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 Reinventing Government co-author David Osborne has teamed up with Peter Hutchinson to produce an instructive volume on the cost of delivering public services, the practices that result in government waste and the policies that most inflame citizens when they interact with government. Like Reinventing Government, this new book, The Price of Government, doesn't stop at the bad news, offering many hopeful examples of innovative reforms designed both to save money and enhance public satisfaction with government. Part of the answer, of course, lies in sound management, but the greater challenge, as the authors amply demonstrate, requires the creation of a constituency for real change.
A senior partner of the Public Strategies Group, David Osborne advised Vice President Al Gore during the 1990s on the REGO (Reinventing Government) I and II processes. He also has consulted with governors, mayors and city managers nationwide. In addition to Reinventing Government, Osborne's book credits include Laboratories of Democracy, Banishing Bureaucracy and The Reinventor's Fieldbook. A former Minnesota Commissioner of Finance and Minneapolis Schools Superintendent, Peter Hutchinson has served as Vice President of the Dayton Hudson Corporation and is founder and President of the Public Strategies Group.
Conceived and written for a broad audience of leaders and activists in the governmental, civic and business sectors, The Price of Government is premised on the notion that fiscal stress will remain a permanent feature of the public sector at all levels due to rising costs of entitlements and debt service and ever-increasing demands for public services on the one hand, and steadfast opposition to tax increases on the other. This fundamental tension, Osborne and Hutchinson assert, will require results- and performance-oriented reforms in government, as well as leadership and long-term commitment on the part of leaders and managers.
The book opens with a review of smoke-and-mirrors budget-balancing processes that preserve sacred-cow programs through one-time bookkeeping tricks, raids on reserve funds, risky borrowing, asset sales, and rosy revenue projections. The authors observe that these methods - essentially, budgeting by finger-crossing - while they result in the passage of a budget (often a political feat in itself, in some states), promise little more than public outrage when they inevitably result in imbalance and mid-year program cuts, layoffs and furloughs. Budgeting, program design and personnel management, Osborne and Hutchinson insist, must be tailored to ensure priority outcomes. The process begins with five key decisions: (1) determining whether the problem is long- or short-term, and whether it's a matter of revenues, expenses or both; (2) determining how much citizens are willing to pay for government; (3) identifying which governmental outcomes citizens value the most; (4) deciding how much it will cost to deliver these priority results; and (5) deciding how best to produce/deliver those priority results.
Subsequent sections of The Price of Government address the sizing of government, ensuring high value and citizen satisfaction, managing personnel through incentives, flexibility and accountability, and - perhaps most important - sustaining leadership and support for meaningful reform and change. The book reviews familiar administrative technologies for achieving these objectives - outcome budgeting, total quality management, privatization, co-production, technology implementation, etc. - and profiles the experiences of numerous jurisdictions with their use, hinting that this, in essence, is the easy part. The real challenge is leadership, which the authors define very simply as changing things to make things better-the focus of the concluding section. A number of familiar public sector heroes emerge in these two final chapters: Rudolf Giuliani (New York City), Gary Locke (Washington), Beverly Stein (Multnomah County, Oregon), and Steve Goldsmith (Indianapolis), among many others. Their heroics include being forthright about the seriousness of the problem, focusing on the core mission of the organization, selling the reform to both the public and the organization, sticking doggedly to the reform program, and empowering leaders throughout the organization.
The Price of Government does not suggest that extracting the results we want and need from government will be easy, particularly in an ideologically charged political atmosphere that protects entrenched interests, encourages nay-saying and often rewards support for the status quo. Osborne and Hutchinson's third way is a refreshing, common-sense alternative to the traditional solutions of the right and the left.
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