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Efficiency
Department of Redundancy Department
The state's pursuit of efficiency is rife with inefficiencies.
Outside the slogan
Calabro says the “opportunity” is to pair the many efficiency efforts with some management-oriented procedures. He has quite a few in mind. One would be progressively larger annual targeted cost reductions, starting at 1% then 2% and so on, with audits and quarterly presentations by agency heads to explain variances. He also wants a more competitive process for state and local functions and to make local productivity enhancement a condition of getting certain state funds.
“What we’re doing now is not working,” Calabro says flatly. “Government should be more productive, more effective, more efficient, but many people don’t know how to do it.”
Yet Florida is not really so bad off. TaxWatch notes that Florida is the lowest of all states in state payroll per citizen and ranks among the lowest on state taxes as a percent of personal income and state spending per capita.
So we might instead spend more of our time making government effective — really making programs work, giving great service to citizens — instead of having battalions of Frederick Taylors using stopwatches on the assembly lines.
But “making government work” doesn’t seem to be a winning campaign slogan.
