WAPO:

"When the Vice President began this Administration's bold journey on the road to reinventing government eight years ago," said National Partnership for Reinventing Government Director Morley Winograd, "he thought it was the career front-line employees who knew what needed fixing and who were in the best place to create real and lasting change."

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/whoweare/history2.html


From the NYT and WAPO:

The riff was laid down by Dennis Kucinich, but now all the candidates are playing along. Howard Dean says the Halliburton contracts show that the Bush administration ''has sold this country down the river.'' John Kerry says the administration has broken faith with the American people with its no-bid contracts with Halliburton. In the parade of Democratic bogeymen, the word ''Halliburton'' elicits almost as many hisses as the chart-topping ''Ashcroft.''

The problem with the story is that it's almost entirely untrue. As Daniel Drezner recently established in Slate, there is no statistically significant correlation between the companies that made big campaign contributions and the companies that have won reconstruction contracts.

The most persuasive rebuttals have come from people who actually know something about the government procurement process. For example, Steven Kelman was an administrator in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy under Bill Clinton and now is a professor of public management at Harvard.

Last week, Kelman wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post on the alleged links between contributions and reconstruction contracts. ''One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded -- whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert -- who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd,'' he observed.