Florida Trend | Florida's Business Authority

Department of Redundancy Department

It’s horrifying, really, how many redundant, overlapping organizations we have created to pursue more efficient government. There are more than half a dozen, not counting legislative committees — whose commitment to efficient government extends no further than the next special-interest provision — and not counting Gov. Charlie Crist’s nine “citizen review groups.”

If we can’t be efficient in pursuing efficiency, what hope is left?

Government should be more productive, more effective, more efficient, but many people don’t know how to do it.

— Dominic Calabro, president and CEO, Florida TaxWatch

Republican Sen. Don Gaetz of Nice-ville laughs at the suggestion. He’s partly in charge of one those organizations, the Joint Legislative Sunset Committee (Rep. Kevin Ambler is the House co-chair), which is supposed to review every state agency over an eight-year cycle. “It’s such a great issue, everyone wants to be involved in it,” Gaetz says with a touch of sarcasm. “It’s government people asking government people if there’s too much government. It’s like asking your insurance agent if you have too much insurance.”

Over at Florida TaxWatch, the privately funded watchdog of taxes and spending, President and CEO Dominic Calabro isn’t troubled by the redundancy, but he is troubled by the absence of any “accountability and results-oriented procedures” to ensure that recommendations are systematically put into place.

Government efficiency is one of the most popular toys on the political playground. No one pursuing efficiency ever really cuts anything. They create procedures to let other people consider cutting something.

These commissions and committees mostly dance around the real issue in effective government: Political results always trump managerial results. We elect people on the basis of political positions, not management ability, and they in turn hire agency managers who accommodate political interests and work compliantly within the system of risk-averse, controlling rules that the politicians set up.

Set up all the review committees you want, but only a very strong-minded governor with serious management experience and a certain lack of political ambition is going to change that. And he’ll need to appoint creative, determined, experienced management that can provide both political results and high performance — a move that might require paying higher salaries.

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.

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.