problem of the federal government doing very little across its own verticals and very little horizontally. You've got food stamps doing very little with job training, which is doing very little with child care, which is doing very little with child support. Then you've got the absence of systems integration on the devolution side from federal to state. You've got boundaries that are geographically horizontal boundaries. You've got vertical boundaries between the federal government and these geographical horizontal boundaries. Then you've got this dimension of an awful lot of private players and confusion about the boundaries between private and public players.

The best thing that could happen would be federalism working groups to look at solution sets that go horizontally across programs, and go across the verticals, but also go up and down federal, state and local.

GT: How will technology advance civil society and the faith-based initiative?

Goldsmith: Hopefully, technology will play an enormous role in advancing civil society. People talk about how impersonal it is, but if we concentrate on providing the right tools to community groups and faith-based groups, they can knit that information together in a way that provides cohesiveness inside their community of interest. People will depend more on the neighborhood center for information or they might have their own kind of ISPs, if you will. It's just using the Internet for micro-segmentation at the neighborhood level, whether it's around interest groups or issue groups, and I think it can help civil society.

GT: You've said that the current structure of government, particularly the federal government, is incompatible with the New Economy. What needs to change? Will we see a much different looking government in five to 10 years?

Goldsmith: We have a networked society and economy and an industrial-age government. They need to be a little bit better matched. Government needs to operate in a less autocratic way and a more networked way: Employees should be allowed to have more discretion. They should be organized around problems, moving from project to project, year to year, and be rewarded for performance - things you'd expect from an information society.

Will we get there? I hope so. It will take congressional leadership, as well as presidential leadership. The president talked about how to get there during the campaign. There is leadership in Congress today, senators [George] Voinovich and [Fred] Thompson and others who are interested, but there still is a tendency to preserve the status quo because that's the way Congress is set up. It'll be slow going to change it.

GT: Wouldn't that mean that Congress would have to change its committee structure because they are now funding the silos?

Goldsmith: Yes. The committee structure reinforces the outdated organizational bureaucracy.

You almost need another Hoover Commission. There is so much wrong with the civil service, it inhibits the performance of public employees. You have the committee structure in Congress and you have the antiquated civil service work. You need big, bold changes to make this work.

GT: Will the huge improvements in government efficiency and service quality that we expect to see from e-government increase citizens' trust in government institutions?

Goldsmith: It should. Accountability in government is one of the top reasons that citizens want e-government. It is certainly true in terms of procurement, if it is done right.

GT: If more government transactions are done online, what will happen to the tens of thousands of government field offices that dispense Social Security checks and farm payments, sign people up for welfare, handle Medicaid and unemployment insurance, etc.?

Goldsmith: It is the same as any other business. Some people will