OPINION-EDITORIAL

September 5, 2003

Budgeting away tax-and-spend initiatives

Jason Mercier | Evergreen Freedom Foundation
Whether it is Tim Eyman trying to reduce the state’s taxes or the Washington Education Association (WEA) seeking to increase state education spending, recent citizen initiatives have one thing in common: a lack of trust in the legislative budget process.

Many taxpayers fear their tax dollars are being used inefficiently, while special interest groups bemoan the lack of “adequate” funding for particular services. In both cases, members of the public are questioning the legislature’s spending practices and priorities.

These concerns may be alleviated if lawmakers fully embrace and institutionalize Governor Locke’s innovative “Priorities of Government” budget model. While not a new idea, it is a revolutionary one that says simply: budgeting should be focused on achieving clearly-defined results, not on maintaining the status quo by blindly adjusting spending to include inflation and caseload increases.

To accomplish this, the governor and his budget team identified ten goals for government and asked agencies to submit their budget requests based on how effectively each of their programs would accomplish one of those ten goals. In other words, they started by answering the question: What are the state’s top priorities and how can we best provide them with the money available? The process allowed Senator Dino Rossi to lead the way to a budget balanced with no general tax increases.

The progress made in the last session is the first step toward responsible budgeting. It allows legislators to start their next session with some valuable new tools, such as the governor’s priorities for government in the next budget cycle; agency mission statements; agency goals and objectives to meet the governor’s priorities; and agency evaluation measures.

But legislators will also have some obstacles to overcome. Unfortunately, the public was not involved in the process of determining the state’s core priorities, some legislators do not yet understand how the model works, and a few agencies refused to participate.

These problems can all be addressed.

Debating the state’s core functions should be part of every town hall meeting in every legislative district between now and the next budget-writing session. Legislative policy committees should vote on what they believe the priorities are.

Why is this so important to budgeting?

Core functions are our understanding of government’s job. For example, it doesn’t matter if the state is efficient in delivering a particular service if government shouldn’t be providing the service in the first place. To determine whether or not a program or activity is a core function of government, the following questions should be answered:

• Is this a proper function of government, or is it best left to the individual (family) or charitable organization?
  
  
• If intervention is necessary, is it best left to local government which is closer to the people?
  
  
• Does it further increase taxes, regulations or the size of government? If so, is this justified?

When Governor Locke determined his answers to these questions and asked agencies to rank their activities, department heads in K-12 and Higher Education refused to participate. Programs in these areas account for more than half of the state’s spending, or $12.8 billion for this budget cycle.

Legislators have the authority to require these agencies to participate in the process, or to determine their priorities for them. All agencies and their programs must be reviewed in the context of whether or not they are core functions of government for this review to be successful. None can be exempt.

With the public’s support for a core functions review of government, this can become the state’s standard budgeting procedure. In addition, if independent, comprehensive performance audits of the state’s programs are implemented to measure return on the dollars we are investing, the budget will become even more transparent and accountable to the public.

Though agencies may fight this process, it must be done for the health of Washington’s budget. Only by carefully considering the proper role of government can our state officials do a good job protecting individual rights while providing essential services to taxpayers in an efficient, cost-effective manner. Regardless of what agencies may say during this review, this is not an “anti-government” philosophy; rather it is ensuring that what government is supposed to do, it will do well. If activities are determined to not be a core function of government, they should be eliminated.

Instead of trying to avoid “budgeting by initiative” with restrictions on citizens’ access to the initiative process, as some legislators flirted with this past legislative session, why not simply avoid these initiatives in the first place by creating a transparent, prioritized and accountable budget?

Jason Mercier is a budget research analyst for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a non-profit public policy research organization dedicated to individual liberty, free enterprise, and accountable government.

Contact: Jason Mercier | Budget Research Analyst | 360.956.3482

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org