Clinton and Gore’s Attempts at Government Reform Highlight the Challenges Ahead for DOGE

Before there was the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there was Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s campaign to “reinvent government.”

As alarmed critics point to the unprecedented developments of DOGE’s early weeks—aggressive incursions into the U.S. government’s multi-trillion dollar payment infrastructure, the abrupt defunding of USAID, racist comments by youthful engineers and the specter of mass layoffs—Elon Musk has claimed that the Gore-led efforts in the 1990s prefigured his own.

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In the 1990s, as now, an ascendant political movement fused America’s anti-bureaucracy ethos with new ideas about how the “information superhighway” would reroute the U.S. political and economic future and open up opportunities to reimagine government. Yet, DOGE’s flurry of activity is a much more radical disruption than the principled reform attempted by Gore. This history suggests that, not only will Musk struggle to accomplish his goals, but meddling in the federal bureaucracy has real political risks.

Antipathy toward government bureaucracy has always been a strong current in American political culture. As the government grew in size after the 1930s, that antipathy only escalated, especially as conservatives rose in power in the 1970s and 1980s. And it wasn’t just from Republicans. A new breed of “New Democrats” or “Atari Democrats” was concerned that the government had grown too big. They also saw Ronald Reagan’s political success as he preached the evils of government and bureaucracy, and concluded that shifting gears away from reflexively defending government programs and bureaucracy would be both good government and good politics.

By the late 1980s and 1990s, these Democrats saw an opportunity to mobilize Americans’ anti-bureaucracy politics by embracing the promise of a less bureaucratic “New Economy.” Democrats saw new technologies and emerging sectors in finance and telecommunications as an opportunity to finally rid the country of the bureaucratic forms that had defined much of the century. Ideas about Silicon Valley’s whiz kid hackers, nimble startup cultures, and futuristic ventures, coupled with the allure of “efficiency,” came to dominate Democrats’ political thinking in the 1990s.

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In 1992, Clinton and Gore, both of whom belonged to this new crop of younger Democrats, ran an explicitly future oriented campaign, one literally set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” After winning, Clinton promised to pursue his ambitious agenda—free trade, welfare reform, health care reform, technology policy, and deficit reduction—while eschewing “big government.” He named Gore to lead a “National Performance Review” (NPR), which sought to remake the federal bureaucracy.

The effort was inspired by a 1992 book titled Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, which served as a roadmap for government reform. It pledged to “bash bureaucracies” and harness concepts of competition, consumer choice, and administrative creativity to bring “entrepreneurship” to government. Gore recruited one of the book’s authors, journalist David Osborne, to become a senior adviser. The vice president created 30 distinct teams to translate book’s recommendations into reality and bring about “historic change” in the function of government. Six months later, on Sep. 7, 1993, Gore presented the first report from the NPR to Clinton at a White House ceremony.

Clinton and Gore immediately moved to use presidential directives and executive orders to implement many of the recommendations from the report. Where necessary, they requested that Congress pass legislation to implement other elements. 

For example, the administration instructed agencies to post standards for “customer” service and to use them to measure performance. Gore also moved to overhaul the federal procurement process—freeing managers to buy what they needed more quickly, with an eye toward both efficiency and cutting costs. Additionally, he created “reinvention laboratories” within agencies where managers experimented with ways to deliver services more effectively. Finally, in an effort to reduce the size of government, an administration-backed “buyout bill” offered incentives for selected employees, identified by the agencies, to leave government.

A follow up initiative in 1995 encouraged agencies to slash regulatory mechanisms, a process which led to the elimination of over 100,000 regulations. The vice president awarded “hammer awards” to federal employees who “reinvented” a piece of the government, and leaders and employees within departments, agencies, and commissions—including the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the commission on consumer safety—embraced the opportunity to improve the work of governing within their organizations. 

By 1995, the Clinton administration boasted that it had shrunk the federal government by 12%, bringing the share of civilian federal jobs to its lowest point in decades. Some critics on the left were wary of the administration’s employment of market logics and its tendency to treat citizens as consumers. Morale among public servants was also low. 

