BY THE TIME the Senate passed its grand restructuring bill last week, a paper merger of two agencies and a feckless new Cabinet agency were all that remained of an effort to impose some order and accountability on the convoluted mess that is the executive branch of South Carolina’s government.

But the butchering that Sen. Glenn McConnell’s bill endured at each step in the process does not begin to illustrate how resistant the Legislature is to Gov. Mark Sanford’s quest to make the government manageable by combining overlapping agencies and replacing unaccountable, part-time governing boards with Cabinet secretaries. After all, the Senate didn’t pass any restructuring legislation during the previous two sessions.

To understand the depth of the hostility toward common sense, you must look beyond the hollow bills whose primary purpose is to let legislators claim to have done the governor’s will, and focus on more obscure measures that are percolating through the State House.

No longer content to simply resist the governor’s entreaties, legislators are now engaged in aggressive counterattacks, with bills that, in effect, destructure government. Consider just a few recent actions:

• On the morning after the Senate passed Restructuring Lite, a House subcommittee took up a bill to move the Division of Veterans Affairs out of the governor’s office, where it had been placed in the 1993 restructuring law, and make it a free-standing agency.

That would be bad enough — since we already have 85 free-standing executive agencies — if it were to be an agency with a director named by the governor. It wouldn’t be. The bill by House Medical Affairs Chairman Joe Brown would create a nine-member board to run the agency.

That would be bad enough — since there’s nothing less accountable or competent than government by part-time board — if the board members served at the pleasure of the governor. They wouldn’t. The governor would appoint three board members, the House speaker would appoint three House members to the board, and the Senate president pro tempore would appoint three senators to the board, thus violating a key reform of the early 1990s, which stripped legislators from executive agency boards. The legislators couldn’t be removed before their terms ended.

• The next morning, a Senate subcommittee took up a bill to merge the adult and juvenile parole boards and make the new board essentially a free-standing state agency. Like the Veterans Affairs measure, this one, sponsored by Senate Corrections Chairman Mike Fair and 10 others, dilutes current gubernatorial authority.

The governor now appoints all the members of the adult and juvenile parole boards. Under the Senate bill, the governor, the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore each would appoint three members of the new parole board.

• The morning after that, another bill to dilute the governor’s appointment authority arrived in the Senate. As passed by the House, the bill allowed the speaker and president pro tempore each to appoint a new lay member to the Board of Medical Examiners, whose members now are all named by the governor. The Senate Medical Affairs Committee wasn’t willing to admit to going that far. It proposed forcing the governor to accept the recommendations of the speaker and the president pro tempore when he appoints people to those two new positions.

• This week, a House subcommittee was scheduled to take up one of the 11 bills that have been filed to limit the governor’s power to hire and fire Santee Cooper board members. This bill makes it clear that while the governor can still appoint board members, the General Assembly calls the shots: It prohibits board members from even discussing the possibility of selling off any of the publicly owned utility’s assets, and it subjects them to lawsuits if they consider the good of the state rather than just the good of the company and its ratepayers, as Mr. Sanford had suggested they do.

“Except for a few points of light, government restructuring is moving backwards instead of forward,” says Sen. Chip Campsen, one of the few legislators truly dedicated to the idea. “I think there’s some frustration toward Sanford, and you can see that coming through.”

Mr. Campsen, a Charleston Republican who gave up his House seat to work in Mr. Sanford’s administration and then gave up that job to run for the Senate, has seen firsthand how inefficient and unwieldy the current structure of government is.

“It violates every principle of management you’d derive from any textbook of management organization,” he told me last week. “And it seems like we’re moving in the direction of violating more principles. In one sense it’s a power struggle, in one sense it’s about Sanford beating legislators up too much, and in one sense it’s a situation of diffused benefits and concentrated costs.”

And in every sense, it is a disservice to the people of South Carolina.

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