What have been the most successful public sector reform efforts in recent years?
Donahue: In recent years, you’d probably have to look overseas for successful reform efforts. I think that former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in Britain, despite some of its more recent failings, was a spectacular success in public sector reform in its early years, really restructuring the British civil service, getting the whole government focused on performance in some very creative ways. In the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is actually a great test case of public sector reform because it’s gone from basket case to poster child back to basket case again in recent administrations. In the George H.W. Bush administration – partly because there hadn’t been a large scale disaster – FEMA was left untended and that showed when hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992. During the Clinton administration, James Lee Witt turned the agency around. He incorporated some modern management principals, but more importantly he just paid attention to the agency for four year
