Axe Dozens of Dormant State Agencies - report recommends
PEER recommends repealing dormant Mississippi state agencies
A legislative watchdog agency told a Senate panel studying government restructuring that dozens of state agencies still on the books are effectively inactive and should be repealed to clean up state law.
Ted Booth, of the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, testified before the Senate government restructuring hearing on Oct. 14. He said PEER's review aligned with work already done by the Lieutenant Governor's office in identifying which entities should go. "What we've concluded is that we agree with the lieutenant governor's office on all the ones that are coded red. That those are entities that we probably could just do without," Booth said.
Booth told the panel the agencies in question have been dormant for years, some never becoming operational after being created by statute decades ago. He was direct with senators that repealing the agencies would not produce savings, since the entities currently spend nothing. Instead, he said, the value of repeal would be in clearing outdated statutes from Mississippi's law books.
The testimony comes as PEER's broader review found dozens of statutory bodies that exist in name only, including some created decades ago but never activated. Booth's caution that repeal saves no money tempers the scope of the recommendation, even as it feeds into a wider legislative push in Mississippi to scrutinize government structure and reduce what lawmakers have characterized as bureaucratic bloat. The Senate panel is continuing its review of state agencies as part of the broader government restructuring study.