IT’S NEVER BEEN easy for the public to keep track of how the General Assembly spends state money. While someone who knows where to look can tell fairly easily, say, how much money goes to the Department of Mental Health or what the salary is for the director of the Transportation Department, it’s next to impossible to look at the state budget and compare what it costs to run the state engineering schools in Columbia and Clemson, much less figure out what is spent on such efforts as providing medical care to the poor, which unnecessarily crosses agency lines.

Getting at such information is one of Gov. Mark Sanford’s aims in his budget hearings, which this year involve bringing state agencies with related responsibilities together at the same time to grill them about how they’re spending money. That’s a smart idea that we hope will move us in the direction of what’s called a programmatic budget, which allocates money to specific goals — say, reducing the infant mortality rate or improving the highway death rate — rather than just to agencies.

But that’s going to take some time, and legislative cooperation. Meanwhile, Mr. Sanford has unveiled another initiative that should begin to unmask the spending that legislators have long gone to great lengths to hide from the public, and often from each other. This secret spending, called “pass-throughs,” occurs when influential legislators add money to an agency’s budget but put no directions in the budget for how the money is to be spent; instead, they tell agency directors how they are to spend the money. The money generally goes to local pet projects, and often it has nothing to do with the agency; one pass-through a few years ago, for instance, directed the Department of Health and Environmental Control to pass money through for a local soccer field.

Last week, Mr. Sanford ordered his Cabinet agencies to stop funding any pass-throughs that are not spelled out in the budget. He allows an exception if the spending will “further the goals and purposes of the agency,” but he is requiring agency directors to give him a list of any such exceptions, which he plans to make public.

This initiative is an encouraging step toward more responsible, and more accountable, spending. But since most state money is allocated to the many agencies that are not part of the Cabinet, it doesn’t go far enough. And if additional steps aren’t taken, the result will be that legislators will simply redirect their flow-throughs to non-Cabinet agencies.

Fortunately, the governor has the power to at least force that into the open, which likely would have the effect of stopping it. While he can’t order those other agencies to stop funding flow-throughs, he can make them provide him an annual list of the ones they do fund. We doubt many legislators will want the public to know how they’re gobbling up pork. As former Public Safety Director Boykin Rose can tell you, an obscure state law that requires all state employees to comply with the governor’s requests for information can result in the firing of those directors who don’t.

We suspect that most agency directors would like to be able to unmask this deceptive practice, but know very well they could face retribution from legislators if they do so. By extending his order to them, the governor could help them do their jobs better, and unmask a practice that has for too long helped obscure questionable spending in our state.