WITH RESTRUCTURING having such a hard time gaining traction in the Senate, it would be tempting to applaud a little-noticed provision in the House-passed budget bill that should allow some agency restructuring to occur next year.

Tempting, but wrong.

The provision, ostensibly provided to help agencies make ends meet in the face of shrinking budgets, allows any state agencies that want to merge operations.

While it technically applies to all agencies, there is little reason to believe that any agencies that aren’t already a part of the governor’s Cabinet would take advantage of it. In fact, House budget writers refer to it as a provision designed to allow the consolidation of the departments of Corrections and Probation, Parole and Pardon Services and of the departments of Health and Human Services and Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services. Those are both smart changes that need to be made.

But this is a recipe for chaos. Will we have a combined corrections and probation agency for the rest of the Sanford administration, and then two separate agencies again if the next governor wants to appoint an additional Cabinet member? And what of those agencies that the governor doesn’t control, but has some influence over? Might a governor appoint members of the boards of the Arts Commission and the State Museum with the understanding that they would then vote to merge their agencies, as should be done? The governor hires the head of the Department of Public Safety and SLED for fixed terms, but can remove them only in limited cases; might he name a director of Public Safety with the understanding that he would fold his operations into SLED — as probably shouldn’t be done?

These practical questions point to the central flaw in this proposal, and that is the mind-set that engendered it — that the governor has his executive agencies, and should be able to do with them whatever he sees fit. The unspoken corollary is that the Legislature has its executive agencies — and has every intention of keeping them — and should be able to run them however it sees fit.

Beyond the fact that the Legislature doesn’t really have control of any executive agencies anymore — that, in fact, nobody accountable to the public has control of most agencies — this whole notion is a perversion of the basic principles of government. The role of the Legislature is to establish the structure of government — to determine what agencies we will have, and what they will do — to set policy and to provide oversight. The role of the governor is to run the executive branch of government — to operate those agencies the Legislature creates and sets broad policy for.

Our state’s legislative mind-set is so pervasive that even supporters of the idea of letting the governor run the executive branch of government can’t seem to get past it, as the House budget provision demonstrates. They must, as must opponents. It is a mind-set that has created a dysfunctional, disjointed, overlapping, uncooperative government that ill serves the public. It is a mind-set that our state can no longer afford to indulge.