Editor’s note: This oped is by John McClaughry, vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute (www.ethanallen.org).
On June 3, Gov. Jim Douglas signed H.789, the highly touted bill to implement the “Challenges for Change” process so bravely launched back in February. A trip through its 95 pages illustrates in appalling detail why a liberal legislature cannot reform an overgrown state government that is not likely to significantly reform itself.
To review: In February the legislative leadership, with the governor’s support, decided that state agencies could reduce fiscal year 2011 General Fund spending by $37.8 million without reducing any services. How did the politicians know that that was realistic? Because they paid an out-of-state consulting firm $268,000 to tell them so.
And how did that firm arrive at $37.8 million in savings? It announced that the Legislature would reduce agency budgets by that amount, and the fiscally deprived agencies would reduce spending by their assigned shares of that amount, without of course reducing any services.
The consultants did no detailed review of agency programs and operations; the magic number was apparently pulled out of thin air. So why did they not announce $154 million in savings, thus eliminating the entire FY2011budget deficit? Good question. No answer.
The watchword for this process was “spending less money and still achieving the outcomes” declared by the Legislature. Thus, the Agency of Human Services was told to achieve its share of the savings “without reducing government benefits, limiting benefit eligibility, or reducing personnel” unless specifically authorized by the Legislature.
Maybe AHS could achieve savings by allowing competition for providing elder care services? Sorry. The act requires that no new home care providers be used — just the designated agencies monopoly.
Maybe a for-profit company (like America Works) could get non-performing welfare recipients back to work better than the host of government bureaus and “community-based organizations”? Sorry. Profit is a dirty word at AHS, regardless of better results and lower taxpayer cost.
How about saving money by a “cost-effective new service model” for supporting people with developmental disabilities? Sorry. Any savings from the unspecified new service model “shall be reinvested in developmental services.”
How about AHS saving $2 million by improving service delivery or client outcomes? Absolutely! And the bill appropriates up to $2 million to pay AHS to find the $2 million savings.
Lest the monopoly mental health agencies feel constricted, a new section allows the Agency to contract with the monopoly mental health centers to gather in “children [deemed by the centers to be some day] at risk for mental health needs [defined by the centers]”. This has to be one of the most expansive categories in the entire human services field.
Corrections eats up lots of money. Here’s an opportunity for probation savings: Release nonviolent felons from probation after four years, no matter what the sentence required. Even more could be saved by putting them back on the street after, say, a week. Of course, Corrections is forbidden by the act to close or substantially reduce services to prisoners in FY year 2011.
Perhaps the most embarrassingly inept part of “Challenge for Change” is the education section. The Douglas administration’s Challenges Czar Tom Evslin (one of the ablest people in state government) refers to this as “a total failure”. The bill required the Department of Education to produce $23.2 million (out of $1.2 billion) in savings. How will it do that? The commissioner will parcel that amount out among supervisory unions, and implore them to do something to meet the savings goal, at the risk of receiving a letter expressing the commissioner’s disappointment.
How about tossing out the whole overgrown education bureaucratic overlay, freeing every public school or supervisory union to become an innovative self-governing charter school competing for students with independent schools, giving parents vouchers to send their children to the most suitable educational program, and pocketing hundreds of millions in savings? Not likely. Not even conceivable.
And of course the act creates a slew of new boards and committees to oversee the process and assess the results – more likely, to view with alarm why all this hustle and bustle produced little or no taxpayer savings.
The pressure of hundreds of millions of dollars of General Fund deficits will doubtless produce some scattered efficiencies attributable to “Challenges for Change.” But when the election-year smoke clears, it will be increasingly obvious that the problem of overgrown state government providing too many services to too many people, especially through monopoly human service providers and monopoly government schools, will not be solved. It will remain until a courageous governor forces the citizenry to focus on the core functions of government, and appoints a hard-nosed, independent commission to slash through all the bureaucracies, programs and monopolies to limit government to what its people can afford to pay.
