This commentary is by Rep. Jessica Brumsted of Shelburne. She is vice chair of the Human Services Committee and co-chaired the Summer Government Accountability Committee. The committee’s final report was delivered to the Legislature on Dec. 13, 2023, and is posted at legislature.vermont.gov.
Every year, the Legislature convenes for five months at the Statehouse in Montpelier. Our committees take detailed testimony, debate and revise bills, and bring them to the floor for a vote.
During any given session, perhaps 100 bills win final House and Senate passage and are signed into law by the governor. These range from tiny technical corrections — updating an errant phrase in Vermont statute — to the “Big Bill,” which appropriates more than $8 billion in state spending for the coming fiscal year.
Once a bill becomes law, in many ways, the Legislature passes the baton to the executive branch. Across dozens of state agencies and partner organizations, the statutes are enacted, the rules and regulations are written, the policies and programs are developed, and the dollars are spent.
As policymakers, we need to know how well this system is working. Are Vermonters getting the results they expect and deserve? How do we hold the Legislature and our state government accountable while giving our hard-working state employees the tools and resources they need?
The Legislature has many oversight tools. First, all new administrative rules, which lay out exactly how a program or policy is going to work, are developed by a public process and reviewed by a joint House-Senate committee before implementation. Second, we request and review many studies, reports and updates. And finally, public testimony — asking hard questions and getting honest answers — is the heart of our daily committee work.
But it’s an imperfect system, and one the Legislature continually seeks to improve.
Act 53, signed into law in June 2023, established a Joint Committee on Government Accountability. In December, our final report offered a series of common-sense recommendations that will allow legislators and the public to keep closer track of what happens after a law is passed. The House and Senate are working together to enact those recommendations in 2024. The bill (H.702) would establish a more systematic approach to government accountability, reducing the Legislature’s reliance on institutional knowledge, individual legislators and individual committees.
Several of the report recommendations focus on process. We need to set up checklists and timelines to ensure all key legislative reports and deadlines are met, and are easily accessible to the Legislature and the public. We need to ensure that committee members (and staff) formally review past legislation, legislative reports and relevant data before enacting new legislation. We need a more systematic way to review the previous year’s budget data — across multiple committees — and historical budget data, too. Have the funds been spent as intended? And if not, why not?
We’re also interested in requiring a “performance note” for all legislation that’s a priority or costs more than a threshold dollar amount. This document would include a clear statement of legislative intent, overall goals and anticipated change; data that needs to be collected to measure results; and an estimate of anticipated savings, return on investment or quantifiable benefit resulting from adoption of the legislation.
On top of this, we would like to provide training for all members of the General Assembly on the importance of government accountability, how to use data to inform decisions and measure outcomes, and how to embed this work into all legislation. We also hope to establish a dedicated Joint Government Oversight and Accountability Committee. Among other duties, the committee would investigate cases of significant oversight failure — like juvenile justice or the EB-5 scandal — and make recommendations about how the state could avoid such serious problems in the future.
By way of example: In 2023, the Legislature passed Act 76, a landmark bill that invests significant additional funding into Vermont’s long-struggling child care system. The act takes effect in stages, with the first investments in July and September 2023, more funds rolling out to providers this month, and expanded financial assistance for families in April and October 2024.
The new law tasks Building Bright Futures, the state’s early childhood public-private partnership and official legislative and administrative early childhood adviser, with tracking outcomes of Act 76. In just the first few months, 202 new child care slots opened across four programs alone — a sample size of what’s happening across the state. And in the five programs surveyed, all five are increasing compensation for early childhood educators.
In the months and years to come, Building Bright Futures will continue to track hard, quantifiable data — the result of accountability measures that were built into Act 76 and will be used to inform future child care policy in the Legislature.
While this kind of data-gathering and check-back is hardly new to the Legislature, we’re interested in making sure it’s embedded into all of our work — every day, every committee and in every important bill. We need to systematically review past legislation and ensure it’s working the way Vermonters need it to work. We need to use that information to generate new ideas. And we need to infuse oversight and accountability into our citizen’s Legislature, so we can say with assurance that the laws we pass in the Statehouse are being rolled out effectively by the executive branch, that your tax dollars are being spent wisely and that your state government is working — for you.
