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We use various lists to distribute electronic and paper copies of this newsletter. The Roundtable is on the World Wide Web at http://www.npr.gov. Click on News Room and look for the Roundtable. We hope you will copy this newsletter and distribute it inside and outside government. We also want you to share your reinvention stories. Send them to the editor.

We also publish Reinvention Express, a two-page information sheet distributed by e-mail or fax. It has hot news, announcements, and mini reinvention stories. Fax your fax number to Pat Wood at (202) 632-0390. For e-mail, send an e-mail message to Listproc@etc.fed.gov with this message: SUBSCRIBE EXPRESS-L FIRSTNAME LASTNAME. (Put three spaces: after the word SUBSCRIBE, after EXPRESS-L, and after your FIRSTNAME.)

Vice President Gore asked NPR to organize a network of editors of publications directed toward federal employees. The Federal Communicators Network has expanded to comprise more than 330 writers, editors, public affairs specialists, Internet/Intranet coordinators and others eager to spread the message of effective government and help break down barriers to reinvention. To join, contact Regina Downing at (202) 632-1166, e-mail: regina.downing@npr.gsa.gov.

Reinvention Highlights

The book reports the smallest federal workforce in 30 years and savings of $118 billion because of reinvention. Here’s a sampling of what federal workers and their agencies are doing:

• Health and Human Services slashed the approval time in half for new drugs and approved 13 new drugs to combat AIDS and HIV infection in record time.
• Justice reduced management layers in the Marshal Service from eight to four and consolidated 25 of its organizational units into 11.
• NASA went from a 77 percent cost overrun to a five percent underrun.
• Housing and Urban Development condensed 42 mortgage-backed securities processes, saving lenders $50 million annually by eliminating 180,000 sheets of paper that required 400,000 signatures.
• Interior reduced the Park Service’s central staff by 25 percent, reduced its 10 regional offices to seven, and moved hundreds of employees out to the parks, serving visitors.

How to Get a Copy
The Best Kept Secrets in Government is on NPR’s Web site at http:// www.npr.gov. Look under “Latest Additions” or the “Library.” You may buy the book from your local bookstore or from the Government Printing Office (Stock #040-000-00676-1). The GPO version includes fact-filled appendices. Order by phone: (202) 512-1800, fax: (202) 512-2250; or Internet: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/sale/order001.html.

"These technologies allow our government to increase its efficiency," said Vice President Gore in a statement released from the White House on August 1, 1996. The Internal Revenue Service’s industry award-winning Web site (http://www.irs. ustreas.gov) was immensely popular in 1996, with customers downloading more than 2.5 million forms and publications. The Social Security Administration’s PEBES service (http://www.ssa.gov) allows customers to complete a form online requesting a statement of their Social Security earnings along with an estimate of their future benefits. In the past, customers had to call or visit the Social Security Administration to get the form. Here are just a few other activities underway.

Education’s Award-Winning Site

The Department of Education’s INet (Institutional Communications Network) has both Gopher and Web service (http://www.ed.gov). INet had 3.6 million hits in October, 1996, a 168 percent increase in just one year.

Government Executive Magazine recommends the site to “Federal officials who want a lesson in how to set up an attractive, comprehensive, and user-friendly” site. Cyberhound gave it a four-star rating for outstanding content, design, technical merit, and entertainment. For more information, contact Maura Daly at (202) 219-1897 or mdaly@Inet.ed.gov.

Intranet Workshops Help Agencies
Simplify Administrative Functions

World Wide Jobs Are on the World Wide Web

• A federal jobs database of more than 4,000 job opportunities throughout the world.
• Job announcements and application forms that you can download.
• Fact sheets on specific subjects, such as outplacement assistance, veterans’ employment, and student programs.

“No Lines Online”

What Your Agency Can Do

Reinventors Have a Friend in Cyberspace

You can also find the President’s Executive Orders and Memoranda on reinvention, the Government Performance and Results Act, and the status of all National Performance Review recommendations. Or you can search to find the Hammer Awards your department has won.

The site has more than 3,000 reinvention documents. Helpful materials—including older, historical documents—are added every week. The site has a search engine and links to reinvention documents and Web sites all over government. For more information, contact Pat Wood at (202) 632-0223 or pat.wood@npr.gsa.gov.

The National Performance Review recommended eliminating unnecessary, labor-intensive time and attendance paperwork and using technology for what was left. The General Accounting Office released new policy guidelines on March 25, 1996 that permit agencies to get rid of sign-in sheets. “No excuses anymore,” Vice President Gore told participants at a Reinvention Conference in 1996. “It’s time to change.”

NIH Will Share the New System

A 1993 Presidential Executive Order on Regulatory Planning and Review laid the foundation for a regulatory system that meddles less and puts more responsibility in the hands of the people themselves.

