HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania House State Government Committee passed half a dozen bills Tuesday in a package of proposed legislation that would consolidate state departments and committees in the hopes of making government more efficient.

Republicans praised the package for working to reduce the size of a bloated bureaucracy while Democrats decried the lack of collaboration with the executive branch, in which departments would be altered.

The package, if adopted, would consolidate the functions and responsibilities of existing departments into just eight agencies.

“These new agencies would be the Commonwealth Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Business, Tourism and Workforce Development, the Department of Local Government and Community Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services,” the legislations’ sponsors wrote in a memo. “Each merger in the legislation will require the adoption of a strategic plan detailing how the agencies described in the legislation are to be combined.”

This strategic plan would be put together by the stakeholders of the various agencies and functions involved in the departments in question.

The package would also eliminate numerous boards and committees that the bill deems unnecessary, many of which have not met in years.

According to the requirements laid out in the bills, the mergers would reduce administrative costs by 20 percent; improve the delivery of government services to all residents; identify, consolidate and eliminate redundant programs; and improve the use of state funds to reduce costs to the taxpayer.

The package allows for seven months following the effective date to develop the strategic plan.

“Agency mergers haven’t been discussed in Harrisburg in 20 years,” said Rep. Seth Grove, R-196, one of the architects of the package. “Last time we merged anything was under Gov. (Tom) Ridge.”

House Bill 2101 proposes merging the Budget Office, the Department of General Services, the Office of Administration and the Governor’s Office of Policy and Planning into one agency called the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB.

“What’s nice is it finally connects policy to budget,” Grove said. “There are numerous states with the same structure of government.”

State Rep. Pamela DeLissio, D-194th, raised concerns that the bill, as well as others in the package, was put together with little to no input from those that would be impacted if it passed.

“I will be a ‘no’ on this bill and quite a few of the other bills because I cannot discern what the process was that got to the recommendations that are in front of us,” she said.

Additionally, DeLissio said the administration is working on its own to reform its departments and doubted whether it was the Legislature’s place to step in.

State Rep. Matthew Bradford, D-70th, the committee’s minority chairman, agreed, saying while Republican’s thoughts may be in the right place, he did not believe this was the way to go about it.

“As well-meaning as it may be I think we need to be collaborative with the executive branch in any such reform like this,” he said. “There is some irony that from the legislative branch, where we have four print shops and four IT offices, that we’re talking about redundancy in the executive. Sometimes we probably need to look in the mirror a little bit on some of these issues.”

Many of these criticisms carried on to the other bills in the package.

Republicans disagreed with Democrats, saying that after the bills are passed all stakeholders would be involved in the strategic plan formation including those from the executive branch.

The bill passed along party lines, 15 to 11.

House Bill 2102 proposes merging the Department of Labor and Industry with functions from the Department of Community and Economic Development and Department of State, into a new Department of Business, Tourism and Workforce Development, or DBTWD.

This bill also passed along party lines in a 15 to 11 vote.

House Bill 2103 proposes merging various state agencies to create a new department to address local community needs and concerns, called the Department of Local Government and Community Affairs, or DLGCA.

“This bill would establish a department of local government and community affairs transferring specific powers from the DCED and the department of state,” said prime sponsor Matthew Dowling, R-51st. The bill also passed 15 to 11.

The final bill passed in the package that day, House Bill 2104, received a little extra resistance from the minority party when DeLissio proposed an amendment replacing the current language.

“This amendment is a gut and replace,” she said. “It repeals the administrative code pertaining to the Department of Health, leaves the Department of Human Services intact and amends Department of Health Language into Department of Human Services.”

DeLissio compared the current bill to building a house before knowing how many rooms you want or what the layout should look like.

She said her bill draws the blueprints first and then starts to build.

Grove defended the bill, saying it builds a house “to code,” garnering praise from Committee Chairman Daryl Metcalfe, R-12th, for maintaining the metaphor.

Bradford argued the DeLissio amendment is a bipartisan solution that was written with input from the administration.

“If we’re serious about trying to accomplish this, this amendment would begin a process where we could get to what seems to be a bipartisan willingness to do a consolidation,” he said.

Metcalfe disagreed and called a vote.

The amendment failed along party lines.

HB 2104 was then approved in a 15 to 11 vote.

The final piece of the package, House Bill 2105, was held for further amendment.