The Winter Commission Report: The Practitioner's Perspective

Abstract

In reviewing the Winter Commission Report, I asked myself two questions. What insight in the problems of public sector management will this report give me? What concrete suggestions for implementing change can I glean from the report? While the report was collect in its identification of some of the problems of managing in state government (there is little about local government), I found much more representing longstanding academic complaints, which sadly do not represent the concerns of public sector management. Did the last two decades slip by without anyone noticing that things have changed in state and local government? I helped draft legislation over 20 years ago to create a cabinet system in Massachusetts to redress the failure of the states to permit strong executive leadership. Now I am told the central problem of state government is that we elect too many Secretaries of State and State Land Commissioners. This ground was plowed more than 25 years ago by, among others, the Commission on Economic Development. Did not virtually every state make significant constitutional changes in the 1970s? Was not that an era marked as the renaissance of state government? Did those of us working on state government reform accomplish nothing? The core concept behind the commission report is that of and That notion is invoked in several sections. The initial definition of this concept sounds like something out of Reinventing Government, or one of the many books on public sector TQM. As I understand the statement, the idea is that, as a manager, if you trust your staff you will let them lead. The juxtaposition of this idea, which is embedded in the section on the weakness of governors, is fascinating. Do you first need to accrue more power at the top before you trust and lead? Is a bottom-up management style something that will work only if mandated by a single person at the top? I can appreciate that the chair of the commission is a former governor and that two of the meetings were held in the capitols of the states with the constitutionally weakest chief executives (Austin and Tallahassee). But to presume that those institutional restraints also apply in the other 47 states, or to the council-manager cities and counties in this country is a little extreme. To my way of thinking, reshaping the state and local public service has more to do with how we educate and utilize our public servants than the relative power of the chief executive. When someone does a convincing study that demonstrates that Alaska and Hawaii, with only a couple of state-wide offices, are the best managed states, and Texas and Florida, with the weakest governors, are the worst managed, I will find this whole argument creditable. The same argument would apply to the issue of the nationalization of Medicaid. In the 1960s, Congressman Reuss proposed revenue sharing; in the early 1970s and again in the early 1980s, the proposal was to nationalize welfare, which then cost more than health care. Should the changes in public management in state and local government be dependent on the national government taking over a larger share of governmental expenditures in the 1990s? How well we manage state and local governments should not be contingent upon decisions about Medicaid. Health care reform of any kind should not be linked to public sector management change. Furthermore, such a change relieves overburdened states, but does nothing for local governments. While I laud the goal of reforming Medicaid financing as sound public policy, I think that management improvement initiatives are also sound public policy and should not be linked to other policy concerns. I want to touch on one last unnecessary foray into politics that muddies the water about management change. Campaign reform and lobbyist registration are hot topics, but what do they have to do with public management? I understand that the public is suspicious and even cynical about both politicians and bureaucrats, but these recommendations are off the point. …