Remember “reinventing government”? This was the task Bill Clinton assigned to Al Gore when they took the White House in 1993 — and which Gore deemed so vital that he publicized his findings by appearing on the David Letterman show. Among the hidebound government bureaucracies Gore was supposed to ” reinvent” through his so-called National Performance Review was the Environmental Protection Agency — his favorite government office and so important to him that he brought Carol Browner up from Florida to run it.

Gore assigned the EPA the task of “[reinventing] its approach to management” so that it could achieve “increased accountability” and ” decentralization” that would “bolster the role of the private sector by creating competitive government.” And with these instructions from its man in the White House, the EPA swung into action in inadvertently hilarious fashion: It assigned 450 full-time employees to the chore of reinventing itself. Nineteen “Process and Policy Teams” were gathered, whose purpose it was to write “in-depth reports on specific topic areas” under the guidance of a 20- person Senior Leadership Council. This august panel, composed of the agency’s “top political and career executives,” was created to advise EPA chief Browner on “National Performance Review planning and implementation.”