Wednesday, September 01, 2004 Osmeña: Eliminate bureaucratic bottlenecks By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
RIGHT TRACK. President Arroyo is moving in the right direction by imposing her political will to eliminate bureaucratic bottlenecks.
In its early stages, a government bureau is a vigorous, small agency with dynamic leadership. But as it grows, its effectiveness and sense of mission decline. Eventually the agency can become so large, complex and rigid that it chokes on all the highly specialized rules and regulations. More money and energy are then used to keep the agency operating, while it puts out less useful work and sometimes creates more problems than it solves.
Through the years, government has created too many agencies. This has caused bureaucracy with the number and complexity of government regulations. Some regulations are unnecessarily complex. Many, however, must be complex and detailed.
Government officials know that most industries they are required to regulate have teams of lawyers that will go through laws and regulations to find even the tiniest loopholes that will allow these industries to circumvent the intention of the law.
Most of the blame for over-regulation lies with Congress—not the national regulatory agencies. In a number of cases, Congress writes vague laws and leaves it up to national agencies and courts to fill the details.
Because of bureaucratic overspecialization, government has become an enormous organism composed of separate cells of experts, often remote from the people, unable to see the overall picture, competing rather than cooperating with one another, and incapable of dealing with the multiplicity of interlocking problems that characterizes society today. Another problem is that each overspecialized bureau becomes more concerned with its own survival than with its mission.
Some are even taken over by the groups they are supposed to regulate.
Today our government is encountering serious fiscal deficits due to the failure to institute bureaucratic reform. Or if there is any, it is ineffective, temporary, or both.
New reforms are here suggested to reduce the size of the bureaucracy and to increase its efficiency. They include the following: (1) exempting all annual replacements from turnover from civil service protection, (2) streamlining the procedures for dismissal, (3) overhauling the evaluation and merit raise system, (4) providing more effective protection and higher rewards for “whistleblowers” who expose fraud and waste in government, (5) giving local officials more authority over the spending of national grants or “pork barrel” allotment, (6) turning more of the national tax revenues directly back to the different regions in the country, and (7) enlarging and strictly enforcing sunset laws, under which government agencies and programs are evaluated periodically and eliminated unless they can be shown to be necessary, effective and efficient.
Many people continue to criticize and wrongly evaluate President Arroyo, but they should keep in mind the Spanish verse: “Advice pours down from the stadium full, but only the matador faces the bull.”
Instead of merely criticizing, let us urge our political leaders to show loyalty to the Filipino people, who are thinking of national security issues and energy policy.
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