GUEST COLUMN.

I was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in a special election. Two days later I was dumped into multiple tax and budget sessions. Complete budget structural chaos! Unpopular governor after his first session. Nothing was solved for the structural deficit, no budget debate on the House floor, no plan to determine if citizens were getting their money’s worth and fiscal reform was brutalized at the ballot box.

Fast forward three years and I gained a seat on the House Appropriations Committee with the same $700 million structural deficit embedded in an old worn-out line-item budget format. No answers! No hope! The signature on the Appropriations Act was hardly dry before the money started moving between agencies and projects and was nearly untraceable. After seven years in office, I made a decision – change it or go back to the private sector.

That’s when the real work started. I introduced the Louisiana Government Performance and Accountability Act. The statute has been in continuous operation for twenty-nine years under five governors of both parties without major structural amendment. By any measure of durability, it is among the most resilient performance accountability systems in the country.

But national observers who study budgeting do not cite Louisiana as a benchmark. And they are not wrong to notice what is missing. Yet Louisiana’s gap is different from the one stalling reform elsewhere. Across states now chasing reform, the mistake is initial sequencing. States have tended to build the visible parts of performance accountability first: embedded measurements in appropriations legislation, quarterly data collection systems, shiny new performance dashboards, agency strategic plans, zero-based justification templates, priority-based stakeholder retreats. They are impressive in presentations and satisfying to enact.

The simplest way to understand why systems stall and frustration grows is this: states hang the chandelier before they pour the foundation. The chandelier—the performance measures, the data systems, the reporting calendar—is the visible public part. The foundation—the institutional structure mandating data be used in an appropriation decision—is the part that frustrates the buildout.

The states that successfully built working performance models built the foundation first. New Mexico did not start with reporting mandates—it started with the Legislative Finance Committee—a permanent, nonpartisan fiscal office with the authority to link quarterly hearings directly to budget recommendations. The Accountability in Government Act could then be loaded with that performance data. The data had somewhere to go and someone with the statutory mandate to use it.

The Texas model can trace its beginnings back to the enforcement granted to the Sunset Advisory Commission, a body whose reviews could end an agency’s existence by operation of the Sunset Act. The Legislative Budget Board came later and was charged with loading measures into the General Appropriations Act. Agencies then knew the consequences of low performance from the Budget Board.

Tennessee created its Office of Evidence and Impact with an evidence classification framework while at the same time requiring statewide inventories. The classification system created a focused demand for data. The data did not have to create its own demand.

My analysis of the current status of the 50 states reveals a consistent pattern. What makes implementations stall is remarkably fixable. The correlation is unmistakable where institutional mechanisms that work in a handful of states tie directly to the right implementation sequencing.

Louisiana is the case study. The statutory architecture was substantially complete upon enactment—the appropriations bill format, reporting infrastructure, data systems, quarterly cycles, the statutory authority connecting performance to budget decisions. Ninety percent of the system was built, implemented and institutionalized at the pouring of the foundation. The final piece was the delivery mechanism that would forge a hardened politically resistant bond between performance data and appropriations decisions, making the process self-executing rather than dependent on the sustained effort of the officeholder operating it.

The final piece was well under development when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck Louisiana twenty-six days apart in the fall of 2005. In less than eight hours of the first storm, the state’s entire senior leadership was enveloped in disaster operations and nothing else. The second storm pushed the state’s entire administrative capacity toward major disaster response across two regions. The 90 percent that was institutionalized survived and functioned because it was designed to be self-executing. The ten percent left never had a chance and did not survive the disruption, because the delivery architecture was still a person, not yet a permanent component.

Why does ten percent matter? It is the difference between a system that simply ingests data and a system that truly decides how dollars are best appropriated and how people can be positively impacted. Twenty-nine years later—initially tested by two major hurricanes and many more after that, subsequent fiscal crises, and multiple changes in administrations—the architecture is still running, data is still collected and the statute is still on the books. But the gap between collecting the data and decision-making also exists in nearly every state. The record proves that even the most durable system falls short of its aspirations if a clear bond between data and decisions is missing.

The current gold rush by states in launching efficiency commissions or enacting government reform mandates is building the visible outward-facing apparatus. The critical question is whether anyone is building the institutional mechanism underneath. If they are not, the outcome is clear: the commission will report, data will be collected, statutes will be satisfied, budget adoption will proceed on its own inertia. It will look very impressive but not change how a single dollar is appropriated. Success requires an underlying permanence. Build that first.

Note: LeBlanc was a Governing Magazine Public Official of the Year in 2005.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

#StateandLocalManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentBudgeting #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalDataGovernance #StateGovernmentAccountability #StatePerformanceMeasurementUse #StatePerformanceMeasurementAndDecisionMaking #State2026EfficiencyPush #LegislativeAppropriationsAndPerformanceMeasurement #StateLegislaturesAndPerformanceMeasurementStatutes #PerformanceMeasurementStatutes #LegislativeDecisionsAndDataUse #LouisianaAndPerformanceMeasurement #NewMexicoAndPerformanceMeasurement #NewMexicoLegislativeFinanceCommmittee  #TexasAndPerformanceMeasurement #TexasSunsetCommission #TennesseeOfficeOfEvidence #StateandLocalPublicAdministration #LouisianaGovernmentPerformanceAccountability Act #GoverningPublicOfficialOfTheYear #JerryLukeLeBlanc #BandGGuestColumn #BarrettandGreeneInc