Idaho House Bill 68, authored by Rep. Megan Blanksma (R-23), would shift the oversight of the Office of Performance Evaluations from the bipartisan Joint Legislative Oversight Committee to the majority-party legislative council, eliminating the committee in the process.
This change in oversight structure will result in OPE conducting performance audits and publishing agency reports under the oversight of the legislative council. Under this new arrangement, the legislative council would also be able to appoint a director for OPE who would “serve at the pleasure of the legislative council.”
These audits are used by the state as a means of gauging the effectiveness of programs carried out by a given administration. Through annual reports, the state government is able to determine how effectively and efficiently a program is run, perform continual cost-benefit analysis and ascertain as to whether or not any given program can be expected to succeed or fail in the future.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, state legislatures expanding their oversight roles, especially when it comes to the oversight of executive agencies, is a phenomenon of the last few decades.
Assistant Professor of Political Science Markie McBrayer noted that, while the bill would mark a change for Idaho, the operations of legislative oversight committees can vary from state to state.
Referencing a 2003 survey from the National Conference of State Legislatures, McBrayer said that most oversight committees are housed under a legislative auditor’s office.
In other cases, like Idaho’s, the committee or council “is often joint House and Senate and bipartisan, or directly supervised by legislative leadership.” Other still are “established in independent legislative offices.” Idaho’s bill would mark a shift from the bipartisan arrangement to supervision by legislative leadership.
Shifting oversight to the legislative council has raised some concerns regarding whether a majority-party oversight would hinder independence and accuracy of OPE’s ruling on the effectiveness of state programs. Rep. Mitchell said they he felt there was little concern for partisanship interjecting into the affairs of OPE.
“I don’t think it’s a valid concern,” Mitchell said. “And the reason I say that is because when they actually dig into some of these reports, they’re actually looking for data, it’s factual data that they’re trying to pull out.”
These performance reports being data driven, Mitchell said, leave little room for subjectivity.
With this bill also bringing an end to JLOC, there is still uncertainty surrounding what roles the current JLOC members will take on in the future.
“We get specific subcommittees that we work on all the time,” Mitchell said. “For instance, I’ve got two subcommittees that I’m on right now … we’ve always got places to put people and there’s always roles for them to fulfill … I think they’d be having a place in another role somewhere else.”
Though Mitchell noted that the primary impact of the bill will be allowing the legislature to receive more “guidance” as to the state’s legislative needs, measuring the overall impact of dissolving JLOC could come with some difficulty. As it stands, offices like OPE receive comparatively little coverage and scrutiny versus the other moving pieces in the state government.
“(OPE) is one of those space that nobody really studies anymore,” McBrayer said. “That’s not to say that no one would ever study it again, but it’s uncommon. Even the survey that NCSL took up 20 years ago … they got 44 states to participate, so even that is not a full picture of what all states did.”
Royce McCandless can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @roycem_news