For all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurs relative to
budget cuts in Louisiana, the fact of the matter is they have a cleansing
effect, wringing out impure inefficiencies otherwise potentially tolerated
without the imperative of tighter money. Case studies show the benefits they
bring to taxpayers.
In the waning days of the just-completed legislative session, one
high-profile program that seemed on the chopping block when there was a
movement afoot to exclude
some recurring funds from the budget just because they weren’t classified as
being in the general fund was Early Steps, which seeks to assist
developmentally disabled children to overcome as much as possible learning impediments
at an early age to prepare them for regular schooling. If the program does what
it should, this makes sense to avoid having more intensive and expensive
services later administered without this intervention.
When funding did come through, obviously program participants were
relieved, but the near-miss also induced some retrospection about what the program
does and how it goes about doing it. As one functionary noted, restructuring
and review of the core assumptions of how the program can operate to achieve
its goals using fewer resources are tasks inspired by the threat of budgetary reductions.
Without such external stimuli, incentives for this kind of evaluation may never
exist sufficiently to prompt money-saving measures.
The necessity to scrutinize the relative value and worth of programs
also encourages institutions to scale back or shed those that are too
peripheral from its core mission. Just such an action comes next fiscal year at
Nicholls State University, where, under pressure of reduced state funding, it
will reduce its subsidy of the Louisiana
Center for Women and Government from $275,000 to $50,000. The organization
asserts it’s there to promote women in government and public service, to
acknowledge achievements of women, and to teach all citizens about the
importance of public service and responsible citizenship.
That’s all well and good, but is it necessary to have conferences, leadership
summits, girls’ academies, leadership and campaign institutes, and paid
internships of as many as 15 hours credit for female college students in state
government to accomplish this on the taxpayer dime? Is all of this necessary
and non-duplicative, especially as other nonprofits or the private sector or
universities across the state (without necessarily offering pay) offer
essentially much of the same?
Nor does this constitute an evident good investment for taxpayers when
the present head of the organization, who will lose her full-time job (she does
retain her faculty position) as its leader cites as justification for continued
increased funding that, given the relative paucity of women in the Legislature,
this means “[t]here is no balance in the Legislature in the perspectives that
are being brought to the table in what's important and what's not important.”
Not only does this view reflect the tired and invalid notion of identity
politics, it also ignores the reality that women do serve in the Legislature,
have input into the bills that come out of it (including their own), and that women
do have the right to vote and do so regularly in Louisiana elections. This
political agenda aside, confidence in the Center’s proper orientation erodes further
by having an ex-state
legislator on the payroll whose salary exceeds the continuing subsidy.
This is not to say that the program’s existence nor its apparent
perspective are undesirable, but that it’s questionable whether this is an
appropriate expense borne by taxpayers and with students’ tuition dollars –
again, given that other entities outside and inside of government perform many similar
functions. Nor does it mean that everything that gets taxpayer bucks now deserves
them through fulfilling a genuine need that otherwise would be unmet without
state government intervention – perhaps the most notorious example of an
utterly wasteful program being the shelling out of hundreds
of millions of dollars annually to make movies that returns only 13.5 cents on
the dollar to the citizenry.
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