IT’S DEJA VU all over again, as Gov. Mark Sanford hammers away at Frank Fusco, the director of what is perhaps South Carolina’s most bizarre governmental creature, the Budget and Control Board.

“Wouldn’t you agree,” the governor asks, as he did throughout the budget hearing with Mr. Fusco a year earlier, “that it’s a flawed management system?”

Anyone who looks objectively at it would have to agree, of course: The Budget and Control Board is governed by the governor, comptroller general and treasurer and the chairmen of the House and Senate budget-writing committees, all of whom frequently have vastly different opinions about the best way to operate state government.

Constitutional and even practical problems aside, the political problem with this arrangement is that the agency is crucial to any attempts to change the way government is run. It operates state government’s health insurance, pension and insurance plans, provides budgeting expertise to lawmakers, oversees information technology and human resources, operates the state motor pool and maintains government buildings and grounds. When three of the five bosses can’t agree on how things should be changed, nothing happens.

Mr. Fusco, whose job depends on the good graces of the flawed management structure, is understandably reluctant to join in the attack. Instead, he walks the fine line between explaining how he makes the structure workable and reminding the governor that his job is to implement whatever changes the governor and Legislature agree to. “We don’t lobby,” he says. “We stand ready to do whatever y’all decide.”

Mr. Sanford is completely correct when he says the agency that handles the administrative functions of the government should be controlled by the state’s chief executive, as should just about all executive agencies. His fixation on wringing an endorsement from Mr. Fusco obviously stems from his hope that, by hammering the same points over and over, he will convince the Legislature to approve these changes.

But in South Carolina, if the entire Sumter National Forest were to crash to the ground and no legislators were on the scene, not only would it have made no sound; it wouldn’t even have happened. And while some legislative leaders had their staff in attendance at last Wednesday’s meeting, copiously recording Mr. Fusco’s responses, the hearing did not attract the legislators themselves. It didn’t even generate any news coverage.

The Budget and Control Board exchange is perhaps an extreme example, but the theme was clear from the governor’s first budget hearing this fall, when representatives of four Cabinet agencies sat at the table offering a redundant recitation of how their efforts to produce efficiencies and shed extraneous or dubious duties had been stymied by the Legislature.

As Budget and Control Board attorney Ed Evans put it when the governor pressed on the looming financial crisis in the State Retirement System: “I don’t see that as a management (structure) issue. The mandates come from the General Assembly.”

Which brings us to the central question that emerges from this year’s hearings: When the governor already has identified so many programs and practices that could be eliminated to save money for better use elsewhere, and when we already know that more savings could be had by consolidating overlapping agencies, and the Legislature is unwilling to make those changes, how do we move forward?

Many legislators insist that this coming year will be the year they make fundamental structural changes to the government. And while it’s tempting to suggest that many of the same people are certain that the Easter Bunny is going to solve the state’s budget problems, the fact is that the first two years of the Sanford administration weren’t exactly a fair test.

Something as complex and controversial as government restructuring requires plenty of time, and plenty of energetic support. But it was near the end of his first session before Mr. Sanford introduced his proposal, and that doesn’t leave “plenty” of time. And he never did launch an all-out campaign to sell the idea, instead devoting most of his energy to even more controversial plans to cut income taxes and have the taxpayers pick up the tab for private school and home schooling.

The conversations in the budget hearings give every reason to believe that Mr. Sanford will bring generally the same budgetary and structural proposals to the two-year legislative session that begins on Jan. 11. That means that the test for both the governor and the Legislature will be whether they can work together to implement these proposals, or else improve them.

There are lingering hard feelings in the governor’s office over the way the Legislature treated his agenda, and in the Legislature over the way the governor treated the Legislature. Everybody involved needs to come to terms with the fact that it’s time to start over, something that does not come easily to South Carolinians.

Everybody involved also needs to realize that the test facing them is one that they will all pass or all fail together. And our state very much needs for them all to pass.

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