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Guest Column: Fixing South Carolina’s ‘Out Of Control’ Health Bureaucracy
Jennifer Black: State representatives need to get serious about reforming broken, unaccountable agency.
3 comments
The DHEC Board is appointed by the Governor with the consent of the Senate. If they felt like DHEC was doing an inadequate job they could’ve asserted their authority for change to occur. Putting DHEC in the cabinet and combining it with other agencies to make a mega-agency larger than the current DHEC is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Unfortunately in practicality, the power of the Board is not that powerful either. They do not get into policy or practice of DHEC, they only hire and fire the Director. And when you are missing leadership in real time, having a spread out board, coupled with their only threat of firing the Director of DHEC, no action happens. I am not sure how putting DHEC into a cabinet agency makes a “mega-agency larger”. It merely puts the focus of accountability clear, to an elected position that is ultimately beholden to his/her vote.
The only restrictions that were made at the state level were via executive order of the governor. The governor likewise included DHEC in his regular public addresses and stood behind them in their recommendations. Whether there was any issue with DHEC or not (and I’m certainly not conceding that there was), the governor was most responsible for the state’s pandemic response (again without giving any opinion on whether it was good or bad).