Our views for Nov. 29, 2009

• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: Nov 29, 2009

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Two cheers for the budget crisis.

Yes, there is an upside to the budget wars about to break out at the State Capitol.

One is that the prospect of future cuts is stimulating some level of change in the budget process itself. We also hope that at last, despite the Jindal administration’s embrace of President Barack Obama’s stimulus funding as a short-term fix, the day of reckoning for a bloated state government is coming.

Both cheers have been a long time coming, and there’s been much time wasted getting there. That’s what budget-cutting commissions usually are good for.

Nor is there, ultimately, really any great news: The downsides of the budget crisis are real enough. Cutting higher education funding — again — is the opposite of wisdom, and ideas for fundamental restructuring of state programs are getting a hostile reception even from the “streamlining” commission that is supposed to be the champion of reform.

Still, a couple of cheers are justifiable, or at least needed to encourage more progress.

One is that smaller budget cuts, including many of those suggested by state departments to the streamlining commission itself, are in the process of being done. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s chief budget adviser, Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis, told the Press Club of Baton Rouge that where potential cuts or savings are identified by state departments, they are being implemented if they can be.

Some require changes in state law that the Legislature must make. And some require that the Legislature relieve state departments of mandates and programs lawmakers have created over the years.

That level of cutting back will require real leadership from the governor at some future date. We hope that date is soon, and specific. Maddeningly vague “everything is on the table” statements from the chief executive lead nowhere.

Another cheer should go up for Davis’ initiative to put more discipline into the budget process.

For years, reformers in state government have tried to rework the way budgets are built from the inside. Davis and her colleagues in Gov. Mike Foster’s Division of Administration tried to put in place performance standards for what state agencies do with the money they get. The former chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Jerry Luke LeBlanc, was later Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s commissioner of administration and was an avid proponent of performance standards.

Too many of those standards were too vague to be effective in changing the bureaucracy’s behavior, Jindal’s aides said during the transition, and Davis’ take on the process is that more can and should be done. As she did while working for Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu during the Blanco administration, Davis has brought in David Osborne, a government operations guru, and pushed “outcomes-based” budgeting.

In general, the idea is to judge the value of state expenditures on what their results are, not just how many widgets are produced. A social agency should not get more money for more social workers to see more clients; that is budgeting based on activity, not outcomes. Instead, an agency that shows it is, for example, moving more poor people from unemployment into the work force ought to get more money, not less.