Missed Opportunity: JFC Bunts on Agency Briefs

The Joint Committee on Finance (JFC) had the opportunity to pose some tough questions to the Evers’ administration on Tuesday, and it more or less took a pass.

JFC’s first significant step in the state’s budget process is to hold agency briefings. This is an opportunity for the heads of major state agencies to make their case for their funding requests in the next budget. It’s also a chance for lawmakers to find out exactly what’s going on at the agencies and whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth out of them.

Ordinarily, JFC spends three to five days on these briefings, inviting the agencies that are asking the most from taxpayers or have the most to explain. The Public Instruction, Health Services, and Transportation typically participate. JFC usually starts holding public hearings a week after the agency briefs. This year, however, JFC took a very different approach.

It only scheduled one day of briefings, and it only had two agencies come in to testify, and they weren’t even the most important ones. Only the University of Wisconsin System and the Department of Corrections testified. Public hearings begin on Wednesday. All of this is out of the ordinary.

Back in September, after agencies submitted their initial budget requests to the governor, the MacIver Institute conducted a detailed analysis into their performance metrics. Every agency gets to pick its own criteria and set its own standards, and even then, they struggle to deliver acceptable results.

The worst performing agency, by its own standards, was the Department of Public Instruction (DPI). It failed to achieve four out of five of its goals for the year, an 80% failure rate. The Department of Military Affairs (DMA) failed to achieve 7 out of 10 goals, a 70% failure rate. Veterans Affairs (DVA) failed 9 out of 13, a 69% failure rate. Health Services (DHS) and Children and Families (DCF) both had 66% failure rates. The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) had the highest number of failures, 12 out of 23.

MacIver’s analysis revealed startling facts such as: DPI has no goals tied to academic achievement, DMA fails to meet its recruiting goals every year and is alarmingly understrength, the DNR is taking four times longer than it should to approve air permits, and most daycares in the state cannot meet DCF’s minimal quality standards. JFC had the opportunity to ask these agencies why these things are happening but decided to take a pass. This disinterest in holding the Evers’ administration and state agencies accountable for their failures is a discouraging start to the budget process. What makes this situation worse is that most agencies, apparently, were not being cooperative with JFC about the hearings, and JFC decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

JFC Co-Chair Rep. Mark Born said, “They don't want to really talk about what they're doing, and why they're doing it. And so, it kind of makes it like it's a waste of their time and our time.”

A Democrat controlled JFC would have scheduled them for hearings anyway. They definitely would have had the state superintendent testify about her failings at DPI and made a show of it for the election.

Also on Tuesday, Co-Chair Sen. Marklein told reporters that JFC won’t start the real work of putting the budget together until mid-May. “We have never done anything significant until we get the final Fiscal Bureau projections. And they usually come in around May 15th,” he claimed. Not true. MacIver has previously reported on executive session starting as early as April 15^th (in 2015).

Look, everyone knows that this year’s budget process is going to be more contentious than usual. A number of pending supreme court cases will play a major factor in how the legislature can write the budget to ensure it survives Evers’ veto pen still balanced. Unfortunately, the first steps that JFC took on Tuesday indicate that it is not up for this fight at all.