In his speech to the Lincoln Club of Orange County, California, Friday night, Fred Thompson mentioned a lengthy report on government waste due to mismanagement that he, as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, authored in 2001 entitled Government on the Brink.
Through the wonders of Google and Al Gore's Internet, you can still read Government at the Brink. It's online in two parts:
Volume I: Urgent Federal Government Management Problems Facing the Bush Administration - 70-page PDF file
Volume II: An Agency by Agency Examination of Federal Government Management Problems Facing the Bush Administration - 135-page PDF file
Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution praised the report in a letter to the editor of Government Executive magazine in 2001:
Calling the level of federal mismanagement "shocking," he listed the government's top 10 failures; they included $12 billion in Medicare waste, health and safety issues at the nation's 172 veterans hospitals, mission failures at NASA, and financial discrepancies at the IRS and the Defense Department.
Thompson's report, "Government at the Brink," did more than just inventory the problems, however. It also provided an easily accessible analysis of causes and solutions, most notably the projected retirement of between a third and a half of the federal workforce. Unless the federal government figures out a way to get the right employees both hired and motivated, Thompson argues, the federal government will start to feel the pinch of poor performance in every corner, from mishandled Social Security checks to ever-lengthening delays at every point of citizen service.
Thompson in his speech Friday said the report was never acted upon because a few months after its release came the terrorist attack of 9/11, which understandably grabbed the government's focus.
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