Drop by the once moribund Labor Department, where former Harvard lecturer Robert Reich now is in charge. His office is festooned with scribbled flow charts: easelpad visions of new job-training programs taped to the tall windows framing a view of the Capitol. Or stop by the Old Executive Office Building. There, in a bare-walled office, sipping Diet Pepsi from a can, Ira Magaziner meets delegations of task-force consultants. He’s racing to redesign the entire American health-care system by May 17. No flow charts are on display. He doesn’t need them. It’s all in his head.

Brain trusts have been celebrated and vilified since Franklin Roosevelt’s day. But you have to go back a couple of decades to find a pair of government activists with such big egos and grand designs as Magaziner and Reich. The brain trusters have the confidence of the president, who thinks he’s one of them. After all, they were Rhodes scholars together at Oxford. The question is, do they have too much faith in reason (their own) and too little respect for political reality?

Both men have long viewed the world through a wide-angle lens. Arriving at Brown in 1965, Magaziner found the courses too compartmentalized. So he designed a major for himself (“Human Studies”) and then led a successful campaign for a new free-form curriculum. His senior thesis, he recalls, was nothing less than a “search for a new metaphysics, a new answer to the question, ‘Why be good?’” Reich, trained in law at Yale, calls himself a “political economist” and writes on topics as diverse as popular culture and industrial organization. As an aide at the Federal Trade Commission in the ’70s, he brought the agency’s lawyers together to examine how their cases affected whole industries. “No one had ever done that before,” he says proudly.

Reich and Magaziner pledge their allegiance to free markets, but think free enterprise needs the guiding hand of government to work for all Americans. Growing up, each saw the harsh operation of an unfettered marketplace close up. Reich’s father, a Republican who admired Herbert Hoover, moved his family from town to town in upstate New York, opening and closing clothing stores before finally establishing successful ones in the exurbs of New York City. Magaziner’s father was a bookkeeper in a tomato-packing plant in Queens. Magaziner remembers his tales of the cutthroat competition to deliver and sell produce to the big hotels in Manhattan.

In 1982 Reich and Magaziner wrote a book declaring their faith in “industrial policy”-a rationally planned government effort to ease the pain of declining industries and nurture the development of new ones. Reich has since recanted that view. (“There’s no love lost between them, by the way,” said one intimate of both.) Reich now focuses instead on government’s role in education, training and infrastructure. That still leaves plenty on his plate. He only half jokingly envisions himself as “the central banker of human capital.” He wants government to ensure lifetime access to job training so that Americans can retool themselves to meet global competition. In Clinton’s new budget, his department gets a hefty increase for training programs. These brain trusters have a flair for selfpromotion. Magaziner has made millions as a management consultant to major corporations, clients such as General Electric, Corning, Volvo and Ikea. Reich dabbled in theater, producing plays in college and at Oxford. A TV talking head and prolific author, he’s nevertheless derided by some colleagues and former students as a publicity-conscious slave to policy fashion.

Clinton has been listening to Reich and Magaziner since their Oxford days. When Clinton was casting about for a health-care proposal early in the campaign, he called on Magaziner and Reich to help him find one. Whole chunks of Clinton’s “Putting People First” campaign plan were lifted from the writing of his two friends.

But should he be listening now? Reich and Magaziner may have their limits as architects of the new Democratic millennium. Reich wants to establish a sense of cooperation between business and labor, but he hasn’t seen either from the inside. Magaziner, ironically, has been a success as a business consultant-and a failure as a public-policy salesman. He has a history of producing visionary plans that look stirring on paper. A quixotic effort at community organizing in the struggling shoe-factory town of Brockton, Mass., failed. He and activists from Brown tried to establish a new set of local institutions: newspaper, purchasing cooperatives, a housing trust. They worked in secret, then unveiled their plan. The locals weren’t buying. A Rhode Island resident intermittently since college, Magaziner tried to persuade voters in 1984 to accept a plan to turn the state into a “greenhouse” for new-wave industry. Voters rejected it.

Now, as director of the president’s healthcare task force, Magaziner speaks unselfconsciously ofthe “kind of world we want to produce.” His “world”: a monumental plan that would make government the guarantor, but not the provider, of health care. It also would require new taxes and a vast increase in federal oversight. But health-care industry officials complain that Magaziner is pulling a Brockton. There are only a handful of frontline health-care providers on Magaziner’s 500-person task force. “He’s got the intellect,” said one top industry lobbyist. He’s also got a lot of naivete.

Some of the sniping comes from inside the Democratic ranks. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala privately has made it clear she doesn’t appreciate–or necessarily agree with–Magaziner’s plans. Chief economic adviser Robert Rubin, a Wall Street veteran, is known to be wary of the grand plans being sketched by a duo that one White House insider calls “Batman and Robin.” And it’s not even graduation day yet: Congress, special interests and the immutable law of unintended consequences all await.

AGE: 45

EDUCATION: Brown University (B.A. 1969); Oxford Unversity (Rhodes scholar).

EXPERIENCE: Founder of business and public-policy consutling groups Telesis and SJS, Inc.; adviser on industrial development ot govenrments of Sweden, Israel and Rhode Island.

AGE: 46

EDUCATION: Dartmouth College (B.A., 1968); Oxford University (Rhodes scholar); Yale Law School (J.D., 1973).

EXPERIENCE: Harvard lecturer; director of policy planning at Federal Trade Commission under Carter; assistant solicitor general in Ford administration.