Matt Mahan

go through an exercise of zero-based budgeting and say, what are the outcomes we need?

And are we actually spending dollars to achieve those outcomes?

Or are we just funding a sprawling bloated bureaucracy where it's just easier to add 2%, 3% head count every year, give everybody a 4% raise and call it a day.

And I think that's generally been the approach is whenever revenue's up, we just kind of give everybody a raise, hire more people, initiate a few new programs.

We never go back to basics and say,

Well, if these are the resources we have and these are the outcomes we need, are we really optimizing our spend for those outcomes?

And the answer is no, we're not.

That's governor.

I think, yeah, as I said before, I think electing a pragmatic, independent-minded governor who understands this problem and is willing to tackle it is step one and is necessary but insufficient.

Ultimately, we have to build a more moderate coalition of legislators who understand how broken the system is, who are willing to do hard things.

I don't think that this just happens overnight, but the governor has a lot of tools that he or she can choose to use.

You do drive the budget process.

Ultimately, you need legislative support for it.

You have the bully pulpit.

You have the ability to manage state agencies in a very different way.

The governor appoints 3,000 people to run state bureaucracies that can either come in with the mindset of business as usual, I'm gonna sit behind a desk, we're process-oriented, or it can be held accountable, and maybe it shouldn't be 3,000 employees.

Maybe we should slim how many people it is, but can be told, here are the outcomes we need,

Tell us, go ground truth these, go down to the local level, spend time with the school boards, the cities and the counties where all the money actually meets the constituent, where the rubber hits the road, and come back with answers on how to reform these systems to get more for what we're spending.

And if you can't hit more aggressive goals, we'll bring in someone else who can.

We need a different mindset for how we operate our government agencies.