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media coverage. This stands in marked contrast with other bureaucratic reforms, such as the first
President Bush’s establishment of the Competitiveness Council. While the Competitiveness Council may
actually have had more impact on the policies and regulations promulgated by agencies, its influence was
not widely appreciated beyond the beltway. We expect the Grace and Gore Commissions to have had two
distinct effects on public perceptions of bureaucratic performance. First, media attention to the release of
the War on Waste: President’s Private Sector on Cost Control (Grace 1984) and the Gore Report on
Reinventing Government (1993) should have had an initially negative impact on public perceptions. Both
reports start from a premise that something is very wrong and it needs to be fixed. However, both then
propose remedies to address these failures. Their implementation was inevitably partial, incomplete, and
staggered over years. Moreover, the specific reforms associated with the reports were almost certainly
well below the radar screen of most of the public. Still, it seems fair to assume that presidents do not
publicize such reports so as to permanently discredit their handling of the bureaucracy. Rather, they
initiate the reforms to reassure the public that they are in-charge of a well-functioning – and well-
controlled – policy machine. Thus, public approval of bureaucracy should increase following the initial
dip in public perceptions resulting from the issuance of the two reports. We operationalize the first of
these two distinct expectations using a dummy variable scored one for the initial year in which the reports
were issued, 1984 and 1993, respectively. The two dummies should generate negative signs. The second
effect is operationalized as a counter variable (1, 2, 3,…) beginning in the year following the issuing of
the report and continuing for the remainder of the president’s time in office. The counter variables should
generate positive estimates. Given the more constraining tone of the Grace Commission and the more
energizing approach of the Gore Report, separate dummies and counters are used for each of the two
reform efforts. We also examine an alternative specification in which we test for an initial shock
associated with the release of the reports and then assess how those shocks decay over four years.
Findings
We utilize a lagged dependent variable specification to take into account the inertia in the
Convention