Government reorganization push faces pitfalls
LITTLE ROCK — Promising to cut in half the number of agencies answering to him, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is hoping to emulate a Democratic governor who later defeated him in his first bid for statewide office. Hutchinson is also trying to avoid the pitfalls faced by the last member of his party to hold the state’s top office.
Hutchinson said last week he’d like Arkansas to cut the number of cabinet-level agencies from 42 to 20 next year, and has asked an advisory board to solicit ideas on how to do it. He’s casting the plan as the first major reorganization of government since 1971, when then-Gov. Dale Bumpers slashed the number of agencies from more than
60 to a dozen.
“The size of our state cabinet is unwieldy and does not allow for sufficient accountability to the taxpayers,” Hutchinson told reporters last week.
The plan gives Hutchinson a new campaign issue friendly to GOP audiences as he tries to fend off a longshot primary challenge from Jan Morgan, a Hot Springs gun range owner who’s repeatedly criticized the governor as not conservative enough when it comes to state spending and taxes. Morgan regularly rails about the number of state agencies and regulatory boards in her stump speeches.
Hutchinson’s complaints also echo those of Bumpers, whom Hutchinson unsuccessfully challenged for a U.S. Senate seat in
1986. Bumpers had pushed for reorganizing state government after he took office as governor in 1971, a goal that predecessors had unsuccessfully sought. Bumpers later said even his family was aghast at how much the cabinet had grown before the reorganization.
“My brother said, ‘Little brother, anytime you think you can run an operation with sixty-five people reporting to you, I got bad news for you. That’s not doable,” Bumpers, who died last year, said in an interview with the University of Arkansas’ David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in 2010
Hutchinson has already been able to shuffle or pare back other offices in government, including signing a measure into law that abolished the state’s lottery commission and moved the management of the games to the Department of Finance and Administration. Hutchinson last year also approved moving War Memorial Stadium’s management to the state Department of Parks and Tourism.
Hutchinson says he doesn’t expect layoffs from the reorganization, saying reductions would instead come through attrition as employees retire or find other employment. He also says he’ll be looking at more than 200 state commissions to see if changes are needed there as well.
Hutchinson has offered few other details on the plan, which comes 15 years after then-Gov. Mike Huckabee failed in his attempt to cut the number of cabinet-level agencies from 53 to 10.
“In so doing, we’ll reduce duplication, save money for far more important things than the machinery of government and make our system uniform and understandable not only to newly elected, term-limited legislators but even more importantly to our bosses, the taxpayers of Arkansas,” Huckabee told lawmakers at the start of the 2003 session.
Huckabee’s proposal, however, ultimately died in the Legislature after facing complaints from a variety of groups about the impact trimming those departments would have. A successful remnant of his reorganization plan, merging the state departments of Health and Human Services into one agency, was short-lived. The agencies were split back up in 2007, less than two years after the merger, by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe.
“Both agencies are stronger for the experience of having worked together,” Beebe said when he signed the order splitting the agencies back up. “But after careful consideration, it makes the most sense to separate the two and return the Department of Health to a cabinet-level agency in a cost-neutral way.”
Hutchinson is at least trying to avoid of Huckabee’s pitfalls, and said reuniting those two agencies isn’t a change he’s considering.
But beyond that, he said, “it is a white sheet of paper.”