Process is Underway; Headed Where?

The administrative reform promised by the new government has not been long in coming. Last Saturday the Cabinet of Ministers passed a resolution to dissolve fourteen executive agencies, most of them state committees, and hand over their functions to individual ministries. The government has also changed the status of over a dozen other departments. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko made a statement to this effect at a news conference after the government meeting. Among the agencies that have been dissolved Prime Minister Tymoshenko named the State Committee for Overcoming the Consequences of the Chornobyl Disaster, the State Committee for Energy Supply, the State Aviation Service, the State Committee for Natural Resources, the State Committee for Export Controls, the State Committee for Construction and Architecture, the State Department for the Administration of Sentences, the State Committee for Religions, the State Tourism Administration, the State Committee for Sports, the State Committee for Veterans, and the State Committee for Technical Regulation and Consumer Policy. According to Tymoshenko, twelve more committees “are undergoing reforms and will be gradually incorporated into ministries.” At the same time, the government has decided to leave intact the following independent agencies: the State Committee for Housing and Communal Services, the State Service for Motorways of Ukraine, the State Tax Administration, the State Customs Service, the State Committee for Material Reserves, the State Committee for Archives, the Head Department of the State Service, the State Statistics Committee, the State Border Service, the Supreme Certifying Commission, the Antimonopoly Committee, the National Commission for the Regulation of Communications, the National Energy Regulatory Commission, the State Property Fund, the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting, the State Nuclear Energy Regulatory Committee, the State Committee for Financial Monitoring, the Pension Fund, and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). As for the SBU, Yulia Tymoshenko has unveiled plans to partition it into an intelligence agency and a bureau of investigations. “[The SBU] will work along two directions: National Intelligence, which will combine all intelligence systems available in Ukraine, and the National Bureau of Investigations, which will combine investigations and counterintelligence,” Tymoshenko said, adding: “After the reform we will only have structures that can be classed as public regulatory bodies and security agencies.” Ms. Tymoshenko has vowed that the reforms will make the executive system “transparent, clear, and manageable,” and “will completely remove commercial schemes from the executive branch of power.” According to the Prime Minister, the government has decided to limit the number of deputies of every minister and head of oblast and district administrations to one first deputy and three ordinary deputies. Ms. Tymoshenko believes that the current situation, when individual ministers have up to sixteen deputies, is unacceptable. Speaking of when the government resolution will become effective, Ms. Tymoshenko explained that the government’s resolutions relating to the administrative reform have been drafted in the form of presidential orders, and will become effective after President Yushchenko signs them. The Cabinet of Ministers has pledged to draft in the coming weeks all the necessary amendments to enactments and laws regulating the status of state agencies that are undergoing reforms. The new cabinet has thus set about reforming the system of state administration on a grand scale. Whether the reform will make the administrative system more effective instead of slowing it down as it happened before (recall, for example, Khrushchev’s reform of local administrative bodies, which only created chaos and displeased the party elite, ultimately resulting in Khrushchev’s dismissal) is anyone’s guess. So far we can only quote another famous, yet not very successful, Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, “The process is underway.”