IF YOU DIDN'T know better, sitting in last week's budget hearing on the Department of Public Safety, you'd have thought that Director Boykin Rose worked for Gov. Mark Sanford.

Mr. Rose said all the things you'd expect a loyal Sanford Cabinet official to say: He talked about opportunities for privatization, for selling public land to raise money, for using inmate labor to cut costs. He was deferential, with more "yes, sirs" and "no, sirs" than you could count. He frequently referred to ongoing conversations and information exchanges with Mr. Sanford's deputy chief of staff. He repeatedly went out of his way to point out politically sensitive policy decisions that would have to be made by the governor -- even though he has the power to make them himself.

And in his mind, Mr. Rose might well work for the governor.

When he wants to.

But when he doesn't want to, he doesn't. He demonstrated that in 1996, when then-Gov. David Beasley tried to fire him but had to go all the way to the state Supreme Court to have the firing upheld. It was upheld only because of a technicality discovered after the fact, which developed thanks to Mr. Rose's penchant for keeping information close to his vest, and his lack of knowledge of an obscure law that requires state officials to turn over information requested by the governor.

Argue all you want about whether Mr. Rose is or has been a good Public Safety director, whether Mr. Beasley was wise to fire him, whether his successor, Jim Hodges, was wise to hire him back, and then re-appoint him: The fact is that the person who holds his position is by law one of the most autonomous people in state government. It doesn't matter that the governor gets to appoint the Public Safety director; if your "boss" isn't free to fire you (or set your working conditions or your pay), then he's not really your boss. And so the person who runs the Highway Patrol and the Bureau of Protective Services and the Criminal Justice Academy is accountable to no one.

That is by design -- a design that is, and has been from the start, deeply flawed.

The Department of Public Safety was created as part of the 1993 government restructuring, primarily by moving the Highway Patrol out of the scandal-plagued Highway Department and the Division of Motor Vehicles out of the well-run Revenue Department. The Senate insisted on creating a separate agency for the Highway Patrol because it did not want all the police powers of the state to be concentrated in SLED; that argument was not without merit. But Senate leaders also insisted that the agency be autonomous, because they did not want the governor to control the police powers of the state; that argument is without merit.

The idea was that there was less chance of mischief, or worse, if the person in charge of the Highway Patrol was autonomous than if he answered to a governor.

There was a time when this might have made sense, a time when the public had no idea what governors were up to because the media served as lapdogs instead of watchdogs and weren't inclined to rat out the politicians they cozied up to. But that time had long passed by 1993.

The reason you would worry about who is in charge of the Highway Patrol is because you fear that this person would use that power to help himself or his friends or to hurt his enemies. But while a governor might have more motivation to help friends and hurt enemies, he also has more motivation not to help friends and hurt enemies, because the public would be swift in its retribution. The way the agency is set up now, though, neither the public nor the governor nor the Legislature nor anybody else can retaliate if the director pulls a few strings, as long as he doesn't clearly violate the law.

The more mundane reality is that there are all sorts of policy decisions to be made by the director of this agency -- decisions such as those Mr. Rose kept pointing to as being so politically sensitive that they need to be made by an elected official. Whether the Highway Patrol would continue to devote valuable, limited resources to investigating accidents that occur on private property. Or when, and how much, the patrol should charge state agencies and charities and other organizations for traffic control. Or how aggressively the department should push for a primary seat belt law or a mandatory motorcycle helmet law. Or how aggressively it should enforce the speed limit. (For those playing along at home, this hearing's irreverent question from the governor: "Is it a waste of time to have the speed limit at 65 or 70?‘.‘.‘. Does anybody drive 65 or 70?‘.‘.‘. How much more dangerous is it if you're going 75?" The answer: Few people drive that slowly, except sometimes when they see a trooper, but higher speeds mean more deadly results in the event of a crash.)

Those are the types of things we expect the governor to have some say in. If you need convincing of that, look no further than the letters we print on this page demanding that the governor order the Highway Patrol to crack down on speeding -- something he has absolutely no power to do. Unless it happens to be a day of the week when the Public Safety director decides Mr. Sanford is his boss.