GOV. MARK SANFORD took a bold step when he set his sights on transforming the Transportation Department from an autonomous, high-powered political fiefdom to a responsible part of our government. Lawmakers would do well to join him, and stop looking for ever-more-complicated ways to insulate this arrogant agency from accountability.

Mr. Sanford has been taking shots at the agency for so long now that few people noticed just how remarkable it was for him to include it in the list of agencies whose unaccountable, part-time boards he wants to replace with a director who answers to the governor.

Despite the fact that few if any state agencies have a more scandalous past, Mr. Sanford’s call to make it a Cabinet agency actually marked the first time in more than a decade that a high-level state official has been willing to take on this effort.

A series of embarrassing and expensive scandals at the old Highway Department provided much of the fuel for then-Gov. Carroll Campbell’s push to restructure our antiquated state government in the early 1990s. But after two years of fierce Senate resistance, Mr. Campbell declared victory and went home when, in 1993, lawmakers agreed to split the giant agency in half and replace the autonomous, back-scratching 18-member governing board with an autonomous, back-scratching seven-member governing board.

For the next 13 years, no one was willing to touch that political hot potato again.

That changed last month, when the Legislative Audit Council peeled back the skin on an agency that acts as though it has no responsibility to anyone but itself, carelessly negotiating contracts that take the taxpayers for a ride, handing out cushy jobs to the well-connected and cavalierly ignoring state and federal laws it finds inconvenient, all the while arrogantly defending its prerogatives against even the tamest of criticism.

Mr. Sanford has refused to avert his eyes, and so must we. The Transportation Department does many things well, but it has never displayed the accountability that we demand of our government. It has been, by design, an independent fiefdom capable of delivering favors large and small to benefit those best positioned to demand favors — a job for a commissioner’s pal, a road where a powerful lawmaker wants one. It well serves the well-connected, but it ill-serves our state.

We don’t have enough money to dole it out based on political connections rather than on legitimate, quantifiable needs. We need our largest state agencies to be structured so that such self-serving decision-making is the exception rather than the expectation.

The DOT audit, coming as it does as Mr. Sanford launches a second term focused on bringing our 19th Century government into the 21st Century (or at least the mid-20th), holds great potential if the governor capitalizes on it. At the least, an audacious, intense campaign to reform the agency should make the rest of his restructuring agenda look easier, and compel legislators to move forward. At best, it could finally open the eyes of legislators and the public alike to the need for our state to operate more like the other 49, with the chief executive actually in charge of the executive branch of government, and the Legislature exercising its check on that authority through legislation, rather than through behind-the-scenes meddling.