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In 1993, the government began shifting its focus to performance, but the question remains: Has the procurement system improved?
W BY STEVE KELMAN
e are coming up next the National Partnership for Reinventing Govern- year on the 25th anniver- ment. The resulting report, “From Red Tape to sary of the country’s rst Results: Creating a Government That Works Bet- and perhaps only govern- ter and Costs Less,” was released that September.
mentwide management reform program organized One of the rst laws Congress passed in 1993 was
around a coherent theme: the Clinton administra- tion’s “reinventing government” effort.
In 1993, the rst year of the Clinton administra- tion, I went on leave from my job at Harvard Uni- versity’s Kennedy School, where I was a professor of public management, to take a Senate-con rmed position in the Of ce of Management and Budget as administrator of the Of ce of Federal Procure- ment Policy. That of ce of 30-odd civil servants did not buy anything itself but had the lead role in formulating governmentwide procurement policy.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the thinking about how to manage well in government began to turn toward performance. As political scientists William Gormley and Steven Balla have written, “The con- cept of performance came to rival accountability as a standard for evaluating executive branch agencies.”
The concept came into its own early in the Clin- ton administration. In March 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review, led by Vice President Al Gore and later renamed
the Government Performance and Results Act. Suddenly, the words “performance” and “results” were everywhere.
The events of 1993 launched major changes in the procurement system, which has continued to evolve in the past 25 years. In general, that evolu- tion has seen the procurement culture shift its focus from compliance to performance, yet despite that shift, it is hard to say that the system’s performance has improved.
That is due in part to the fact that the changes in procurement coincided with an increase in prob- lems for contract management. The system was getting better, but contract management was get- ting worse — so much so that we haven’t noticed net improvements.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is based on a keynote presentation Steve Kelman gave earlier this year at the annual “Public Procurement: Global Revolution” conference at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
ent,’ 25 years later
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