1. Last night, the Rhode Island House of Representatives’ Finance Committee heard several bills on the subject of reorganizing Rhode Island government, with the goal of boosting the state’s economic performance. The House leadership (as part of their “economic development package”) and the House Republican caucus have submitted different versions of what they each believe an economically-beneficial reorg would look like.

1A. Through a pair of bills, House leadership would create an “executive office of commerce” headed by a Secretary of Commerce, who would be appointed by the Governor and not subject to Senate advice and consent. The Secretary of Commerce would “operate” all functions of the Department of Business Regulation, much of the function of the Department of Labor and Training, the permitting process of the Department of Environmental Management, multiple Department of Administration functions in areas including the fire code, regulatory reform, energy resources, planning, housing, minority business enterprises and the health benefits exchange; and all functions of the Coastal Resources Management Council.  This new Secretary of Commerce would also automatically become the head of what is now the Economic Development Corporation, which would be renamed the Commerce Corporation while keeping most of its extant powers and duties.

(Under this proposal, the law would state both that the Commerce Corporation is “a public corporation of the state having a distinct legal existence from the state and not constituting a department of state government” and that it is “the operating agency of the state to carry our the policies and procedure as established by the secretary, governor and the board of directors”.  I’m not sure both propositions are simultaneously possible).

1B. The GOP plan creates a new cabinet level executive office of economic development “responsible for the management and administration” of DBR, DLT and “all state departments, divisions and agencies having oversight and regulatory authority over tourism, economic development, corporate services and marketing of the state’s resources to existing or prospective businesses”, to be headed by a Secretary of Commerce subject to Senate advice and consent.  The GOP bill would abolish the EDC in its entirety (seventy-two pages of strikethroughs in the GOP bill eliminate the sections of the law enabling the EDC).

2. The House Leadership plan differs from the plan originally proposed by RIPEC in at least one significant aspect; RIPEC had proposed that the current EDC be replaced by a stripped-down version, given that the Executive Office of Commerce would be assuming a broad range of responsibilities.  However, based upon the legislation submitted, House leadership appears to have decided major changes to the EDC are off-limits, raising the question of who it is that wants to keep EDC largely as is.

3. Personally, I begin from a strong presumption against the idea that changing the structure of the the executive branch of RI government will have a major impact on Rhode Island’s economy, though a case can be made that some form of reorg might be beneficial, the argument being that government tends to do more of what it’s officially charged with doing.  Hence, if there is a government department formally dedicated to “regulating” business, but no department charged with “promoting” it, the predictable result is a government that regulates heavily with little concern for the impact of its policies on promotion. Putting both goals on roughly even footing into the executive branch office that deals most directly with commerce could correct an existing imbalance.

4. That said, by creating an executive branch position that bypasses Senate confirmation and automatically assumes leadership of a quasi-public body, the House Leadership proposal (and also the RIPEC proposal on which it is based) does more than give a standard-issue government department a responsibility for improving commerce.  What assumptions went into this design?  That no one who might be good at helping business can get through a Rhode Island Senate confirmation process?  That the governor himself is unable to use his position as the head of the executive branch to make Rhode Island government more business friendly? (And if a governor can’t get regular department heads to work together through normal processes towards a basic goal like improving the economy, then what is his job exactly?)

5. One conclusion to be drawn is that the technocrats and the political insiders think that Rhode Island is in need of someone who can work behind the scenes on one set of priorities through a shadow hierarchy, regardless of what the more visible branches of government focusing their energies on.  Perhaps there is a belief that too much tension exists between what needs to be done to fix Rhode Island’s lagging economic performance, and what has to be expressed in public to become a member-in-good-standing of the state’s governing class.

6. But ultimately, if RI’s technocratic elites and “pragmatic” policy advocates don’t think that a governor’s economic development plans are sound — e.g. if they don’t believe that same-sex marriage and commuter rail to Wickford are sufficient cornerstones of a sound economic policy — then they either need to change the mind of the leader promoting that strategy, or else find a leader with a better economic development strategy to support.  Creating an undergovernor to implement a set of priorities different from those held by the real governor isn’t going to work in the long term.