GSK's First Meeting

The first meeting of Gyosei Sasshin Kaigi (GSK) was held at the Prime Minister’s office residence in the morning of October 22, Thursday.

GSK’s urgent task is to review the budget for next fiscal year. A rough estimate of the budget swelled out to about 95 trillion Japanese yen. Wow. Current fiscal year’s initial budget is about 88.5 trillion yen. Budget requests in the Hatoyama administration are much bigger than the previous administration’s.

What GSK will use is Jigyo Shiwake or “to sorting out government projects”. It is a work to judge whether a project is necessary or not, either central or local governments should take in charge of it and so on. Mr. Hideki Kato, the secretary-general of GSK and the president of Japan Initiative, a think tank invented this Jigyo Shiwake method. It has already been applied for local governments.

At the first meeting, GSK decided to establish three shiwake (sorting out) groups. Each group consists of Diet members, experts and former local government officials. They are called shiwake-nin, or a sorting out person.

Shiwake groups will hold hearings from each department and agency about the rough estimate of the budget. Then, they will choose 200 to 300 projects which should be sorted out. In this month, works to sort out the project will be open to the public. That will, I am sure, promote transparency of a process to select necessary or unnecessary government projects. By the end of coming November, the groups will arrange their sorting-out-evaluations and propose a reducing expenditure to the Hatoyama administration.

Prime Minister Hatoyama said, “We should cut down on expenses as much as possible.”

With his all-out support, GSK has started.


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