Bureaucratic Shufflings

This week we all learned that the governor of Michigan had issued an executive order dismantling one department that contained the state library and state archives and placed each unit in that former department into another department. The news met with much disdain from the archival community.

I am not a resident of Michigan. I've never even been to Michigan. But I see this as a positive step for a state that is having its own kind of fiscal crisis.

Bureaucracy reigns supreme in government, where the trend is to create more departments not less. Archives and special collections (housed in the Michigan state library) are by nature bureaucratic structures. Anyone who has read Ernst Posner's book American State Archives on the history of state archives will know this for a fact. But why does that bureaucratic structure have to change?

The way I see it is two fold. First, the state archives and state library can exist anywhere within the structure of the state government. In Florida, they exist under the Secretary of State. In Mississippi they exist in two places - the archives is under the state legislature, the library I am not sure. Both models work well for that state. Each state is different. The people in each state have created government structures that suit them, so why can't a state archives be put under different departments in different states?

Second, I see this as a positive move because the top-level bureaucratic structure formerly administrating the state archives and state library in Michigan has been dismantled and there will probably be a lot of money saved in overhead costs, salaries and benefits, and other expenditures. Saving money by eliminating expenses is a good government practice, if the alternative also works. And it does in this instance because, as far as I can tell from the news stories, the state archives has not been changed, although the fate of the state library seems in jeopardy.

As is so often quoted to me, the nature of government is change. Government in the modern age is full of bureaucracy, so I think it is okay once in a while, for the sake of change as well as the added benefit of saving money, for the bureaucracy to be shuffled. I just hope, like I know you all do, that this won't mean loss of jobs for archivists.