It is no secret that almost all government officials and their personnel are political hires. Political hires are not required to have expertise. They only need to meet the barest minimum requirement, which is the ability to cast a ballot and to be related to other voters.
Government, alas, is not just a manpower agency. It is paid by taxpayers to do certain things, perform certain functions and deliver certain services — about which most political hires know squat. So the CNMI government has to hire consultants and contractors.
Hence, every single government branch, department, agency and program has a parallel set of staff — one that is supposed to do the work, and the other that actually does the work.
The governor, for example, has a cabinet whose members oversee departments tasked to perform specific duties. Yet the governor still needs several “special assistants,” “special advisers, and “consultants” for jobs that, say, the AG’s Office is mandated to do. Take a look at the list of the governor’s special assistants and you will realize how easy it is to match their duties with already existing departments, agencies or programs. And then there is DPW which still has to hire contractors for tasks that the department was created to do. The most egregious example, of course, is CUC which has always needed consultants and contractors to mess up the mess it creates. CPA has to hire a consultant to inform the agency that it’s broke. Even the municipal councils and the mayors have their own special assistants and consultants. It’s like an addiction.
The end result is that this bankrupt government continues to expand. The governor can shout himself hoarse in announcing cost-cutting and austerity measures, but the fact remains: government hiring continues. And it will step up once we enter general election year, which is next year.
Elected officials, as an American historian once noted, “live more for patronage than principles; their goal [is to] bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there.”
In other words, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Unless, that is, voters will put a stop to all this waste, mismanagement and inefficiency by demanding an end to the hiring of special advisers, consultants and contractors for tasks that duplicate the duties of existing departments, agencies or programs. Voters must insist that their officials hire only the people who can do the job — not someone who can ensure their re-election or allow them to pay back political debts.
Voters can always complain about their officials, but who put them into office?
Let the people vote on the Open Government Act petition
A BILL has been introduced in the House of Representatives to compel government employees to comply with lawmakers’ Open Government Act requests for public records. Lawmakers want to be exempted from the same law.
CNMI voters have taken the required steps to place on the ballot an initiative that will end the Legislature’s exemption from the Open Government Act. They have collected the required number of voter signatures and have been educating the public about the need for transparency in government in the past two years or so. Lawmakers themselves have already weighed in on this issue.
The Senate, however, does not want voters to decide in November whether to apply the Open Government Act to their lawmakers. The Senate is holding hostage the enabling legislation that the House, to its credit, passed. But this senatorial inanity will not stand. The public should tell the senators to resolve this issue democratically — through the election process. That is all the initiative’s proponents are asking for.
Shame on the Senate for disrespecting voters.
