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Never before has the process of drafting a state budget come under such close scrutiny by so many people.
The Government Revitalization Unit, tasked with scouring the budget requests for savings, has finished the first half of its work. Its operations have been covered daily and extensively by the media, and a webcast of the team at work received an incredible 24,000 hits at its peak.
All this reflects growing interest among taxpayers over how their money is used by the government. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama must respect the results of the budget review process and do his utmost to eliminate unnecessary spending so that public money is efficiently used in compiling the budget for the next fiscal year. He should also make sure that spending on similar programs not subject to the current review is also cut.
The task force's work so far has made it clear that spending cuts alone will not be sufficient to finance all the programs the Democratic Party of Japan had pledged in its election manifesto.
In total, 46 programs have been identified that will be scrapped or dropped from the fiscal 2010 budget, representing a saving of about 150 billion yen. The first round of the review process resulted in putting aside about 1 trillion yen, including the 150 billion yen, by discovering surplus reserves that should be returned to state coffers and downsizing other projects.
The government aims to cut about 3 trillion yen from the budget requests, which exceeded 95 trillion yen. This target will be hard to achieve even if the task force identifies additional budget cuts during the second half of its work next week. In addition, the surplus reserves can be spent only once and cannot be counted on as a permanent revenue source.
The question facing the Hatoyama administration is which of its election promises should be carried out and to what extent during its first year in office. It must now make a crucial decision on policy priorities.
The budget-cutting team has been criticized for making hasty rough-and-ready decisions. Critics also said members of the Government Revitalization Unit were not fully briefed on details of how the programs and projects were supposed to work and that decisions on reductions and terminations were actually made before the team started its review.
The team decided to scrap a program intended to help young people having difficulty in adjusting to society, like those who hide away at home, and find jobs for them. But those who are working for the program are calling for its continuation. In the same vein, there are calls to maintain funding for projects that give children opportunities to read books and experience nature.
Indeed, education, welfare and science and technology are policy areas where government expenditures should not be evaluated simply on the basis of cost effectiveness.
The task force's proposals indicate that drastic measures, which could cause unwanted effects, are needed to uproot the vested interests accumulated during the long grip on power by the Liberal Democratic Party.
In assessing the programs, the team sought to ascertain whether they really required the involvement of the central government or could be entrusted to local governments or private-sector entities. The review is significant in that it involved a fundamental rethinking of how administrative services should be provided. If the review process determines that certain programs are necessary, the government should keep them alive by figuring out effective ways to finance them.
Hatoyama has suggested that the budget review is a one-off event. But given the fact that the projects examined by the team represent only 15 percent of the total, it is clear that the work should continue until all of them have been scrutinized.
Above all, such a budget review fully open to the public is certain to change the mind-set of bureaucrats in the Kasumigaseki district and strengthen the sense of participation in the policymaking process among taxpayers. We hope the government will continue this work in some form in future budget compilation work.
--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 19(IHT/Asahi: November 20,2009)