Aiming for Excellence - Actions to Encourage Stewardship and Accelerate Environmental Progress

Shortly after taking office, Vice President Gore took charge of a new National Partnership for Reinventing Government to radically change the way our government performs. The challenge given to all agencies was to be more efficient, less bureaucratic, and to provide better service to the American people. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), that challenge led us to rethink how we go about achieving environmental and public health protection goals. In March 1995, we launched a small set of high-priority porjects that quickly evolved into a broader reinvention agenda for the Agency. Today, we have numerous reinvention efforts under way. Many focus on improving well-established programs, such as permitting and compliance assurance. The emphasis is on streamlining regulatory processes and introducing innovations that can make these programs more efficient and effective. Others focus on finding fundamentally new approaches for the future. Our reinvention initiatives are designed to address environmental problems that have yet to be solved through the current system. We'd like to tell you about all of our reinvention efforts, but for this brief overview, we'll focus on a few programs we think are especially signicant.