When government efficiency efforts actually work
A Texas efficiency review in the 1990s became a national model. The playbook was nearly opposite to Elon Musk’s and the DOGE approach.
Welcome back, readers. We recently had government management expert Eric Schnurer on the Public Money Pod, who referenced a 1990s-era government efficiency review that inspired me to go off and learn more about it. This newsletter is about those takeaways.
But first, a personal note: How are you? If you haven’t stopped to ask yourself that recently, take a moment to do that. It’s been hard to just hit the pause button for a minute these days. I’ve jotted down so many ideas for this newsletter but found little time to sit down and think about what I would write that’s actually helpful. Between my day job, the public service work I do in my community, and my journalism side gigs, the flood of information and alerts to pay attention to has picked up to what feels like a frenzied pace. Meanwhile, the unread emails in my three inboxes continue to grow into a massive sea of bold declarations of my inability to keep up, and I am resisting the urge to just select all of them and mark them as “read.”
If it’s REALLY important, someone will email me again, right???
But I won’t really do that—my FOMO and guilt over neglecting something or somebody always win out! (But if you have tips on email management, please share in the comments.)
And speaking of better ways to manage... on to the newsletter topic!
How Texas inspired a federal efficiency review
In the early 1990s, Texas was facing a multi-billion-dollar budget deficit and before turning to spending cuts, legislators asked the state controller to review government operations to look for potential savings.
John Sharp and his staff spent months combing through every layer of spending, bureaucracy, and decision-making that they could, and made hundreds of recommendations for savings. The legislature adopted about half of those recommendations, and taxpayers saved $2.4 billion (yes, with a “B”) out of $30 billion in annual spending.
The effort was so productive that Sharp and his team began conducting their “Texas Performance Review” annually after that. Their quick success caught the eye of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who was similarly on a mission to, as he put it, “reinvent government.”
“Clinton's first efforts in reshaping the government -- cutting the White House staff by 25%, reducing the federal work force by 100,000 jobs and ordering a 14% cut in administrative overhead over the next four years -- were faulted by critics as being either symbolic or probably ineffective changes,” a 1993 Washington Post story notes.
But Clinton also drafted Sharp, among others, to help bring the Texas approach to Washington’s tangled bureaucracy. In 1993, Clinton signed the Government Performance and Results Act,(GPRA) “a pioneering piece of legislation that required federal agencies to create strategic plans, set annual goals for programs, and measure actual performance against the targets,”’noted government management guru Donald F. Kettl, in his 30th anniversary piece about the law.
There are so many things I found interesting about this history lesson, but here are some of the top takeaways relevant to today.
Actual efficiency comes from the bottom up
Sharp’s approach started off by asking the people who interact most with government services what they thought could be changed. These days, this approach is known as “human-centered design,” but the idea is the same: Ask, don’t tell.
Employees are at the center of that process. “I think what you're going to find is that the people who really provide the services, the lower-level government workers, know where it's screwed up, and it's usually screwed up at the top,” Sharp once told the Post. "I guarantee you that 70% of the ideas we got to change government come from front-line employees.”
The public’s experience is a required check. Dumping money into a service that’s difficult to navigate and doesn’t ultimately meet its policy purpose is practically the definition of government waste. But uncovering the problems requires asking those who are trying to use the service in the first place.
Real savings don’t come from cutting budget line items
On our podcast, Schnurer pointed out that top-line cuts rarely result in long-term savings. That’s because looking for better and cheaper ways to do things is about the government processes—not just the cost of programs.
“Waste and inefficiency don’t appear in the budget. (No one budgets for ‘waste’),” he wrote in an op-ed for Governing. “Instead, it occurs largely in what’s not budgeted. For example, we found that one state had never properly calibrated its snowplows to deposit the correct amount of salt on the roads when it snowed, resulting in about $3 million a year in wasted salt. There was, of course, no budget line-item for road salt.”
The efficiency mindset should be protected from politics
Elected officials come and go and priorities and politics change Self-evaluation is especially subject to the whims of leaders. That’s evident when looking at what happened to the performance review efforts in Texas and the federal government after the 1990s.
According to the Texas Tribune:
When Sharp moved on, the next comptroller, Carole Keeton Rylander, picked up the performance reviews. But she was considered — properly — as a political competitor to then-Gov. Rick Perry, and lawmakers had grown weary of the biennial flood of proposals from the comptroller’s office. The Legislature took them away, putting performance reviews in the hands of the Legislative Budget Board, where they have faded into an all-but-forgotten exercise largely ignored by lawmakers.
In the federal government, GPRA is still around. But by leaving execution up to the executive branch, its usage and prioritization are still subject to politics and it has faded into the background. Compare the current homepage with even President Trump’s first term:
Independent agencies like the Government Accountability Office at the federal level, or government audit offices at the state and local levels, are the most logical places to build change that lasts.
Of course, this means elected officials might not score political points or take credit. But it also means taxpayers stand a much better chance of winning.