Under New Management: Trump's ‘fresh eyes’ sparks massive federal reform
by Paul Bedard
July 09, 2018 09:09 AM
President Trump is taking charge of his administration’s effort to reform the federal government and workforce, the biggest demonstration yet that Washington is under new management.
Aides describe the president as personally invested in the 32-point plan to shake the bureaucracy out of a 1950s model based on secretarial pools.
“So much of the ability to drive change requires a fresh perspective,” said Margaret Weichert, an author of the recently announced reform blueprint and deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget.
“It’s frequently why I, as a management consultant, was brought into an organization to consult on issues like this because fresh eyes and people who don’t have a stake in the status quo very often can see things differently than the people who are of that organization or institution. And that was a major theme in the last election, that people were effectively hiring a businessman to try to change business as usual in Washington,” she said in an interview.
Trimming and reeducating the workforce, combining federal agencies and eliminating overlapping services won’t be easy and Trump’s team are bracing for a bruising fight with bureaucrats, federal employee unions and lawmakers.
But it is one that Trump is approaching like he did many of his business challenges, setting the overall goals and then promoting them.
“He gets involved in the high level conceptual framing of it and then when we pull together the proposals,” said Weichert.
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“We are serious about top down change. It cannot all happen at once, it can’t certainly happen by fiat, but when you look at where we are at in 2018 two decades into the 21st century and you pair that with a bureaucratic infrastructure that was very well aligned to the needs of the post-World War II era, it’s so clear there’s a mismatch,” said Weichert, adding, “If now isn’t the time to get traction on this, I don’t know when is. We have to get serious about making change happen.”
Legislation has already been introduced to begin making Trump’s reforms, headlined by a plan to revamp the federal workforce, reform IT and add automation, and combine the Education and Labor departments so that schools can focus more on filling the nation’s skills gap like some European school systems do.
