Answer: What you have are two governments the first government is made up of agencies which are powerfully imbedded bureaucracies that over time have failed to meet the needs of the public. Their power comes from lobbying the legislature for support. Unable to satisfy the public’s demands or change the bureaucracies the legislature has setup a second government in the form of the Commissions under the guise of streamlining government.

My approach is to weaken the power of the Agencies (bureaucracies) by splitting their activities into functions which can be more easily measured for the Performance Budgeting process. What is happening currently is that each agency is budgeted a large block of money which the agency can use to maintain the bureaucracy and determine the level of support for each of its functions.

The first step is to have the state’s budgeting department define all of the state’s functions. Then have the executive and the legislative branches agree on the funding priority for each of the state’s functions. Recall that a function has processes that produce a product that satisfies a public need. Those functions at the bottom of the list may or may not be funded. Each agency manages one or more of the functions which it is responsible for. The reason this method of budgeting is more likely to be accepted by the legislature is that the power of determining a function’s budget is passed from the Agency to the executive and the legislative branches where it should be.

The next step is to have the budgeting department develop the best estimated budget for each function that they can. Then the executive and legislative branches should reach an agreement on the final budget for each function through negotiation. When the agencies total their budgets they will probably object strongly with their new budget because of the huge management bubble that is not funded. To quell this objection the budgeting department should compare management funding to that found in other states. The goal here is to force the Agencies to agree to Work Measurement to resolve the dispute and to determine just what the funding level should be.

At this point if the Agency management still objects to the implementation of Work Improvement Teams it is time to remove the top management and replace them with management which will enthusiastically support the WIT implementation.

With the implementation “Work Improvement Teams” you can expect that the savings to tax payers from implementation of Work Measurement to be significant. For more information on which method to use see Article 12. “Which Approach to use in State Government ‘Cost and Schedule’ or ‘Work Improvement Teams‘”?
and for information on the elimination of bureaucracies see Article 32.. “How to Bring a Bureaucracy under Control”. See also Article 102. Government Reform of California Agencies and Commissions.

This will open the door to Government Reform and major cultural changes as follows.
Old culture: Agencies lobby legislators for more budget funding.
New culture: Work Measurement determines actual hourly cost of each function, provides input to the Funding Formula (a compilation of all costs) and provides the productivity measurement to the Performance Budgeting process.

Old culture: The Agencies power enables it to operate with impunity.
New culture: Each function has performance measures in place to insure response to public needs.

Old culture: The Agencies were top heavy with unnecessary levels of management.