THE FIRST ROUND of government restructuring was about political accountability.

With his budget proposal, Gov. Mark Sanford began a bid to sell the second round as a way of saving money.

For the changes he included in his budget, that makes all the sense in the world. Despite skeptical legislators’ charges that cutting costs through restructuring is an illusory proposition, the governor’s numbers are quite realistic.

The skepticism stems from the fact that restructuring, as we have been discussing it in this state for more than a decade, really encompasses two distinct types of changes — structural change and political change. We usually group them together because South Carolina needs both. But they can be separated.

Political change — letting the governor appoint the constitutional officers and hire and fire agency directors — doesn’t necessarily save money. It can, if the governor hires directors with the mission of rooting out inefficiencies and working across agencies to eliminate duplication. But that’s up to the governor; savings aren’t the automatic result of political restructuring — and that isn’t the point anyway.

On the other hand, you could save money through structural change — merging health agencies, putting the Corrections and Probation departments together — even if you didn’t give the governor control of the merged agencies. (Although, in fact, many of the agencies Mr. Sanford proposes to merge already are part of his Cabinet.) Turn two agencies into one, and you no longer need two agency directors, two legal offices, two finance offices, two public relations offices, and so on. In business, it’s called efficiencies of scale, and it’s one reason corporate mergers lower costs.

And that’s to say nothing of the duplication of actual service delivery. As Mr. Sanford explains in his budget proposal: “Our health care services are fractured into six different agencies. Agencies with jobs and economic development responsibilities are scattered among four different agencies. Natural resource and environmental programs are shared by five separate agencies.” Put those health agencies together, and you might be able to assign one case worker to a family that is now overseen by six. Clearly, that saves money, too.

In his budget, Mr. Sanford points to a U.S. Department of Energy study that found power company mergers reduced costs by an average of 11 percent to 13 percent. By contrast, his projection that consolidating some overlapping state agencies will reduce administrative costs by 18 percent means the Arts Commission would spend 5 percent less overall, the Forestry Commission 3 percent less, the health agencies 1.8 percent less. (The budget does not include any savings from letting the governor appoint constitutional officers, which isn’t actually part of the budget proposal, and couldn’t occur until at least 2007.)

Francis Marion President Fred Carter was instrumental in helping put together the restructuring proposals as Mr. Sanford’s chief of staff. Dr. Carter also was director of the state Budget and Control Board in the early 1990s, where he was assigned the task of making all the details of the first round of restructuring work.

He believes people who argue that the first round of restructuring didn’t save money miss the point, since that wasn’t the purpose of restructuring. He also believes that while there were some added costs, as when the state created a whole new police agency, there were also some immediate savings — for instance, when lawmakers pulled 40 formerly independent professional licensing boards under the umbrella of one agency.

“Remember we cut out a lot of governing boards, and a lot of administrative processes associated with those lay boards,” he told me last week. “I don’t know that we truly achieved some of the cost efficiency standards that we would like to, but I think we achieved some of the cost effectiveness standards we wanted to.” In other words, agencies were able to serve additional people with the same amount of money.

Dr. Carter believes that will happen again, with both the structural changes the governor proposes in his budget and the political changes, most of which will have to be considered separately and approved by voters.

Moreover, he also believes that the proposals to consolidate agencies are the only responsible way of “dealing realistically with agencies that have been all but paralyzed by some of the budget cuts they have taken over the past three or four years.”

“Many of these agencies, without a restructured organization, really don’t have the capability to carry out their mission effectively,” he said. “He’s trying to continue restructuring, which I believe is vitally important. But the other thing he’s trying to do is to revitalize agencies whose core budgets have been cut appreciably, by bringing about more effective consolidation and coordination models.”

As Mr. Sanford explained, most agencies will receive less money next year than they did this year whether the Legislature adopts his entire budget or rejects the entire thing. With his restructuring proposals, it will be easier for many of them to absorb those cuts without reducing the services they provide to South Carolinians.

When you consider all the other advantages of restructuring, it’s hard to see why anyone whose goal is to serve the public would object to that.

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