By Stephen Barr

Sunday, January 14, 2001; Page C02

The reinventors held their last big bash Thursday evening. More than 400 federal employees turned out for the party at the U.S. Mint headquarters and applauded when the Internal Revenue Service restructuring team and the FirstGov.gov Web development team were presented with Vice President Gore's Hammer Award for helping build a better government.

The awards were No. 1,377 and No. 1,378 handed out by Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. There will be no more.

Like other staffs unique to the Clinton administration, the Gore reinventors are closing up shop. By 2 p.m. Tuesday, when the truck from the National Archives pulls up outside their 17th Street NW office, the reinventors will have combed through hundreds of files and packed 700 boxes for the federal records collection.

Although key staff members said they have no regrets about expending time and energy on the reinvention, some seemed sad about calling a halt to what became the government's longest-running management reform project. One anonymous scribbler had written on a board: "Life is good. Yield to its goodness."

The Gore reinvention opened for business April 15, 1993, and was staffed within weeks by about 250 career employees who gathered ideas for Gore on how to overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

Since then, the staff's size has bounced up and down, depending on the workload. About 1,300 career employees have come and gone from the reinvention office during the past eight years.

Only a few -- John Kamensky, Bev Godwin, Pam Johnson, Jean Logan and Lynn Kahn -- remain from the original reinvention staff. Others, such as Michael Messinger and Pat Wood, came a little later but stayed to become stalwarts of the reinvention effort.

The bulk of the staffers will return to their home agencies, which loaned them to Gore for reinvention duty. Ongoing reinvention projects, such as surveys and Internet databases, will be taken over by the Education Department, Office of Personnel Management, Government Printing Office and other agencies.

By most accounts, the reinvention compiled a mixed record.

It won high marks for streamlining the way the government buys goods and services, for promoting "customer service" and "plain language" regulations, and for tossing out silly rules. It was heavily criticized for failing to overhaul outdated civil service laws and for downsizing the federal work force.

In many offices, employees never viewed reinvention as a priority for their agencies, except for the downsizing. From January 1993 to September 2000, according to an administration tally, the downsizing eliminated 426,200 executive branch jobs. The reduction included about 78,000 managerial positions.

Because the reinvention emerged as one of Gore's signature projects, it seems likely the Bush administration will let the reform effort disappear. But the reinventors believe they have built a legacy.

Kamensky, who worked on ways to measure and improve the performance of federal agencies, lists 90 laws and 50 presidential directives put in place since 1993 that contain parts of the reinvention agenda.

About 30 agencies now measure satisfaction with their services with outside experts. Alliances with communities, electronic networks and regulatory reforms will live on in various agencies, Kahn and Logan said.

At various times, the reinvention offered alternatives to congressional Republican budget-cutting plans, worked on airline safety and food safety, and helped create FirstGov.gov, a one-stop Web site for government information with links to 27 million federal Web pages and 1,000 forms and services.

Behind the scenes, the reinventors worked with the IRS, the disability program in the Social Security Administration, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Office of Student Financial Assistance and other agencies faced with management problems.

With hundreds of "reinventing government" alumni in the government's career ranks, Kamensky said: "Reinvention is going to continue. It's not an initiative but a way of life for people. That's what I've been hearing from people. They say we are not stopping."

Added Kahn, "There is no going back."

Stephen Barr's e-mail address is barrs@washpost.com