Senator Mark Warner and Paul A. Volcker announce a new report to comprehensively reform government

Earlier today Senator Mark Warner and former Fed Chair Paul Volcker announced a new report, produced by Paul Light and the Campaign for High Performance Government at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, to comprehensively reform government.  The report, “Creating High Performance Government: A Once-In-A-Generation Opportunity,” provides an overview of the accountability, efficiency, and productivity challenges facing Congress and the president as they consider a broad “overhaul” of the federal bureaucracy, and offers possible reforms that might improve performance as part of a package of comprehensive action, as well as a discussion of one method for bipartisan legislative implementation.  The report also provides estimates of the potential savings involved in such a package with the caveat that better performance also involves investment in the basic resources needed for improvement. 

This blueprint, which includes specific recommendations, is built on the simple premise that the time for small-scale reform has passed.  Congress and the president have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve government for the long-term.  It has been seventy years since the last comprehensive review of the federal government’s basic structure and operations.  There is simply no time for another blue-ribbon commission of the kind chaired by former president Herbert Hoover during the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Moreover, as the report shows, there are already plenty of good ideas for action circulating through Congress and the executive branch.  The challenge is to push these and other ideas forward soon enough to create a government that works better and costs less.

The report contains a comprehensive menu of actionable reforms and includes an intriguing implementation plan using a Government Reform Corporation to develop legislative proposal for immediate action through fast-track, up-or-down votes.