THE COLLECTIVE sigh of relief you heard in Columbia last week was in response to the Legislature starting up its annual budget-writing process.

Normally, given the massive hole the state has to dig out of, the House budget hearings with state agencies would not be something to look forward to; after all, everybody has to go into those meetings knowing the outcome likely will be more painful cuts.

But everything’s relative. And after the grilling Gov. Mark Sanford gave state agencies this summer when he summoned them, one by one, for an unprecedented round of intense, focused budget hearings designed to challenge the most basic assumptions about what they do and how and why they do it, it must have seemed like summer vacation to step back into the business-as-usual world of legislative budget hearings.

When Frank Fusco and his team of executives from the Budget and Control Board went before Mr. Sanford’s inquisition two months ago, the result was a maddening 90-minute session dominated on the one extreme by an excruciatingly detailed examination of the agency’s fleet service operation and on the other extreme by the governor’s frustratingly one-sided attempt to have a give-and-take on the problems inherent in the agency’s hybrid governance. No one could possibly have felt good as they left the room.

On Thursday, Mr. Fusco and a somewhat smaller team opened the House Ways and Means Committee’s Legislative, Executive, Tourism and Local Government Subcommittee meeting with a session that could not be described as challenging or involving any intellectual heavy lifting. And everyone was probably pretty happy with the outcome — that is, unless they had hoped the meeting would help legislators in what should be their goal: writing a budget that makes whatever changes or deletions are necessary to less-urgent programs so that the state is able to fund essential services adequately.

Subcommittee Chairman Dan Cooper set the typical legislative tone by inviting Mr. Fusco to “lead us where you want us to go.” To the casual observer, it would seem that Mr. Fusco did not take advantage of this indulgence. He talked only a few minutes, hitting the highlights of his agency’s major initiatives and priorities, and then spent most of the hour fielding questions from two members of the three-man panel.

Looks can be deceiving. Nearly all the questions were about items in the agency’s “accountability report,” a document that is a tremendously useful tool in theory but that, in reality, allows all but the smallest agencies to pick which of their multiple functions will come in for legislative review.

So while Rep. Cooper and Rep. Herb Kirsh (who probably probes more deeply into the bowels of the budget than any other legislator) asked a lot of questions, it was hard to see what the purpose was of most, other than simple curiosity. Oh, they were all perfectly legitimate questions — most of which would help legislators know a little more about how some mundane government programs work — as far as they went. But there was no clear agenda, no direction and, with a few exceptions, no reason to think anything might come of any of the lines of questioning.

Instead, the questions suggested a trust on the part of these legislative watchdogs that the folks at the agency are doing whatever they should in the best way they can and that there’s no point in looking for ways to do the job better, or to ask why it’s done.

In this particular agency, that might be a fairly safe assumption; Mr. Fusco does, indeed, seem determined to make his agency evolve and adapt to the state’s needs. But that’s not the case in all agencies, and yet this same approach is typical across the budget-writing subcommittees of both the House and the Senate.

But beyond Mr. Fusco’s competence, it is extraordinary that with the state starting the next budget cycle with as much as $600 million more in obligations than money to pay for them, facing the fourth consecutive year of budget cuts, legislators charged with writing the budget would not have a very clear agenda going into these meetings.

Mr. Sanford could change this. By releasing his executive budget — or merely some large chunks of it, in the same way he released his income tax plan separate from the entire budget — he could give legislators and agency directors something productive to discuss in their budget hearings.

Administration officials worry, perhaps with reason, that if they dribble out parts of the budget now, the impact will be reduced, making it easier for the Legislature to subject it to death by a thousand cuts. But having some groundbreaking ideas out there when legislators are holding public meetings with the affected agencies virtually forces legislators and agency officials to talk about the ideas in public. That very process might well make it more difficult to reject the ideas — and it almost certainly should alter the business-as-usual direction that the budget-writing process is still in grave danger of taking.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com,