ASHINGTON - Vice President Al Gore's mission to ''reinvent government'' has been reinvented by his opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, who traveled to Gore's home state of Tennessee yesterday to announce the details of his plan.
Bush did not use Gore's terminology, calling it instead a ''structural reform'' package, but many of its elements are eerily similar to ideas Gore has proposed - sometimes unsuccessfully - as head of the Clinton administration's commission to cut government waste and bureaucracy.
''We need a clean break from the recent past,'' Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told supporters in Knoxville. Bush promised to ''set a new tone - a tone of respect and bipartisanship,'' while at the same time taking ''practical steps'' to change the way Washington works.
Gore announced a similar strategy in 1993, when he headed a National Performance Review of government agencies and practices, and appealed for cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.
The National Performance Review has gotten mixed reviews; bipartisanship, always shaky, disintegrated after the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and President Clinton was impeached in 1998.
''It's sort of familiar, stealing the other guy's playbook,'' said Stephen Hess, an analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington. ''It's sort of a nifty bit of two-party governing.''
The Gore campaign did not address the details of Bush's plan, but attacked the Republican governor for what it termed his failure to rein in state spending and cut waste in Texas.
The highlight of the Bush plan is a proposal to pass budgets only every other year. That would mean lawmakers would presumably spend one year screaming at one another about funding levels, missing deadlines, and passing 11th-hour continuing resolutions to keep the government running while they approved a federal budget.
The second year would then be free, Bush aides said, to work on oversight and other legislative priorities.
That idea was, in fact, proposed by Gore when he issued the 1993 performance report, said Bob Stone, the former head of the Gore commission. ''It's a good idea,'' said Stone, who now does consulting at Public Strategies Group in St. Paul, Minn. But it did not go anywhere in Congress, he noted.
Bush also recommended creating a bipartisan commission to identify so-called ''pork barrel'' spending. The budget items would then be lumped together in one big, porcine package, and Congress would be forced to vote on it all at once, up or down. That idea may be constitutionally tricky, Hess said, since it may be interpreted as the executive branch meddling in the legislative process.
Gore's National Performance Review, which is still in operation, is already doing part of what Bush is proposing. The panel has been identifying programs deemed unnecessary and seeking to eliminate them. For example, Stone said, the US Naval Academy used to have its own dairy, a vestige from a contaminated milk crisis early last century. The panel eliminated the dairy, saving about $200,000, Stone said. Bush also vowed to pass a constitutionally sound line-item veto, which would give the president the authority to squelch individual budget items without having to veto an entire spending package.
Gore backs the line-item veto, as does President Clinton and George Bush, the Republican candidate's father. But the measure was found to be unconstitutional.
But even if the president had that power, it would not amount to much fiscally, said Donald Kettl, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, since the offending items are usually pretty small.
''It's often presented as a budget issue, when it's really a political issue,'' said Kettl, who has done extensive reviews of Gore's ''reinventing government'' efforts.
Other elements of the Bush plan include:
Adoption of a joint budget resolution, passed by Congress and signed by the president, that would set out spending and taxation priorities. Congress already does this. Bush's idea would simply involve the president in the process.
Preventing government shutdowns by stipulating that if a budget is not passed in time, affected programs would continue at the level proposed by the president or by the current funding level, whichever is lower.
Make the approval or rejection of presidential nominees a ''top priority'' and ''challenge Congress'' to vote on them within 60 days.
Bush also took the opportunity yesterday to berate Gore, saying he was being mean and negative in his campaigning - an attack that came, ironically, as Gore has sought to soften his image.
''It's that war-room mentality. The hostile stance. The lashing out at enemies,'' Bush complained. ''As president, I'll set a new tone in Washington.''
