Andrew Cuomo, Turnaround CEO

Logan's design fused the corner bank with the coffee shop from "Friends" - glass and exposed beam, lots of upholstered chairs. Gensler even helped name the new centers: HUD Next Door. The first HUD Next Door will open later this year near Washington's Union Station. By 2002, all of HUD's offices will reflect the new design.

Cuomo's long-term plan involves other, more ambitious changes as well. For example, the agency is tearing down 100,000 of its worst public-housing units. HUD will provide tenants with rental vouchers, or replace the units with scatter-site developments built in partnership with local businesspeople or community-development corporations. "I'm not going to create my own economy," Cuomo says. "I'm not going to build the bridge or the housing myself. I'll let the private markets do it."

Seasoned HUD watchers admire this ambitious agenda but are skeptical about its chances. Time and again, they've seen the agency deflect reformers. Change gurus have their own concerns. Bureaucracies are like Russia: They don't so much defeat invaders as outlast them. Champy wonders if HUD's top team will stay the course long enough to see breakthrough results.

That's a reasonable question. Andrew Cuomo is already being touted as a possible Senate candidate and even as a potential running mate for Al Gore in 2000. But Cuomo insists that he isn't going anywhere - which could make his backwater agency the site of one of the most intriguing experiments in Washington over the next few years. "I have to get into the way people live now," Cuomo says. "Otherwise, government's going to become irrelevant."

Ronald Brownstein (rbrownstein@usnews.com) is national political correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and a regular contributor to Fast Company.