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Efficiency
Department of Redundancy Department
The state's pursuit of efficiency is rife with inefficiencies.
Where’s the efficiency?
Republicans haven’t delivered on real government constraint much better than Democrats. “Republicans always said we hated government,” Gaetz says. “We ran against government — too big, too expensive. Then we got in charge of government. It turns out it wasn’t government we hated. It was that Democrats controlled government.”
Jeb Bush, who displayed a CEO style but had little actual management experience, had a mantra about limiting the size and scope of government, yet state government is spending more than half-again as much in 2007 as it did when he became governor in 1999.
It’s worth remembering that “privatization” may cut the state payroll but makes relatively small, often one-time gains in total costs while increasing the cost of contract management and monitoring. And you don’t have to read Dilbert to know that private business is just as susceptible to bureaucracy and self-protective management as government is, may treat customers badly or inefficiently and may even be as stymied as government often is about delivering results. One of the continuing sagas on the CNBC financial network is whether the latest underperforming CEO will ever be dumped by his board of directors.
Government does very little real privatization, which is to get the state out of the activity altogether. There is also little real decentralization.
Republicans don’t have a monopoly on the efficiency movement. “Rightsizing” was a favorite phrase of Bush’s Democratic predecessor, Lawton Chiles. His first act was to establish a Commission on Government by the People (the current “people’s government” is not new, just more omnivorous). A huge reorganization of government with a new state constitution in 1968 was a joint product of newly elected liberal Democratic legislators and a newly elected establishment-busting Republican governor, Claude R. Kirk. The next governor, Reubin Askew, had a management and efficiency study commission. Gov. Bob Martinez joined with TaxWatch and the Council of 100 for a “Partnership in Productivity.”
TaxWatch has a chart of all the initiatives still going on: The constitutionally created Tax and Budget Reform Commission (now meeting on its 20-year cycle), the constitutionally created Government Efficiency Task Force, and the legislatively created Council on Efficient Government (both added in 1996), the “sunset” review created last year, and the three more traditional review bodies, OPPAGA (the Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability), the governor’s planning and budgeting office, and the legislatively appointed auditor general [“Another Bright Idea,” February 2006, FloridaTrend.com].
In 1992, the Tax and Budget Reform Commission got voters to approve a requirement that agencies create performance plans, and in 1994 the Legislature passed the Government Performance and Accountability Act to establish performance-based budgeting. We have a “statutory savings plan” to give small bonuses for meeting targeted performance. TaxWatch gives out annual “Davis Productivity Awards” to state employees who come up with the best cost-saving ideas.
And yet, for all those efforts, Gaetz can still tell about recent presentations by the Department of Agriculture and the separate Citrus Commission, now up for sunset review. Each agency markets agriculture in Florida (why is another question). The Agriculture representative said the agency has 62 marketing employees and outsources almost nothing because it’s not cost-effective. The Citrus representative said that agency has about 20 marketing employees and outsources almost everything because it’s more cost-effective. “These two guys were standing four feet apart, neither one of them smiled, and nobody got the joke,” Gaetz says. And neither had any data to support his assessment of outsourcing.
Agriculture is not under the governor but is run by a separately elected Cabinet member, Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, re-elected last year with only token opposition. Also up for sunset review this year are the Department of Environmental Protection, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, and the five regional water management districts.
In the 1980s, Gov. Bob Graham actually tried a good-management approach, with performance agreements with agency heads and productivity goals in his budgets. Bush dumped a lot of managers out of the civil service system with Service First, which Calabro says has increased management accountability. But any management initiative, including fads like “Total Quality Management,” can be either transforming or silly depending on the attention they get.
