THE ONLY REASON the General Assembly was able to keep vital government services from grinding to a halt this year was because of a last-minute, one-time federal bailout. Even with that, we're cutting it close in public education and public safety.

We won't be so lucky next year.

There is no reason to believe the economy will grow fast enough to sustain the current, diminished level of government services. Since there is little reason to believe that the Legislature will -- or even should -- solve the problem entirely by raising taxes, lawmakers will have to make further spending cuts next year.

But the schools and the prisons and the courts and police and health care are well past their ability to sustain the largely indiscriminate cuts that have gotten us through these last three years. And the Legislature has demonstrated that, by following its normal routine, it cannot write a budget that makes the smart, agency-by-agency, program-by-program cuts that we simply must rely on in the future.

That means the normal routine must be abandoned. Our elected leaders need to learn a lot more about what, specifically, is being done by state agencies, how it is being done, how it can best be done, and work a lot harder on reaching agreement on what we need to change and what we need to eliminate. This is a time-consuming and difficult process. It needs to start sooner rather than later.

To his credit, the governor has started. Gov. Mark Sanford has finished two of what are expected to be five or six weeks of meetings with state agencies, in which he explores what they're doing, what it costs, and what the state is getting out of it. In addition, an outside commission he has appointed is looking for ways to do what we're doing more efficiently. He plans to use the results of those two processes to write a state budget proposal that is dramatically different from those that have come before it -- a budget that eliminates specific programs, that combines others, that puts smart efficiency measures into place, perhaps even that combines agencies and moves duties around.

But the governor is just one player in the budget game -- and up until now, he has been one of the less important players. While we are encouraged by how interested in and open to the governor's exercise legislative leaders seem to be, just cheering him on is not sufficient. It is important for the Legislature to go through this type of exercise itself.

Since legislators have made it clear that they don't have the time for this while the Legislature is in session, the time to do this is now. The House and Senate budget-writing committees need to be spending the summer and fall digging into the budget and coming up with their own ideas for providing services in the most efficient way we can, and determining which services we can do without.

The governor's plan will not be perfect; there will be parts of it that don't make sense to anybody who doesn't share Mr. Sanford's libertarian approach to government. It will be up to the Legislature to refine it, to improve on it -- but to do so in keeping with the overall approach of making targeted, clearly identified choices that leave enough money for the state to perform essential services at the level necessary. If the Legislature is not willing to do the work necessary to make such improvements on the governor's proposal, then it will be morally to accept whatever he offers.