reduced the federal workforce by 426,200 between January 1993 and September 2000,” she said, “making the federal government in 2000 the smallest government since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president” while also “yielding $136 billion in savings to the taxpayer.”
The government did cut its workforce during the Clinton years, with the overall number of federal employees falling from 3.09 million in January 1993 to 2.75 million in September 2000—suggesting that Kamarck’s cited cuts outpaced hiring. Donald Kettl, a Brookings Institution scholar who studied the NPR at the time
Article from Reason.com
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