GOV. MARK Sanford came into office pushing the idea of restructuring the government to give governors more control over all those agencies that the public expects them to control. But he and his staff have spent the bulk of their time and energy infuriating legislators and scores of special interest groups by picking apart the state budget.

Part of that is because the budget was in such a mess when he took office. But the bigger reason, as he explained last week when he unveiled another State of the State Address that had been overshadowed by his executive budget, is that the budget is the tool by which a government shifts its focus and sets its priorities. And more than any governor in South Carolina’s history, Mark Sanford has tried to use that tool.

The governor has done the unimaginable, actually examining every dollar the state spends and proposing to eliminate programs and services, rather than buying the argument inherent in the traditional process: that everything the state has ever done is more important than anything it hasn’t done, and that everything the state has ever done is equally important, so nothing can be eliminated, even if that means there’s not enough money to do anything well.

Mr. Sanford’s approach — call it zero-based budgeting or programmatic budgeting or what you will — is what many of the current leaders of the General Assembly used to demand, back before they became leaders.

But it has not gone over particularly well at the State House. Mr. Sanford and legislative leaders try to save face by noting that the Legislature adopted $100 million worth of his budget cuts last year. But nearly all of those simply cut funding, not duties; lawmakers rejected his attempts to eliminate programs or agencies, redirect agencies’ focuses and combine agencies to save money.

Still, even Mr. Sanford’s modest successes mark a huge step forward for a man just three governors removed from the first one to even propose his own budget.

Carroll Campbell did that in 1987, as a follow-up to his attempt to balance the 1987-88 budget, over which he had had no input, by surgically removing 277 spending items. (It’s no coincidence that the man who convinced the Legislature to give governors what little power they have over state agencies was the same one who first tried to exert authority through the budget.) Legislators were outraged at the new governor’s audacity.

The budget had always been, as Mr. Sanford likes to say, the Legislature’s sandbox, and lawmakers hadn’t learned to play well with others.

It would take nearly six years, a recession and a series of government scandals before lawmakers would give governors the legal authority to present a budget directly to the General Assembly.

Mr. Campbell’s successor, David Beasley, rolled several policy initiatives into his budgets and got much of what he asked for, from tax cuts to scholarships, but he never dug into that so-called base budget that the Legislature likes to ignore. His successor, Jim Hodges, also used the budget to propose new spending initiatives, and he too got most of them. But he didn’t even bother to put together a full budget document, instead simply giving lawmakers a wish list that proposed spending more money than the state had.

In 2002, South Carolinians again chose a chief executive who understood the power of the budget, and the state’s duty to handle it responsibly.

When Mr. Sanford unveiled his budget last month, he repeated a favorite line: “We don’t think that the executive branch has a better viewpoint than the legislative branch; but we do have a different viewpoint.”

In that bit of modesty, the governor sums up precisely why it’s essential that both a governor and a legislature be intimately involved in crafting a budget.

By implication, he also explains why our budgeting process has failed so miserably at making our state first where we want to be first and last where we want to be last.

A governor is elected statewide, so he considers the needs of the entire state. Legislators are elected from small districts, and so tend to focus on the needs of their districts. The governor represents the views of the majority that elected him. Each of the 170 legislators is elected by a tiny fraction of the state’s voters — which may or may not agree with the statewide majority — and they represent those views.

In South Carolina, our focus in writing a budget and laws has always been on satisfying those district-by-district interests, even when that wastes money or allows us to ignore the larger needs of the state. Injecting a statewide view into the budget process can’t help but produce better results.

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