In 2012, I published a novel called “Draining the Swamp” about an outsider’s attempts to come to Washington, D.C., to “truly make a difference.” While I had modest hopes for the story, I never imagined its title would be on the lips of every Donald Trump supporter, who are now charging ahead to Inauguration Day with figurative pitchforks and torches in their hands.
President Reagan was actually the first to use this phrase in the context of fixing Washington, but it’s important to note neither Reagan nor Trump appear to have understood two very important things about this metaphor.
First, swamps are very valuable ecosystems and everything in them, even the alligators, have evolved to play a crucial role in nature. Second, government is also vital to the healthy functioning of society and must continue to evolve to become better adapted to its role.
The markets for things like national defense, criminal justice, utilities, natural resources, education, healthcare and consumer goods all need a government that can price in externalities, protect consumers, guard commons and stop abuses from monopolies. Therefore, we need politicians who can rationally select actions that will make government more effective and efficient at meeting these needs for society.
Unfortunately, politicians have lost their way with this vision, and now “corrupt government officials” are by far the biggest fear of American voters.
The federal government spends about $4 trillion per year. That’s about 21 percent of the entire U.S. economy. Yet we’ve never chosen a president for their ability to be a good CEO of the executive branch. No one asked about this qualification during any of the presidential or primary debates in the 2016 elections, and it didn’t come up in the 2012 elections either. The results show it.
Ironically, the last president to really attempt to “drain the swamp” of its dysfunction was President Clinton. In 1993, he took office and assigned Vice President Gore to lead an intensive six-month study that resulted in The Gore Report on Reinventing Government, which contained 255 agency-specific recommendations for improvement throughout its 168 pages. It was the 11th such federal reform effort of the 20th century. When President Clinton announced this project he said, “This performance review will not produce another report just to gather dust in some warehouse. We have enough of them already.”
Sadly, after years of fitful but futile efforts, that’s exactly what happened to Gore’s report. There hasn’t been a major federal reform effort since. The experts in government have given up, rather than promise something they can’t deliver. Good news, however, has arrived since then.
In 1995, professor John Kotter completed a 10-year study of more than 100 companies who tried to make major changes, publishing his results in one of the most influential articles in the history of the Harvard Business Review: “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.”
In 2006, consultant Frank Ostroff published the first article in Harvard Business Review that took this topic into the public sector when he wrote “Change Management in Government.” Combining the theories, best practices and lessons learned from this and other research, we know that the best way to lead major changes involves six steps:
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Establish a sense of urgency
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Form a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition
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Define the transformation’s vision and strategy
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Develop communication plans to inform and involve
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Choose “breakthrough projects” and get efforts moving
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Develop a roadmap for long-term implementation
These must be done in order and none of the steps can be skipped. They have been developed in the business world, refined in a few pockets of government and been proven to work. They will require sustained effort from the top of the executive branch if reform is to truly spread throughout the federal government. But that is the only way our swamp will ever be made to work the way it needs to work.
We shouldn’t ever actually “drain the swamp.” Instead, we need to study the swamp, understand its purpose, and thoroughly clean up the pollution we have dumped in it.
Ed Gibney is an author, philosopher and former management consultant in government. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
