BY WEEK’S end, the House likely will have checked off its promise to advance Gov. Mark Sanford’s agenda with passage of “The South Carolina Restructuring Act of 2005.” Supporters will crow and pat themselves on the back for taking a major step toward injecting accountability and efficiency into the operation of state government.

But unless significant changes are made, this will turn out to be one of the most over-hyped efforts we’ve seen in years.

Despite its ostentatious name, the legislation never even purported to touch huge swaths of government that desperately need some restructuring, from an overlapping array of health agencies to a transportation agency completely insulated from the public will.

What the legislation does claim to do is give the governor control of a central agency to handle the purely administrative tasks of government. This eminently sensible idea represents one of our best shots at actually saving money without cutting government services. Done correctly, it could lead to all sorts of efficiencies, by centralizing such tasks as purchasing, the allocation of office space and personnel matters. But it’s not done correctly in this bill; with this bill, it’s quite possible that administrative costs will actually increase.

The bill has more in common with the Senate’s health agency restructuring bill than a serious efficiency effort: It contains a lot of words, spread over a lot of pages, so it looks like it probably does a lot — unless you read it.

The legislation creates a new Department of Administration, which would report to the governor. The agency would include a new inspector general, who could ferret out waste and fraud, as well as the fleet management, business operations and facilities management offices of one of the eight divisions in the Budget and Control Board.

The Budget and Control Board would retain its other seven divisions, including Human Resources, Procurement Services, Internal Operations, and Internal Audit and Performance Review. Even facilities management wouldn’t come entirely under the new agency; an amendment added in committee keeps the board in control of most decisions regarding the lease, purchase and sale of state buildings and property.

(Just so you don’t think this new agency is powerless, it would assume authority over the state’s phosphate rocks and geothermal resources, and coordinate the government recycling program. It would even get to distribute parking places in the State House garage — under carefully written rules that dictate where legislators’ spaces would be.)

Unfortunately, the bill’s problems don’t stop with its shortcomings. One of the reasons we need a Department of Administration is that those few administrative functions that we now attempt to handle centrally are overseen by the Budget and Control Board, which is governed by two legislators, the governor, the treasurer and the comptroller general. Besides flouting the state constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, this structure renders the board incapable of making bold or even proactive decisions.

In addition to retaining most of the board’s scope, the bill before the House might actually give it more power. It establishes a chief information officer to coordinate computer and communications systems across state government; that’s something we most certainly need. But the CIO would report to the Budget and Control Board, not the Department of Administration. To make fiscal matters worse, the legislation would keep in place a weaker office that now handles such matters. The bill also creates another new division within the Budget and Control Board to oversee the operation of the State House complex and judicial buildings.

Beyond that, the bill makes permanent the ill-conceived decision to temporarily pluck the Division of Aging out of a health agency and plop it down in the lieutenant governor’s office. And it moves several offices that don’t belong in the governor’s office into the Department of Administration, rather than putting them in related agencies where they do belong.

This legislation is worse than a joke; it’s a sham, and it wastes time, effort and money. Unless the House is willing to give the governor the tools to coordinate the administrative functions of government, it should do nothing.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.