The Presidency, the Bureaucracy, and Reinvention: A Gentle Plea for Chaos1

Presidential involvement with administration and the bureaucracy has many faces. At times, presidents have been severely chastised for excessive involvement with the details of administration (Arnold 1999, 234). As Ronald Moe (1999) suggests, most recent presidents have viewed management as a "profitless function detracting from their more important political tasks" (p. 265). In other contexts, attention to management has been viewed only slightly more positively. Electorally, for example, management reform has been identified as "a nice second level issue" (Arnold, 1999, 38). But underlying this slighting of administrative issues is a deeper realization that management of the federal bureaucracy resides at the core of presidential leadership. Simply put, with the exception of a few symbolic issues, almost anything a president wishes to accomplish must be accomplished through the bureaucracy. As Pfiffner (1999) notes, "while ... the president should not become enmeshed in the details of managing departments and programs, managerial issues are crucial to the political leadership of the government" (p. 5). At the risk of embracing a tar baby while pursuing his own objectives, every president must address the perennial issues associated with managing the permanent bureaucracy. It is not surprising, then, that nearly every president in this century has undertaken some effort to impose structural reforms on the bureaucracy designed to enhance the executive's ability to direct and control administrative behavior. The most recent of these endeavors is the Clinton-Gore National Performance Review (NPR), which described itself as a bold and radical call for governmental reinvention. Indeed, NPR was premised on a theory of reinvention that differed sharply from the traditional theories guiding earlier presidential reform efforts. At the same time, however, NPR was driven by many of the same political calculations and institutional incentives that have governed executive-administrative reform proposals from the Keep Commission to the Grace Commission. What is especially interesting about NPR was how these unique and traditional elements of reform interacted. Did a new theoretical perspective on presidential management alter or modify the basic political incentives shaping presidential control of bureaucracy? Or did those incentives make real reform impossible? The relative influences of the unique and traditional elements of the NPR episode of bureaucratic reform are examined here as a means of exploring the underlying dynamics of executive-bureaucratic relationships. This exploration is, however, unlike many other analyses of the executive-bureaucratic relationship provided by students of the presidency, which typically view that relationship exclusively from the president's perspective (Rourke 1984a; Hart 1987; Ragsdale 1998; Hult 1999). While that perspective informs this analysis, the relationship is also assessed from the perspective of enhancing bureaucratic effectiveness (Hill 1991; Moe 1990, 225-26), a criterion that may not always be isomorphic with presidential control of the bureaucracy. With this caveat in mind, the first section of the article outlines the reinvention theory underlying NPR. This is followed by an analysis of how NPR deviated from that theory. The third section of the article considers what reforms might have been proposed by NPR had it taken reinvention theory more seriously. And fourth, I discuss the deeper problems of presidential implementation of any reform not founded on enhanced hierarchical control of the bureaucracy by the White House. Finally, a unidirectional cycle of presidential reform is described, a cycle that seems impervious to and unconnected with scholarly work on management. Reinvention as a Reform Strategy If we are to take reinvention seriously as a management strategy providing useful guidance about both reorganization of the executive branch and its relationships with the other branches of government within a system of separated powers, we must first identify what reinvention is and how it relates to previous management reform efforts. …