Because I usually finish what I start, the “Drafts” section of this site’s back office is mercifully brief. It contains exactly one unfinished blogpost. That one is more than four years old, and I long ago despaired of ever pulling it off.

Its title is “We Have No Idea How Well State Government Performs.” I honestly believe that statement is true, but I’ve never finished it because it would be an absolute bear to research — to try to catalogue examples of state government failing to work as it should, when I suspect that most examples remain safely concealed in a bureaucratic mountain that gets little meaningful independent oversight.

But three recent news items provide solid evidence in support of the working theory that our state government is not nearly as efficient or effective as it could be.

Let’s start with what seems to be almost a decade of gross negligence at the Agency of Education. According to Seven Days’ Alison Novak, the Agency has disclosed a “coding error” that has tainted its annual Vermont State Report Card going all the way back to 2017. The Report Card, which the Scott administration has regularly used to bash Vermont’s public schools, “may have led [AOE] to misidentify certain schools as having persistent achievement gaps on standardized state tests,” Novak wrote.

Education Secretary Zoie Saunders issued an artfully crafted non-apology* and promised a review of every school that has been designated as needing “targeted support and improvement” over the past eight years, which sounds like a big expensive undertaking.

*She apologized, not for the erroneous reports themselves, but for “the confusion that will inevitably result from this error.” That phrase makes “this error” seem like an appendix to the rest of the thing, rather than the sole cause of all that confusion.

This isn’t quite “You Had One Job” territory, but it ain’t far off. Reporting on the quality of public education is a core responsibility for the Agency, mandated by federal law. The Report Card gets broad media coverage, and downgraded schools have to answer for alleged shortcomings. And, again, the Report Card is used by the Scott administration as a cudgel against our public schools.

One more detail. Saunders’ “apology” and promise to make amends was issued on February 26 — only one week after AOE released its most recent Report Card. Apparently they expect us to believe that the error was completely unknown on the 19th and fully confirmed by the 26th, which seems incredible.

Now let’s move on to Gov. Scott’s pet government-reform project, the Agency of Digital Services. It was a well-intentioned effort to centralize the acquisition, implementation and oversight of the state’s digital infrastructure. Scott established ADS with a promise to make government work better and more efficiently. So how’s that going?

Well, about a month ago Finance Commissioner Adam Greshin delivered some rather sheepish testimony to the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee. As VTDigger’s Theo Wells-Spackman reported, Greshin told the committee that the state’s “primary annual IT operations fund went from $1 million in the black three years ago to $25 million in the red last year.”

That seems like a big ol’ oopsie. What’s worse, per Wells-Spackman, is that the administration “is not quite sure what’s actually causing the fund’s deficit.” Greshin told the committee that it’s “very challenging to track what spending is going on where.”

All right, digital infrastructure is a monumental administrative challenge. But c’mon, we’ve had a state agency focused entirely on digital services since 2017. If they haven’t been able to figure it out after nine years on the job, that looks like, sounds like, smells like failure. For Phil Scott’s signal innovation in state government.

There’s been no follow-up coverage by any media outlet, even though Greshin’s testimony left many questions unanswered. The Agency of Digital Services may or may not be a full-on boondoggle, but do we really know if it’s doing a good job? I submit that we do not, and Greshin’s remarks were a signal that all is not well at the governor’s pet project.

Finally, we move on to the latest report from Auditor Doug Hoffer, which came out on March 5 and was first reported four days later by VTDigger and Vermont Public. (The four days included a weekend, so we can cut them a little slack.) Digger’s Wells-Spackman wrote that Hoffer found “gaps in the state’s child care oversight processes” that “pose potential risks to both child safety and federal funding,” which seems suboptimal at a moment when the Trump administration and the Republican Congress is looking for any excuse to punish blue states for alleged managerial shortcomings.

It’s not exactly reassuring for parents, either. Per Vermont Public’s Derek Brouwer, the audit “found that state inspectors have been undercounting serious violations of safety regulations.”

Oh, and wouldn’t you know it, digital infrastructure is part of the problem! Hoffer characterized the Department’s enforcement software as “a mess.” Paging the Agency of Digital Services!

There’s more to Hoffer’s audit, but that will suffice to underline my point. The auditor does what he can, but he has a small office and can only do so many audits and reviews. The Legislature has no capacity to even conduct oversight hearings, much less the kinds of investigations that are routine in Congress. Our news media are so depleted that there are no resources to do any in-depth reporting á la the EB-5 scandal, or even follow up on tantalizing revelations like Greshin’s.

Which brings me back to the headline of my (probably) never-to-be-published blogpost: We have no idea how well state government performs.

But I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that the three cases cited above are not the only ones where the government has failed to perform up to the taxpayer’s expectations. Odds are, we’ll only find out about the others when the auditor digs in or when voluntarily disclosed by Scott administration officials themselves.