DOGE, meet REGO. 32 years before Elon Musk, Al Gore did it

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — The last 140 years have been littered with promises by presidents to fix the federal bureaucracy.

Back in the late 1880s, when unqualified political appointees were wasting taxpayer dollars, there was a move to professionalize government workers in a merit-based bureaucracy. The effort gained momentum after then-President James Garfield was shot and killed by a disaffected former supporter with mental illness who was angry at not getting a job in Garfield’s administration.

The US has a bureaucracy for a reason

The political “spoils” system, which the bureaucracy replaced, was demonized for its cronyism, inefficiency and graft.

Now, ironically, President-elect Donald Trump demonizes professional government workers as part of a “deep state,” and his incoming administration wants to uproot and replace them with political appointees more responsive to elected officials.

History undoing itself.

Remembering REGO, which came before DOGE

There’s a much more recent and applicable chapter that directly echoes Trump’s appointment of efficiency czars in Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who were on Capitol Hill Thursday to gain support for the nongovernmental advisory effort they’re spinning up and calling the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Three decades ago, the new president promising change was Democrat Bill Clinton. His charge to then-Vice President Al Gore was to streamline government through a National Performance Review, or NPR. Supporters referred to it in shorthand as “reinventing government,” or REGO.

Drain the swamp vs. reinventing government

There are some major differences in the efforts. Trump wants to “drain the swamp” in a punitive way and tells supporters that the government is essentially stealing from them. Clinton, more optimistic, wanted to “reinvent” government to make it work better for Americans.

Then, as now, the plan was to take a holistic look at government and recommend changes to improve how taxpayer dollars are spent, including by culling the federal workforce, cutting regulations and more.

REGO was not a completely original idea either. Ronald Reagan, for instance, had empaneled the Grace Commission, which sought advice on how to cut waste and government inefficiency from more than 160 corporate executives and issued a 47-volume set of recommendations.

The difference with REGO, according to Elaine Kamarck, is that Gore’s team was able to follow up on their recommendations and get multiple pieces of legislation passed into law.

Today, Kamarck is the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. But back in 1993, she was running the REGO effort with Gore at the White House.

“We passed a lot of laws, we cut regulations, and we cut the workforce,” Kamarck told me of the effort, which started as a review process and morphed into a major effort that lasted throughout Clinton’s presidency.

The insider approach

While Musk and Ramaswamy want to use technology and artificial intelligence to figure out how to shrink the federal workforce, Gore and Kamarck assembled a task force of hundreds of federal workers to spend six months looking across government and issue recommendations by September 1993.

Even as momentum was building for the “Republican Revolution” in 1994, laws based on REGO’s recommendations were being passed with broad bipartisan support. Buyouts were authorized that helped spur a shrinking of the federal workforce. The Congressional Research Service has a more detailed timeline and assessment of what REGO did and did not do, based on a slew of assessments from what’s now known as the Government Accountability Office.

‘The era of big government is over.’ LOL

The REGO effort is what’s behind Clinton’s famous declaration in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over,” when he was in full triangulation mode, appealing to the middle of the country and on the way to a solid reelection.

With a spiraling national debt and deficit spending in every year since Clinton left office, his claim about the era of big government has not aged well.

At the same time, by the end of the REGO effort, the federal workforce was reduced by 351,000 positions, federal agencies had been reorganized and reams of red tape had been cut.

The Congressional Research Service notes that not all of the job cuts could entirely be attributed to REGO, since many of those from the Defense Department had already been underway when Clinton took office. Plus, Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in decades in 1994, and rather than completely fight them, Clinton drafted off their momentum to widen the scope of REGO.

During the 1996 presidential campaign, Clinton bragged to voters about having the smallest government since John F. Kennedy was president.

The REGO effort was ultimately rebranded as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, and it continued throughout the Clinton administration, ceasing operations when he left office. It is also one of the only times in US history when there was a balanced federal budget. A strong economy and reductions in defense spending helped.

What happened?

I asked Kamarck why, if REGO was a success, federal spending skyrocketed again.

“Government spending is driven not by the size of the government, but by entitlements,” she argued. “So as the population rises, government spending rises.”

Plus, the subsequent George W. Bush administration was marked by the 9/11 terror attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which again increased spending.

Anyone who reads this newsletter with any frequency knows that neither political party is currently talking about reforming either Medicare or Social Security.

Kamarck agrees that it is time to reassess how government functions, and she’s interested to see what Musk and Ramaswamy come up with. She noted that since Election Day, they already appear to be modulating some of their promises. They have not been repeating Musk’s claim he could quickly cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. That “palpably ridiculous” idea would erase most of the money Congress gets to spend each year, she said.

She worries that Musk and Ramaswamy will present a sledgehammer approach focused entirely on shrinking government rather than improving it.

Her advice for Ramaswamy and Musk was to look for help inside the government rather than solely from outside. In the REGO effort, civil servants who worked on the project were assigned to review agencies other than their own, she said, which allowed them to apply their federal experience in an objective way.

Civil servants as allies rather than enemies

That advice was echoed by Peter Morrissey, a senior director at the Volcker Alliance, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for a more experienced and educated public sector workforce.

He said the size and scale of the federal government and federal spending mean that the focus should not just be on shrinking the number of full-time bureaucrats – which, thanks in part to efforts like REGO, has not grown since the 1960s, even as government spending has skyrocketed. A system where a much larger portion of federal workers change with each administration would be difficult to implement today.

“The core of senior civil servants who deeply understand how things work, and tend to be very, very high capacity should be thought of as allies in a thoughtful reform effort, not as enemies of reform,” Morrisey said.

But he agreed there are some correlations between REGO and DOGE.

“A lot of that 1990s effort was in the early era of digitization and the web, and there was a notion that there could be significant returns to automation in terms of saving costs,” he said. Technological advances would suggest another effort to improve government would be beneficial, something both parties could agree on if they can work on it together.

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