We at the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) are used to the slings and arrows that come with pushing for a smaller government — really pushing for it, not lip service. That means actually reducing the growth of government spending or, better yet, reversing it.
Most elected officials, when prompted, will claim to be fiscally responsible, even fiscally conservative. Some, like Senator Cook (Idaho Falls), never seem to meet a spending bill they don’t like. Fair enough, if that is his world view. But Senator Cook doesn’t have to take cheap shots at IFF to vote like the big spender that he is. And he ought to at least stick to the facts.
On Friday, during a debate on the Office of Information Technology Services’ (OITS) budget for next year, Senator Cook accused “third-party” analysts (quite clearly the Idaho Freedom Foundation) of providing misleading information. He also impugned the integrity of his fellow Senators who he presumed agreed with our analysis. For your edification, here is the bill and our analysis.
Senator Cook tried to justify the budget growth as the result of an IT consolidation and claimed how the “outside analysts” (us) missed this point — which we clearly did not. In two different parts of our analysis, at the beginning and the last paragraph, we pointed out how the 22 new positions were transferred from other agencies. We noted that no synergies–no net cost savings were achieved by moving IT staff from other agencies to a centralized IT department. The positions moved and costs were added at OITS, but costs were not reduced for the transfers from the other agencies.
Perhaps Senator Cook is blind to this notion, but consolidations cost money up front with the view that they save money in the long term. In the private sector, this often means staff reductions as part of consolidation. It is a reasonable assumption to bring up, especially when the budget in question showed only consolidation but no reductions.
We also identified another bad mark for the bill. The budget proposal contained a $2.5 million line item for moving staff offices from one part of the Chinden state office complex to another. We deemed that excessive (at $8,500 per staff relocated), certainly a debatable point.
There were lots of additional line items this year for IT infrastructure, hardware, security, and related items. We did not deem these excessive or wasteful because we did not have a basis for evaluation. OITS is a very new agency.
“The Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) was created July 1, 2018, when the information technology program was eliminated at the Department of Administration and moved to ITS.”
The budget for OITS has grown dramatically, from $5.9 million in FY19 to the requested $46 million this coming year. Perhaps some of this budget growth is necessary. Still, it is reasonable to ask questions and analyze this level of growth without fear of being harangued by a senator on the Senate floor. Other senators are right to be skeptical given all the problems we at IFF have recently documented with the state Enterprise Resource Planning system, also known as Luma.
In closing, we would again note that Senator Cook rarely meets a budget he doesn’t like or vote for; he is one of the Senate’s biggest spenders. If you listen to his floor debates, he incessantly defends more spending.
We suggest that Senator Cook focus his energy on curbing the state government’s appetite for taxpayer money instead of taking uninformed jabs at our solid research and other senators. After all, state spending has grown over 50% over the last five years, and Senator Cook has been a big driver of that growth in his role on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. His Spending Index rating this year is a paltry 3.9% (at the time of publication); it’s hard to do much worse.
