CUTTING DEAD WOOD IN GOVERNMENT: IT TAKES VERY LONG TIME TO DIE

No one hated government bureaucracy more than Ronald Reagan. He made a lifelong career as after-dinner speaker, governor and president railing at the stupidities and blunders of federal agencies. "Government isn't the solution, it's the problem," he often chanted.

So Reagan decided he would go through the exercise of drastically changing government. He set up a commission headed by J. Peter Grace, the chairman of W.R. Grace & Company. The commission would find the "waste, fraud and abuse" (magic words) and "reorganize" (another magic word) things. In fairly short order, Grace "found" $400 billion to be cut. Most of his figures were nice, round guesses.

Reagan sent the Grace Commission Report to Congress and dropped it like a hot potato. He had scored some points with the issue and that's all Reagan really wanted for his 1984 re-election campaign. Grace himself came to Congress a time or two to testify about his recommendations, but no one really paid much attention because Reagan had failed to give it any priority, even in the Republican controlled Senate.

Will it be different this time with President Clinton? He says, "The Government is broken, and we intend to fix it." One difference is that the re-inventor is Al Gore, not Peter Grace. Ronald Reagan could bail out on Peter, but Bill Clinton can't bail out on Al. Another difference is the intensity of public disdain for government. In Reagan's time ti was simmering anger, today it is intense loathing.

But the underlying conditions remain the same. The federal government, despite Ross Perot's proclaiming it so, is not a Fortune 500 company. General Electric, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, and General Motors can all become "lean and mean" (But not necessarily more successful) by the stroke of a CEO's pen. Not so in government. It may well be good for government to be "lean," but not "lean and mean." The federal CEO -- we call him "Mr. President" -- has to deal with the public, Congress and a whole host of special interests.

One of the major areas targeted by Clinton for pruning is the Department of Agriculture. Some years ago, during an all-night filibuster, the senators were sitting around in the rear of the chamber and took a secret ballot on the question: Which is the most bloated federal agency? Twenty-four senators participated and 22 wrote down "Agriculture." So let's cut it. Ask Bob Dole (KS, wheat), Pat Leahy (VT, dairy), Bennett Johnston (LA, sugar), Wendall Ford (KY, tobacco), Connie Mack (FL, oranges), Tom Harkin (IA, corn), how much they want to cut the Agriculture Department.

Oh yes, lest we forget, there is the matter of the civil service system. Civil service is to government what tenure is to teaching. There is no civil service system to deal with when the Fortune 500 CEOs decide to slash middle management. There is in the federal government. Old Bureaucrats never die; they don't even fade away.