Success Ends Task for USDA Reformers

WASHINGTON â€”  Twenty-seven years of federal employment have made Robert G. Halstead realistic enough to know that changing the bureaucracy in a place like the Agriculture Department is something like trying to move a polar ice cap.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying.

In a development that seems to run counter to the bureaucratic habit of self-perpetuation, Halstead has just about worked himself out of a job.

The department’s Office of Management Reform, which Halstead was chosen to head in 1984, has finished its work and disbanded. To mark its end, Halstead and Co. staged a ceremonial burning of the secretarial memo that set up the short-lived operation.

“The easiest thing in the world would have been to keep it going,� Halstead said. “The idea was for us to work a year and then quit, but it was extended another year at the request of the department’s top managers, who agreed to fund it out of their own budgets.�

$4.6 Million Saved

No one is rash enough to claim that glaciers have been moved, but Halstead said the effort saved the taxpayers at least $4.6 million and gave some of the department’s 115,000 employees a new sense of participation in decision-making.

Among the accomplishments of the reform office is a cost-cutting agreement allowing the Commerce Department and the Merit Systems Protection Board to run their payrolls through the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center at New Orleans. Agriculture and Commerce also will share warehouse facilities in some cities.

An “idea week,� suggested by a field employee as a way of eliciting cost-saving and job-improvement proposals from bureaucrats, brought more than 2,500 suggestions over a toll-free phone line and led the department to repeat the project this year.

“Lord, no, we haven’t improved everything,� said John J. Franke Jr., assistant secretary for administration, “but we have had some remarkable success in instilling a top-down, bottom-up approach aimed at finding ways to work smarter and work better.

“Here in Washington, we get so separated sometimes from our field offices that people out there know that one simply does not talk to Washington, because nobody up there listens anyway,� Franke said. “We wanted to create a pipeline for managers to get the best of their agencies’ thinking.�

Field Employees Heard

In sessions around the country, more than 2,500 Agriculture employees from all grade levels were brought in to make suggestions on improving communications and streamlining operations. “They played a role in some of the changes we have carried out . . . . For a lot of them, that participation gives a sense of ownership of the system,� Halstead said.

The office was created by then-Secretary John R. Block as an outgrowth of a Reagan Administration effort, prompted in part by the recommendations of the Grace commission on government efficiency, to improve the management of federal programs.

Halstead was transferred from a management position with the Soil Conservation Service to run the reform effort. The staff of 11, borrowed from other agencies, have returned to their old jobs. Halstead remains assigned to Franke’s staff while he fields queries from other agencies about replicating the project.

“Can we change the bureaucracy?� Halstead asked rhetorically. “Yes, it can be done, and I think we have made some impact.�

Idea Needs ‘Champion’

His formula: Have a “champion� at the top who wants it done; involve bureaucrats who are “risk-takers� eager to effect change, and “ask the troops what’s wrong . . . . They have a share in all of this. And try to make it fun.�

If nothing else, the exercise may have set records for saving paper. Halstead’s file of nearly two years of correspondence with Franke, his boss, contains two--repeat, two--memos:

One from Halstead proposed an agenda; Franke’s answer told him to get cracking.