The President and Vice President pulled out the stops in February 1995 when they summoned the heads of regulatory agencies to a press conference. We’re going to change the regulatory culture, the President announced. Rethink the entire regulatory process, he told the regulators. Review every reg you’ve got. Cut obsolete regulations. Reward results, not red tape. Negotiate, don’t dictate. Get out of Washington—create grass roots partnerships.

And while you’re cutting back on regs, the Vice President added, write what’s left in plain English. In a Presidential memo that followed, President Clinton said reform of the regulatory system is the“ central part of reinventing government.”

Regulatory Culture Is Changing

Richard Zanetti, editor of Chemical Engineering magazine, a McGraw-Hill trade publication, says the Environmental Protection Agency’s first voluntary program worked. The program is a toxic emissions reduction program called 33/50. “I would guess that the taxpayer return on investment...is light years ahead of that from traditionally run environmental programs...33/50 may be the harbinger of a changing regulatory rationale.”(See box on page 5.)

“Companies cut more than 750 million pounds of pollution in the time it would take EPA to write a reg. It’s awesome,” said Chris Tirpak, 33/50 deputy. “We were stunned that companies signed up to make these reductions publicly. You take a risk in admitting that you are a big polluter. But companies even signed up for 90 percent reductions and some companies made it. All we did was set the national goals and identify the targets. The companies chose their own methods.”

Building on What Works

With partnerships, EPA has changed its emphasis from cleaning up pollution to preventing it. Since 1992, the agency more than tripled the number of members in its partnership programs. More than 7,100 companies now participate. EPA, OSHA, and other regulatory agencies did not give up their responsibility to enforce the rules and apply stiff penalties if it’s necessary. Because they no longer waste time on the “good guys,” they can do a better job going after the cheaters.

What Your Agency Can Do

Easy to Read Rules Are Easier to Follow

Led by Annetta Cheek at Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, the team opened a Plain English web page in December at http://www.blm.gov/nhp/ NPR/plaineng.html. You’ll find a list of agency representatives, samples, and an interactive tutorial. You may reach Annetta Cheek at (202) 452-5099 or e-mail: acheek@wo.blm.gov. NPR’s web site includes a page called “Common Sense Regulations” at http://www.npr.gov/initiati/common/index/html.

Here is a before and after sample from Interior’s Mineral Management Services. Reg writers in this agency won a Hammer Award for their plain English regulations.

33/50 Program Achieves
Major Environmental Goal Without One Word of Government Regulation

Exchanging Blue Ribbons for Red Tape

For More Information

So, Dear created a self-managed “Design Team” in 1994 composed of 17 OSHA employees—compliance officers, managers, union representatives, and support staff from all over the country. (The team later expanded to 27 employees.) Dear gave them a two-year mandate and a blank piece of paper. Their charge: design a new OSHA, drawing from best practices in government and the private sector. The effort is an NPR Reinvention Lab. Team leaders are Leo Carey, representing management, and Ken Maglicic, Vice President, National Council of Field Labor Locals, American Federation of Government Employees. Maglicic works as a compliance officer in the Columbus, Ohio, office.

“I’ve been on a lot of teams,” said team member David Katsock, compliance officer at the OSHA area office in Parsippany, NJ, “but all the others were management-directed.” Not this one, Katsock said. People worked on an equal footing. “Members left their titles at the door,” he said.

Going to the Experts

They discovered the agency was relying on one tool—inspections—to do the job, though research showed it would take 87 years for OSHA inspectors to visit every worksite in the country. They concluded that OSHA should add other tools to its reliance on enforcement penalties and citations. “We cannot be everywhere all the time,” said team member Robert Kulick, Area Director at Parsippany.

The Design Team came up with new tools, such as incentives and partnerships with employers, trade associations, unions and other governmental organizations. Partners would work together on the common goal of eliminating hazards to prevent injuries and illnesses. Traditional enforcement would focus on those who chose not to participate in the partnership efforts.

The new OSHA would judge its own performance by its impact on worker health and safety, not the number of inspections, citations, and penalties. Inspectors would stop working autonomously, rulebook in hand, in a reactive, piecemeal approach. Instead, area office staff would work in self-directed, multi-disciplinary teams, using problem-solving techniques and creative approaches to address hazardous working conditions. Two team models emerged. One—the response team—focuses on immediate complaints, referrals, outreach, and fatalities. The other—a strategic intervention team—works on longer-range prevention and partnership. The overall design is called Getting Results and Improving Performance (GRIP).