But the program was among the “Clinton Administration’s few clear victories,” as one observer put it. By the end of the decade, surveys found “increasing satisfaction with the way government works.”

Even so, questions remained about whether Gore’s ballyhooed effort actually increased government efficiency, or whether it just cut personnel. Critics expressed concern that downsizing had preceded any real strategic plan, leaving “managers to perform jobs that if anything have grown.” “Quick public-opinion victories from cutting Federal employees” would “pale in comparison” to the long-term performance problems, opponents of the effort warned. Even management theorist Peter F. Drucker, who had directly inspired the authors of Reinventing Government, decried that the program might amount to “amputation without diagnosis.” Such hasty efforts at downsizing consistently failed, Drucker warned, even in the private sector.

The bigger problem for Gore, however, was that by attempting to tackle a gargantuan problem like government inefficiency through piecemeal reforms and voluntary retirements, some felt the administration had overpromised. Even if Clinton and Gore benefited from headlines about a shrinking federal workforce, over time their effort looked more like sizzle than seismic change. After all, as reporters noticed, “counting bodies is easier than measuring improvements in performance.”

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This was all too evident when Gore, who treasured the reformer’s spotlight in the 1990s, hit the presidential campaign trail in 2000. “They haven’t reinvented government bureaucracy—they’ve just reshuffled it,” his opponent George W. Bush quipped in June 2000. Worse still, citing a General Accounting Office report, Bush suggested that two-thirds of the administration’s claimed cost savings could not be verified. 

After Bush narrowly beat Gore, the impermanence of reinventing government’s signature achievement—a reduced workforce—became almost immediately clear. Between 2002 and 2005 alone, wartime demands led the Bush administration to add nearly 2.5 million employees to the federal workforce, many of them contractors.

Gore’s efforts amounted to some reforms and lots of hype, but it did little to prevent the regrowth of the bureaucracy. The downsizing it did accomplish simply resulted in the government resorting to a “shadow bureaucracy” of contractors. Politically, the reformers became vulnerable to critiques from the party’s left wing and from the beneficiaries of government programs. The focus on reform also stoked anti-government sentiments, which ultimately constrained Democrats and benefitted conservative Republicans, who were seen as the true opponents of government.

A quarter century later, DOGE pledges to reinvent government again. The MAGA coalition of national conservatives and Silicon Valley builders echo the anti-bureaucratic and techno-futurism that shaped the New Democrats. In a striking parallel to the 1990s, epochal thinking about the potentialities of a high technology society has once again upended politics.

Yet, there are several crucial differences between the two efforts. The New Democrats of the 1990s were not fundamentally hostile to the government or its employees. Reinventing Government asserted from the outset that government employees weren’t “the problem.” As Osborne and his coauthor stressed: “Our purpose is not to criticize government, […] but to renew it.”

DOGE, by contrast, has so far been focused on slashing government rather than reinventing it. Musk has bragged about feeding life-saving agencies, such as USAID, into the “wood chipper,” and he and President Trump have pledged to dismantle agencies and departments, including the Department of Education. To date, DOGE has spent more time dedicated to breaking up government rather than trying to reform it.

But to the degree that DOGE is following the New Democrats’ playbook for “Reinventing Government,” the history indicates that there is good reason to doubt that it will bring real improvement. We have already seen the Trump administration scramble to rehire axed employees and reports indicate that GOP lawmakers, facing angry voters at town halls, are panicking in private. Musk himself—a “special government employee” whose companies have received billions in federal contracts—is attracting severe public scrutiny over conflicts of interest. Plus, new reports suggest that DOGE has exaggerated claims about the savings it has produced.

If public response to Clinton and Gore’s reform efforts are any indication, it is possible that American clamor for reform could swing the other way.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

Jacob Bruggeman is a PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins and a graduate fellow at the SNF Agora Institute. Jacob is currently completing his dissertation, “Securing the System: Phone Phreaks, Computer Hackers, and Political Order in Modern America, 1963-2013.”

Casey Eilbert is a postdoctoral fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She defended her dissertation, “Conceptualizing The ‘Iron Cage’: Bureaucracy in Modern America,” in the history department at Princeton University in 2024.

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