By Steve Brawner

© 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

May 23, 2019

The book “Team of Rivals” by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin explains how President Abraham Lincoln appointed and led an often discordant cabinet through the Civil War.

What happened in Arkansas Wednesday was not nearly so dramatic, but it’s worth a newspaper column.

That day, Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced his 15 cabinet-level secretaries as part of his transformation initiative.

The cabinet has been composed of 42 agency directors – 27 more cabinet officials than the United States president has. Plus, the state has had more than 200 boards and commissions floating around with no one above them except the governor.

It’s been an unwieldy arrangement, especially for a governor who likes things tidy. The 42-member cabinet can’t really serve as an advisory body. It only meets two or three times a year, because what could you hope to accomplish?

This year, Hutchinson made straightening out this mess a priority. The 2,047-page Act 910 by Rep. Andy Davis, R-Little Rock, and Sen. Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, condensed the number of cabinet-level agencies from 42 to 15 and brought most of the boards and commissions into one of them.

It passed remarkably easily for such a sweeping document, probably because it so obviously needed to be done. It’s actually been done previously – under Gov. Dale Bumpers in 1972, when the number of agencies shrunk from 60 to 13. But government has a tendency to grow, and spread out.

As of July 1, Arkansas will have secretaries of the following departments: Health; Labor and Licensing; Education; Veterans Affairs; Public Safety; Agriculture; Military; Commerce; Finance and Administration; Human Services; Parks, Heritage and Tourism; Transformation and Shared Services; Energy and Environment; Corrections; and Inspector General. Two others, the Department of Transportation and the Game and Fish Commission, will remain constitutionally separate.

This is important to you for two reasons.

First, the executive branch is forecasting savings of $15 million in the second year of the two-year biennium, but it could be more, and the long-term savings could be much higher. The new agencies will be able to combine human resources, finance, legal, and information technology functions. While Hutchinson doesn’t plan any layoffs, the number of state employees should shrink through attrition. Meanwhile, as building leases expire, agencies should be able to consolidate their operations.

There are a lot of “shoulds” in that paragraph. Things don’t always work as they should.

Second, it should make state government work better. (Uh-oh, there’s another “should.”) Combining agencies will allow those with similar missions to better align their efforts. For example, the initiative will put one person, Secretary of Education Johnny Key, in charge of the state’s pre-K, K-12, career education, and higher education efforts. So now, there will be one shared mission instead of all those separate ones, which will better serve students as they progress up the academic ladder.

Hutchinson plans to bring his new streamlined cabinet together for a training session, but he’s not sure exactly how it will work after that. Even meeting locations haven’t been decided, though it’s a lot easier to fit 15 into a room than 42. He can even squeeze them into his office at the Capitol.

He said he expects the cabinet to meet “much more frequently” than in the past, though this will be a “governor-led executive branch,” not a “cabinet-led government.” But, he said, “if there are the tough moments for our state, then I would certainly look to the wisdom of the cabinet to help guide me.”

Hutchinson selected the secretaries after an interview process involving mostly internal candidates. The directors of the most prominent current departments usually became the new secretaries. Most of the rest of the 42 directors will serve in similar capacities as they do now, the difference being they’ll have someone between them and the governor on the organizational chart.

In many cases, that person will have been selected over them for the job, so there might be some bruised egos and personalty conflicts.

But teams of rivals? Probably not. It’s Arkansas state government, not the Civil War.

If there are, Hutchinson has read Goodwin’s book.