Making the Design Work

All the research and evaluation paid off when GRIP was put into practice. “The two best parts of redesign...are employee participation and outcome measurement,” according to Howard Eberts, a union steward on the strategic intervention team in Columbus, Ohio. “By allowing field employees to actively participate in improving the way we do business, our employees have more ownership in our work and take more pride in making our office succeed,” Eberts said.

By the summer of 1996, 15 (of 67) area offices had implemented GRIP and the roll-out continues. OSHA workers have come up with some creative approaches for improving worker safety and health:

• Parsippany’s staff found that a large number of workers had been killed on highway construction sites in New Jersey over the last five years, and that the State was planning a massive, multi-billion dollar highway improvement program. Further, with an anticipated increase in auto and truck traffic over the next decade, OSHA could expect additional fatalities on highway construction sites.

  To counter these threats, OSHA joined with the New Jersey State Police, the NJ Department of Transportation, and the International Laborers Union. The program uses an already existing state highway construction police unit to be a “second set of eyes” at construction sites. When troopers observe a hazardous condition, they bring it to the immediate attention of the contractor and the NJDOT. If the problem isn’t fixed, the troopers call OSHA. Since OSHA trained the police in hazard recognition, the troopers have reported four times as many interventions.

• The Savannah, Georgia, OSHA area office set up a partnership with pulp and paper mill employers to improve safety and health programs and find and fix hazards in local mills. During the first six months, employers found 453 situations that violated OSHA rules, and corrected 255. OSHA devoted 320 staff hours to the project. By contrast, in the previous four years, the agency had spent 7,180 staff hours inspecting the industry with a return of 159 violations found and corrected. The partnership yielded a 3,200 percent increase in the number of hazards abated per hour of staff work.

• OSHA’s Atlanta East office, Argonaut Insurance Company, the Department of Defense, the Florida State Consultation Program (funded by OSHA to provide onsite technical assistance) and Horizon Steel formed a partnership on a project Horizon was building for DOD in Florida. The centerpiece of the agreement was commitment from Horizon that every one of its workers—100 percent—would use fall protection and that all of its supervisors would enforce this commitment.

  The partnership was a success. Three workers who fell from heights ranging from 60 to 100 feet were protected and uninjured. Without the full body harnesses they were wearing, plus the “tie off,” all three would have been killed. In the first 90 days, Horizon had a 96 percent reduction in accident costs per person hour—from $4.26 to 18 cents. Over six months, total workers compensation claims costs fell from more than $1 million to $13,200. Horizon Safety Director John Paulk now travels at company expense to tell others about the new OSHA.

Cleveland, which receives the highest volume of complaints in the country, reduced the average time between the complaint and abatement from 39 workdays to nine; Peoria reduced its response time from 23 days to five. Backlogs are now rare. OSHA implemented the phone/fax complaint handling process nationwide.

Reinventing Headquarters

OSHA’s national office has also improved its service to the public. The agency gets about 12,000 requests a month for publications. In the past, mail orders were backlogged, phones went unanswered, and publications were often out of print. The publications staff got a GRIP, too. They cut the time for processing phone or mail orders from six weeks to less than one day and the backlog from 3,000 pieces to under 100.

Information technology also plays a big role in OHSA’s efforts to meet the public’s requests for help. OSHA’s popular Web site (see below) receives close to one million hits a month, mostly from industry. The agency produced a CD-ROM to deliver more information to clients in the swiftest way possible.

Helping Is the Goal

Vice President Gore recognized the changes as well when he presented OSHA’s Design Team with a Hammer Award on June 12, 1996. “There really is a new OSHA out there,” the Vice President said. “The fact that you’re doing it will be an inspiration to others.”

After the award presentation, Parsipanny’s Dave Katsock said, “I would do any project with this team. This team could find a way to get to Mars.”

For More Information

A task force of the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program, a government-wide reinvention activity, developed the new legislation and implementing regulations. Call (202) 512-9201 for the name of a task force member who can discuss the travel provisions. Call (202) 512-6000 to get a copy of the JFMIP report, Improving Travel Management Governmentwide. The report is also on the World Wide Web (gopher://pula.financenet.gov:70/00/docs/central/jfmip/travel.rpt.gop.gop).

Public managers like the new guide. “Job well done! Your clear, user-friendly guide certainly fills a void,” wrote Carolyn Lane with the Louisiana Office of Planning and Budget.

You may get a free, single copy from NPR’s John Keith, (202) 632-0189; Fax—(202) 632-0390, or john.keith@npr.gsa.gov.) You may purchase in bulk from the Government Printing Office. The stock number is 040-000-00680-0 and the price is $7.50 each; non-US, $9.38. GPO offers a 25 percent discount for orders of 100 or more. Order by phone: (202) 512-1800, fax: (202) 512-2250; or Internet: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/sale/order001.html

To link to the other 1,000, go to http://www.pccomputing.com.