That particular exercise in frustration prepared him well for his task this year as chairman of the Texas House Committee on Government Reform. Representative Swinford's mission--to reorganize state agencies, eliminating some and cutting redundant layers of administration--ran into multiple sources of opposition that ultimately sank it.
The bill he came up with had something to antagonize practically everyone. His package would have cut $464 million from school districts top heavy with administration; provided sweeping new powers to the governor; privatized more prison space; changed the rules for protesting environmental permits; merged several regulatory agencies; and imposed organizational changes on nearly every government department.
Not surprisingly, it proved impossible to balance all the competing interests. "Every time the thing would tilt a little bit more the way one wanted it to," Swinford says, "someone else with a BB--the comptroller or the railroad commissioners or whoever--would object."
After holding dozens of hearings all over the state, Swinford finally decided to get "all the people with BBs in one room." But he still couldn't fit them in the holes. By the time he had completed his package and gotten the executive branch to sign off on it, the bill had grown too cumbersome to pass. Some legislators were worried about the additional gubernatorial power. Others were concerned that the cuts in administration were really camouflage for a reduction in services. Moreover, most House members just didn't take time to read the 400-page bill that landed on their desks at the end of a session marked by delays and charged with partisan feeling.
"The short of it is that the government reorganization bill didn't make it because it was probably, as we say in Texas, a little too pregnant," says Rodney Ellis, sponsor of a companion package in the state Senate. "It just got a little too heavy, loaded up with too much, and the clock was ticking."
Swinford had grand hopes that his reorganization plan would go a long way toward plugging a $10 billion gap in the state's budget. Promoters of reorganization in many other states have had similar ideas this year. With fiscal problems dire all over the country, governors and legislators have looked seriously at streamlining agencies and making other administrative changes as part of the search for savings. But so far, at least, most of them have run into the same sort of problems Swinford had.
The interest in reorganization is being driven by other factors besides fiscal scarcity. There is the impending retirement of a huge percentage of experienced state employees within the next few years, and the big batch of mandates that has arrived from Washington in recent years despite passage of a federal law aimed at restricting them. The roles of many state agencies shifted dramatically in the 1990s, away from direct management responsibility and toward contracting out and overseeing many functions. Information technology is speeding such changes and is pushing much of the current drive toward efficiency. Technology makes it easier both to find bloat hidden deep in agency budgets and to force agencies to share strictly administrative functions such as human resources and purchasing.
But there's little question that budget deficits are providing the main push. Operating in a no-new-taxes environment, with a choice between cutting services or making government run more efficiently, more than a dozen states have launched efforts to overhaul at least some of their administrative structures. "If you want to change things," says Massachusetts state Representative Geoffrey Hall, "the time to change things is when times are bad. There's more apathy when things are running smoothly."
As a result of this combination of pressures, the boxes on many state organization charts may look considerably different a decade from now than they do today. But recent events in Texas and other states suggest that massive changes are not going to occur overnight. While turning down most of Swinford's ambitious plans, the Texas legislature did manage to pass a significant reorganization in one area--health and human services bureaucracy. But that change had been in the works for a dozen years.
GOING FOR BROKE
It's tempting, of course, to try to reorganize all of a state government at once. Like new homeowners who want to strip away all the layers of paint left by previous tenants, new administrations are eager to reduce the accretion of government that has grown over the years through mission creep, departmental ambition and responses to new federal requirements. The most dramatic way to do that is by simply combining agencies.But it's politically almost impossible to peel away all the layers at once. Earlier this year, Arkansas legislators quickly shot down Governor Mike Huckabee's proposal to regroup 53 state agencies and boards into 10 departments. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich managed to close or merge 100 agencies and commissions, but virtually all of these were minor. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, accepting political reality, decided to press forward in creating a new labor and economic development department, but postponed her plans to reunite the state environmental quality and natural resources departments.
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney may ultimately do better. He is poised to achieve a substantial reorganization of the commonwealth's health and human services secretariat, and may be able to get the development department he envisions to oversee transportation, housing, energy and the environment. En route to those changes, however, Romney has learned the same lesson as his counterparts in other states: It is impossible to do everything at once, especially during the first year.
Romney scored some major wins, but much of what he proposed-- revamping state university management, merging the major road agencies, consolidating courthouses and legal services, and redesigning his Cabinet--were swatted down by legislators. Like their colleagues in Texas, Massachusetts lawmakers found reorganizing the entire state government at once too much to take on. In particular, the likelihood that the legislature would grant the governor significant new power was minimal from the start. The idea was troubling to legislators in Texas, where the GOP controls both branches of government; it was a non-starter in Massachusetts, where Romney is a Republican and the legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic.
FIGHTING FOR TURF
A good deal of the difficulty in achieving major reorganization in a single step is simple turf protection. Every agency, however tiny, has its backers. Texas, for example, over the years created two dozen separate agencies to handle health and human services. Many of the agencies sprouted up to meet federal mandates that were highly categorical in terms of funding. Others were born out of the desire of narrowly focused interest groups to claim an agency of their own. Eventually, the system all but collapsed of its own weight. "They all had their own executive directors, their own procurement and purchasing and human resources, their own regional offices and contract management," says Ruthie Ford, manager of strategic policy initiatives in the Texas comptroller's office. "We really just wound up with a mess."The state started trying to do something about the mess as far back as 1991, when it opted to place a commissioner in charge over the entire bureaucratic enterprise, but the powers of that office were nominal and all the executive directors of all the departments went about their various businesses. Gradually, however, legislators kept giving the commissioner more authority. This year, State Comptroller Carole Strayhorn, who has a mandate to monitor agency performance, decided to push for a final consolidation.
The reorganizers didn't achieve everything they wanted, but the legislature did agree to take 12 of the agencies that mattered most and merge them into five, under a general commissioner with sweeping powers over all of them. This reduced the number of employees in the resulting agencies by 2,100 (out of a total of about 50,000) and is projected ultimately to generate savings of $1.2 billion a year. Passage of the reorganization plan was accompanied by promises that the new system will run more efficiently, maximizing Medicaid dollars and other federal aid in a way scattered agencies could not, and that citizens who need to use a variety of services will now be able to find them under one roof.
Promises of greater efficiency through consolidation sometime prove false. But Texas does seem to have made at least one corner of its state bureaucracy more manageable. "One of the reasons why the health bill was successful is that we worked on it for 10 years and it was incremental," Ford says. "It wasn't just, 'Okay, we're going to reform health and human services in one day.' We tried to keep it limited to one function of government and we tried to build on past successes."
Representative Swinford now admits that his more sweeping reorganization of state government was too much to take on all at once. "The whole dad gum thing got to be so huge that it wasn't manageable," he says. "From now on, we're going to do some rifle shots."
