A letter from the Prime Minister’s Office calls on all ministries to justify themselves, or else be reformed out of existence. On the other hand, a letter to the PMO from the Speaker of the National Assembly might help explain why the government needs reform in the first place. The Speaker’s letter says that the Public Accounts Committee needs to reconcile thousands of audit objections between 1985-19866 and 2022-2023, involving billions of rupees, and needs the PMO’s assistance in making the various ministries and divisions comply.
The PMO’s letter seems to be merely making the ministries go through motions already gone through before, at the time of the Eighteenth Amendment, and the transfer of functions to the provincial governments. There are two areas which the ministries are asked to consider: which bodies or organisations are performing functions which should be handed over to the provinces, and which can be made subject to public-private partnership. The result of such an exercise will be to reduce the federal government’s headcount, but not in absolute terms, merely transfer it to the provinces or the private sector. The steps do not include any measures of improving productivity, so that headcounts could be reduced because the same work had become possible with less people. The shrinking of government is something that the PTI government promised, though the Institutional Reforms Committee headed by former SBP Governor Dr Ishrat Hussain ran into a brick wall and Dr Ishrat resigned. The present government has set up a fresh reform committee, but if political will continues to be lacking, nothing will come of it yet again.
One of the strongest proponents of reform is the IMF, which seems interested in shrinking the government primarily because it reduces the salary bill. Because the government is so desperate to obtain a fresh IMF package, it is barely possible that reforms will be pushed against the counterpressure of the bureaucracy, which has empire-building tendencies so strong that it has ensured that the posts earmarked for abolition because they have not been filled for a long time, are kept on the books. The Speaker’s letter suggests the means by which they are to be brought under parliamentary scrutiny. The letter itself is evidence that that scrutiny is presently absent, as the Ministries’ Principal Accounting Officers (bureaucrats who testify to the PAC) have not called Departmental Accounts Committees in the last year. Bureaucrats escape having their accounts examined, which means they escape scrutiny.
