In the penultimate episode of Parks and Recreation, Rob Lowe plays a manager from the Indiana State Budget Office who arrives to solve the financial problems of Pawnee. From 1999 to 2001 I actually had exactly this job, and so I feel compelled to set the record straight. A few points of clarification:
1) No auditors work for the Indiana State Budget Agency (not Office). The State Budget Agency is responsible for financial analysis and management of state agencies. It’s the equivalent of the federal Office of Management and Budget, an agency that allows the elected governor to exert authority over the state bureaucracy by controlling the allocation, use, and movement of money.
2) One might logically conclude that Rob Lowe’s character should therefore have come from the State Auditor’s office. Wrong! The State Auditor, an elected official as required by the Indiana Constitution, doesn’t audit either. He’s essentially the State Bookkeeper, who maintains the chart of accounts and writes checks. More sensible states house this function with the budget agency; the fact that they’re separate occasionally leads to petty disputes about exactly how much money the state has at the end of the fiscal year, particularly when the Auditor and Governor are from different political parties. The funds themselves are invested by the State Treasurer, who is another separately elected official. It doesn’t make much sense.
3) The actual auditors in Indiana work for the State Board of Accounts. But their work is pretty much limited to auditing in the generally understood sense, like when auditors show up in your office once a year and commandeer an empty office for a couple of weeks to make sure you submitted a paper receipt when you got reimbursed for a cab ride from the airport. If the city of Terre Haute were to be gripped by a politically-induced budget crisis, nobody from the state of Indiana would do anything about it. The park lawns would go un-mowed, Freddy Spaghetti wouldn’t get paid, and the gay penguins would eventually run out of ice. Local governments manage their own affairs, well or badly.
4) Nobody in Indiana state government looks anything like Rob Lowe.
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In the federal government, all of the cabinet secretaries are appointed by the President, so there is no concern about unelected officials needing to be herded into line by the elected leader (the President). Perhaps the 60-year “experiment” with OMB and its predecessor, the Bureau of the Budget, should come to an end. Budgeteers often speak scornfully of the days (which actually spanned most of American history), when the federal agencies worked directly with their authorizing and appropriating committees to hammer out budgetary and legislative deals. I know, this arrangement sounds primitive to an OMB technocrat, but could it possibly be any worse than the arrangement that has been in place for the last several decades? In addition, you would probably then attract a larger potential talent pool of cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, because they would know that they could actually do some maneuvering, negotiating and decisionmaking — something that would appeal to former governors and CEOs who have been accustomed to that level of responsibility and thus are often frustrated by the somewhat-”figurehead” role of cabinet secretary.
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