“Bureaucratize It” Oregon GOP Governor candidate Chris Dudley to create new political bureaucracy!

By Sean Cruz

(Portland, Oregon)—Chris Dudley plans to create a new bureaucracy of political appointees in the Governor’s Office, with new titles of “State Budget Director” and “a Budget Review Team”, and order the new bureaucracy to duplicate the budget review and regular auditing work that is already being done by non-political state agencies.

Reaching deep into his playbook, “Just Wing It!”, Dudley posted his strategy to:

“Strengthen Executive Leadership and Budget Accountability:

“As Governor, Chris Dudley will appoint a State Budget Director inside his office – not a state agency; will establish a Budget Review Team of experts in public and private finance to review budget assumptions and conduct regular audits; and will aggressively use his veto-pen to control legislative spending that is non-essential, wasteful, or fails to adequately save for a rainy day.”

Dudley’s proposed State Budget Director will not have any actual budgetary authority, but will report to the GOP Governor and help him understand what the fiscal reports and audits mean in language he can understand, and will lead the proposed Budget Review Team, acting as the Governor’s Point Guard on the Budget, doing the work that the Governor normally would be doing himself.

Dudley has not disclosed the salaries and PERS benefits his “experts in public and private finance” are looking forward to claiming, nor a short list of who these essential Team Dudley members might be, saving that information for after the election.

Since the Oregon GOP platform calls for the “abolition of the Department of Education”, it is possible that Dudley plans to pay for his Budget Review bureaucracy with savings gained from shutting down the Oregon DOE and moving into their offices, but that is only conjecture (except for the call to abolish the Department of Education).

There is speculation that Dudley’s new Governor’s Budget Review Team will also be proponents of Creationism and thus serve a dual role, advising Dudley’s new State Education Director on the many budget-saving faith-based curriculum ideas as called for in the Oregon GOP platform, which would replace the abolished Department of Education.