NPR vs PM: The Battle of the Dichotomy
Dichotomy, as viewed on the public administrative levels, can be viewed as separation or as a hierarchy. Historically, many politicians were fans of “big government”. In their eyes, it was better to have multiple divisions of tasks divided up into departments that report to somebody that reports to somebody and so on until the President or CEO is reached. A major change took place around the 90’s. Politicians begin to tinker with the notion of shrinking government to make processes more efficient. Moreover, some presidents even attempted at taking private sector approaches to everyday public administration activities. Two programs take center stage in this discussion, National Performance Review (NPR) and President’s Management Agenda (PMA). Policies such as the NPR and the POMA are part of a broader government reform trend in American public administration and its European counterparts. Let’s take a look at these two policies in more detail.
National Performance Review was enacted during the Clinton-Gore administration (1993 – 2001). The goal of NPR was to reform the federal government. This was to be done by reinventing government principles and exhorted federal agencies to downsize, eliminate unnecessary regulation, focus on results, and offer customer service equal to or better than “the best in business”. The Clinton administration wanted the federal agencies to become more like businesses. Essentially, the NPR viewed the citizens as customers and treated them in the same manner businesses would seek customer satisfaction. The NPR targeted opportunities for waste reduction and offered hundreds of specific recommendations for managerial and technological improvements. High level initiatives avoided extreme politicization and received generally positive evaluations for achieving most major goals. Reform proposals were drawn from private manufacturing successes in Japan and the United States during the previous decade and selectively converted to the public-service sector. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, many ideas originated in other countries where national governments exercised significantly greater centralized federal control over budget than governments in the United States.
The results of the NPR were mixed. These reforms resulted in the lowest government employment totals, as a percentage of the national population, since the 1950s. However, in terms of shrinking the dichotomy, Clinton and Gore failed to demonstrate how they decreased government’s size and improved its efficiency and what difference it made to the average voter even though the size of government was smaller than when they took office! Although the Clinton administration’s capacity-building efforts initially received tacit support from Congress, management reforms were highly politicized and limited in scope. Nonetheless, the NPR did help prepare many federal agencies for the unimaginable challenges to public management and homeland security that they have faced since 9/11. These reforms had little impact on public opinion or electoral results for the incumbent administration.
President’s Management Agenda was the George W. Bush’s performance management plan for the federal government. The ideological blueprint of the Bush administration, PMA sought to use performance data to make budgetary and programmatic decisions. PMA wanted to implement “pure” top-down, corporate, private-market-based performance management approach. Partly in response to budgetary restraints, changing national priorities, deficit spending, and fiscal stress, Bush favored the broader use of private alternatives such as competitive outsources as a PM measure.
The Bush administration shelved many of the NPR initiatives in early 2001 and the momentum for institutional reforms stalled in the 108th Congress. As a real-time test of the Bush administration’s PMA reforms, the federal agencies was less satisfactory than many had expected or been promised. Ironically, during his administration in 2001- 2099, the size of bureaucracy as well as the total amount of federal spending and public debt increased more than under any other president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s!
In closing, it appears that while both the NPR & PM have benefits it would appear that NPR was more successful in attaining the goals. NPR was also successful in shrinking the dichotomy in government, but PM (or the Bush administration in actuality) increased the hierarchy. What the Clinton administration was unsuccessful in was ensuring that the voting public saw all of the benchmarks accomplished via NPR. Bush piggy backed off of NPR’s vision and edited down to a structure of government to his and his constituents liking.
References:
Milakovich, M., & Gordon, G. (2007). Public administration in America. (10th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.
Dichotomy. (2011). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy
