Back in the late 1980s when a young Harvard-trained legal scholar named Ma Ying-jeou chaired the Executive Yuan’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, he initiated a project to streamline and modernize the government’s executive branch, which was still operating under a basic structure put in place in 1949.

Efforts to refine that plan proceeded gradually under the Kuomintang-led administration in the 1990s and continued earlier in this decade when the DPP was the ruling party, culminating in the drafting of a bill for submission to the Legislative Yuan. But more than two decades after Ma first broached the idea, reorganization of the Executive Yuan is still no closer to reality. Conducting serious reform means stepping on the toes of some vested interests, and the resulting political pressures have repeatedly been strong enough to stall the process. 

Perhaps the starkest example of the archaic nature of the current framework is the continued existence of a ministry-level Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission. But of far greater concern are the structural impediments, including overlapping responsibilities across ministries, preventing government from operating at optimum efficiency. It is no accident that when international economic research organizations release their annual surveys of business competitiveness, Taiwan’s otherwise impressive score is invariably dragged down by the performance of the bureaucracy.

While AmCham urges President Ma to carry forward to fruition his original vision of revitalizing government, we are aware that the goal of a comprehensive makeover     undoubtedly cannot be accomplished within a very short timeframe. In the interim, the Chamber suggests that the administration first tackle an urgently needed piece of the most recent version of the reorganization package – creation of a Ministry of Environment and Resources, upgrading the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and combining it with related departments now belonging to other agencies. These include the Forestry Bureau under the Council of Agriculture (COA) and the Water Resources Agency under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA).

The Typhoon Morakot catastrophe demonstrated the danger of trying to muddle through without an organization that possesses unambiguous authority over all water management and soil erosion issues. Instead, jurisdiction over a given waterway may be shared by four different Cabinet-level organizations – the MOEA, COA, Ministry of Interior, and the Council of Indigenous Peoples – plus the governments of the various cities and counties that the river flows through. When problems arise, there is inevitably no one to take charge, as each government unit seeks to pass the buck. That fragmented authority exacerbated the problem of responding effectively to the Morakot flooding, and it will enormously complicate the cleanup and reconstruction effort.

Taiwan has already been sufficiently challenged over the decades by the seemingly endless cycle of periods of flooding interspersed with periods of drought. At a time when global climate change is causing weather patterns to become more and more unpredictable, that challenge will only be intensified. AmCham encourages the government to address the crucial environmental and resource issues it is being confronted with by establishing a new ministry with clearly defined authority to act as needed.