On Sunday, the Knesset formally approved the new governing coalition, which has an unprecedent 35 ministers, and an additional sixteen deputy ministers. (Since 2001, there have, on average, been about 26 per government.) New ministries have had to be created, and, Haviv Rettig Gur writes, many Israelis are concerned about the resulting expenses and inefficiencies:
[N]o Israeli media outlet . . . has failed to point accusingly at the new “Ministry for Strengthening and Advancing Community” the prime minister just created, or the “minister in the Defense Ministry” Benny Gantz just appointed—who will serve alongside Gantz, the actual defense minister—or the strange lumping together of higher education with the water supply, or the equally baffling removal of the community-policing program from, well, the police.
Yet, Gur notes, such “contrived ministries” have been part of Israel’s politics since at least 1964, and are a necessary part of the coalitional horse trading that its constitution requires. Gur argues that there are graver concerns than the government’s size:
The handful of ministries that genuinely have nothing at all to do is relatively small and most aren’t new. The trouble with the new government lies not in the ministries it has added, but in the ones it has broken apart. A careful look at the rejiggering of the cabinet reveals a worrying pattern. The ministries were redistributed in politically advantageous ways for the prime minister, weakening opponents and rewarding loyalists—but often at a dire cost to the agencies themselves.
Orly Levy-Abekasis’s new Ministry for Strengthening and Advancing Community is perhaps the best example of these. To construct the ministry, and to allow her to pretend its existence is justified, vital programs had to be sacrificed on the altar of Levy-Abekasis’s political reputation. The “City Without Violence” program, a collaboration of the welfare and public security ministries that sends social workers into high-crime areas to help develop community policing programs, was unplugged from its administrative home and handed to Levy-Abekasis. It was thus detached administratively from the two agencies that built it and must still implement it on the ground.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/coalition-flaw-isnt-all-the-new-ministries-but-the-ones-that-were-ripped-apart/