IT WAS FAIRLY easy work for legislators to decide to save Medicaid and throw a few million extra dollars into public education when the Congress came through last month with $176 million to help us balance our budget for next year.

After all, those are our priorities. End of story. Right?

Not exactly.

A closer look at the post-congressional bailout budget cobbled together by legislative leaders shows that there were several other beneficiaries of the extra money.

My pencil-and-paper count found 27 additional agencies that got a share of about $15 million in extra wealth. (Those numbers use the House budget as a base, because the Senate budget did not include money from the House's $25 fee on traffic tickets, which made it into the final product. As a result, there are a few additional agencies that ended up with more money than the Senate had planned to give them.)

The beneficiaries ranged from such clearly essential and needy agencies as the Department of Juvenile Justice to the completely unnecessary Sentencing Guidelines Commission.

None of them got a lot of money; $15 million isn't much in a $5.3 billion state budget. But with layoffs looming and legislators bemoaning the fact that they simply could not scrape up another dime to protect the public safety and keep their own commitments to public education, it's worth examining what legislative negotiators considered the top priorities when they had a little extra cash to spread around.

First, the major spending that nearly everyone would agree makes sense:

???????_The Department of Mental Health got $2.9 million more than the House had appropriated, for a total increase of $11.2 million over this year's $163 million.

???????_The Department of Juvenile Justice will receive $7.1 million more. The Senate had left its budget unchanged at $66 million; the House had added $2.2 million.

Now for the decisions we might question. According to preliminary spreadsheets provided by the legislative budget panels:

???????_The Forestry Commission got its $1.4 million budget cut reduced by $24,483. You can be sure that is not a random number.

???????_Clemson Public Service Activities will see a cut of just $3.4 million in its $43 million budget, instead of the $3.6 million the House had planned to cut it and the $4.4 million the Senate had planned to cut it.

???????_The S.C. State PSA will get an extra $295,000 instead of the $105,000 cut the House and Senate both had approved.

???????_The Commerce Department will be cut just $368,000 instead of the $1.1 million cut approved by both the House and Senate.

???????_The Sentencing Guidelines Commission, whose job is to help implement a law that has never been passed, was supposed to see its $149,000 budget cut by $14,063 under both the House and the Senate budgets. Thanks to the Congress, there will be no cut.

???????_The Legislative Council, which writes bills and codifies laws, will get an extra $173,000. The House had cut its budget by $75,000; the Senate had left it unchanged from this year.

???????_Total spending for state employee benefits was to have been reduced by $284,000 in the House budget and $174,000 in the Senate budget; instead, an extra $1.8 million will go there.

One interesting area of "compromise" came in the budgets of the Legislature and the governor's office. Essentially, lawmakers moved the decimal point over one place for themselves and the governor:

???????_The Senate's $9 million budget will be cut by $83,000 instead of the $827,000 the House and Senate had both approved.

???????_The House's $10.6 million budget will be cut by $97,000 instead of the $970,000 the House and Senate both had approved.

???????_The governor's office will be cut by $12,000 instead of the $118,000 that the House and Senate had both approved.

???????_The governor's mansion budget goes down by $4,000 instead of the initially planned $38,000.

(For all you Andre watchers -- friend and foe -- the lieutenant governor was not among the recipients of the last-minute legislative largesse. He still gets the $26,000 budget cut he was supposed to get before he asked for a reprieve -- and then backed down in the face of public criticism.)

What does all this tell us about legislators' priorities? Well, they do understand the need to take care of some essential services, as the extra money for the departments of Mental Health and Juvenile Justice indicates. But they also like to take care of themselves, they still like to meddle in minutiae (see the Forestry Commission), and they seem to have a special affinity for the PSA programs.

I'm glad to see legislators are setting some priorities. I'm just not sure these are the priorities that would have been set if that federal money had come in soon enough for a full debate on how to spend it.