The Shot!

After years of struggling to restructure our outdated form of government, the House finally passed a bill aimed at giving more authority to executive branch. The newly formed Department of Administration will included the Energy Office, CIO, Procurement, Human Resources, and General Services.

I’m sure these are highly important offices to running our bureaucracy, but this is certainly not what a lot of Republicans (and even some Democrats) were hoping to see changed. The fact of the matter is the Budget & Control Board should not exist in any form resembling its current structure. The legislature is constitutionally designed to be woefully inefficient. This inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing. It prevents bad bills from being passed. But when executive decisions are being made with the input of the legislature, it creates a woefully unresponsive and wasteful form of government. This cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year, and leads to serious failures in the bureaucratic structure.

The most serious consequence of having a Budget & Control Board is complete lack of responsibility given to any single elected official when serious failures in the government occur. The most recent example of this was the series of incidents involving members of the South Carolina Highway Patrol. The Department of Public Safety remains under the control of the Budget & Control Board despite being a cabinet agency. Gov. Sanford was able to get senior officials at DPS to resign from there positions, but the responsibility for these failures rested upon bureaucrats rather than elected officials.

Ultimately, the buck must stop with an elected official so that voters can make informed decisions about the candidates seeking to represent our best interests. While the Budget & Control Board is composed of five elected officials, citizens will not be able to decide whether to hold the Governor, Comptroller General, State Treasurer, Senate Finance Chairman, or House Ways & Means Chairman accountable. This complete lack of accountability is fundamental failure in our government that must be addressed by meaningful reform.

Moving these offices to the executive branch is a first step in the right direction, but the negligible effects of moving these relatively minor offices fails to address the aforementioned grievances. Members of the legislature will have to relinquish some of their influence in order to bring meaningful reform. I would like to take this opportunity to remind them that their purpose is to serve the best interests of South Carolinians rather than clinging on to their power, which has proven to be a corruptive force in government time after time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 pm and is filed under The Chaser. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.