Government empire building

When confronted with a problem, government solutions tend toward increasing the size and complexity of the government. So generally, when something is not working, the solution is to basically increase the size of the solution.

Some may disagree, but I think this is a prime example:

Advocates called on the state and the public to increase efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect following the unrelated deaths in recent days of three children whose families had prior contact with child welfare authorities.

“There are 92 counties, and there are probably 90 different ways of doing things, and we intend to make that more uniform and consistent,” said James W. Payne, director of the Department of Child Services.

Payne said one call center staffed by specially trained operators could help provide consistency in the way child protection workers respond to reports of abuse and neglect.

Link.

So instead of local official dealing with a local problem, we will have the ever efficient state government initiating (and presumably overseeing) the process, dictating the actions to be taken by those local officials. I agree that there are 92 different approaches to dealing with reports of child neglect and abuse under the current system, and that a report of child neglect in Marion county will be met with a very different reaction than in Union counties. But, those reactions, in my experience, are generally consistent with the expectations of the local citizens and with the budgets of local governments.

I doubt that having all local agencies comply with the standards and procedures set out by Judge Payne will solve the problem of children slipping through the safety net and getting harmed, but I have no doubt that the added complexity and centralized control will add costs and headaches to an already overburdened system.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Domestic Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.