Lawmakers yesterday questioned the Executive Yuan’s plan to restructure the government, saying that while the objective of the initiative is to make the central government smaller and more efficient, the plan would make it bigger instead.
The government reform project was started in 1987, and amendments to the Organic Act of the Executive Yuan (行政院組織法) were adopted in January 2010 to reduce the number of ministries from 37 to 29. However, since the organizational reforms started in January last year, the inauguration of as many as 13 ministries is pending.
Another challenging task will be carry out the 135 legal revisions needed to complete the restructuing. A provisionary law regulating the reorganization and readjustment of Cabinet agencies will become invalid by Dec. 31 next year, meaning that all administrative transformations must be done by that date.
The chairs of the legislature’s Judiciary, Organic Laws and Statutes Committee Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), both called the delay “a disaster.”
Liao accused the Executive Yuan of not understanding the point of restructuring the government and of being too idealistic. He said that government restructuring in Northern Europe a few years ago not only reduced the number of civil servants, but also lightened the state’s economic burden.
However, there was no real “reform” in the Cabinet’s restructuring, only the “moving around of ministries,” which has resulted in none of the ministries being happy with the reorganization, Liao said. He added that a genuine restructuring would close extraneous ministries at both central and local government levels, as well as reduce the number of counties and cities.
Many government bodies have expressed their discontent with the proposed realignments. For instance, the Construction and Planning Agency has lobbied lawmakers to stay under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior, instead of being made part of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. The Forestry Bureau has also pushed to be allowed to stay with the Council of Agriculture, rather than being transferred to the future ministry of environmental resources.
Yu said the government’s restructuring plan is illogical and fails to resolve the biggest issue: a lack of exit mechanisms for public servants. She said that without such mechanisms, non-essential government staff would continue to be employed, while new workers would have no positions to fill. Hence, after the bureaucratic realignments, the number of government employees would grow, increasing the state’s burden without improving its efficiency.
Liao urged the Executive Yuan to propose better solutions because its controversial plans to establish a ministry of environmental resources and a ministry of health and welfare are not likely to be carried out as planned.
DPP Legislator Wu Yi-chen (吳宜臻) said she only sees mergers, not functional readjustments, in the Cabinet’s plans.
Citing the future ministry of health and welfare as an example, Wu said that while the Cabinet proposed creating a directorate-general for social and family affairs to oversee the Department of Social Affairs and the Child Welfare Bureau, such an agency would be able to solve problems requiring coordination between social affairs and health sectors.
Without readjusting agencies’ and ministries’ functions, mergers would not fulfil the objectives of the Executive Yuan’s government restructuring, Wu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater