Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised this week to conduct a top-to-bottom review of state government that will examine every function, determine if it is still worth doing and, if so, whether it can be done better.

Calling the executive branch a "mastodon frozen in time" and "about as responsive," the governor said he wants to consolidate departments with overlapping responsibilities, abolish boards and commissions that serve no pressing need and modernize a state purchasing system that he termed archaic and expensive.

"I plan a total review of government -- its performance, its practices, its cost," Schwarzenegger told a joint session of the Legislature in his first State of the State speech.

He added: "Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government. I don't want to move the boxes around. I want to blow them up."

That's a laudable goal, and his approach is novel: He is going to appoint a commission of outsiders and experts to oversee a team of more than 100 civil servants, senior managers from within government who will be freed from their regular jobs to conduct the examination and propose changes. His aides characterize it as a once-in-a-generation overhaul of government operations.

It's certainly a project worth doing. I am under no illusions that the state's entire budget shortfall can be erased by finding "waste, fraud and abuse," as some would believe. But there is no doubt that our government tends to grow in fits and starts by political and administrative whim, with little of the discipline that private firms must exercise to survive. I am sure that the state could save money and better serve its customers -- the people of California -- if someone truly pressured it to do so.

As Schwarzenegger noted, California has 13 agencies that oversee construction of new power plants. The process for building new schools is almost as cumbersome. Two different agencies collect taxes, more than a dozen have a hand in training teachers, and a big bureaucracy plays a role in managing competing programs and offices responsible for retraining workers.

The purchasing system, while tinkered with from time to time, still hasn't caught up with the private sector. An executive from a major department store recently suggested to me that the state follow the lead of the retail world and begin conducting online "reverse auctions" to get its suppliers to bid against one another in real time for the right to sell toilet paper to the state prisons or paper towels to the Department of Social Services.

And while the rest of the world has gone electronic, many state offices are still hopelessly tracking data and business on paper or with outdated computer systems because the state either hasn't thought about updating or hasn't the ability and know-how to do it right.

Even in those offices that have modernized, the staffing is often still dictated by the needs of an earlier era. A university professor, for example, told me recently that his department still has the same level of staff support it had when secretaries did the typing for the faculty, answered their phones and made their copies. Now, with the help of desktop computers and telephone voice mail, professors do that work themselves, but the administrative support remains what it has always been.

Ferreting out such inefficiencies will not be easy. Skeptics will say it probably can't be done. I hear almost every week from rank-and-file government employees who complain that their agencies or departments are hopelessly mismanaged, behind the times, wasteful. But they invariably put the blame on the very people Schwarzenegger is looking to for leadership: the senior management.

The word on the street is that these people know they will be there for a while, even as governors come and go. Asked to justify their existence or the way they do business, they can befuddle even the most determined cost-cutters.

But for that very reason, maybe Schwarzenegger is on to something. He is enlisting the help of the people who know the most about hiding the ball. Ask a manager from Department A to review practices in Department B, and she might know just where to look and what to do. Only a massive conspiracy among those chosen to do the review -- an unlikely prospect -- could trip it up.

And with help from the appointed commission and existing snoops in the state auditor's office, the legislative analyst and the Little Hoover Commission, which already has done much of this sort of work, the governor might actually get somewhere.

Schwarzenegger is asking for ideas from anyone and everyone -- the more radical, he says, the better.

Good for him. Given the state's fiscal mess and Schwarzenegger's resistance to new taxes, the next couple of years are going to be difficult for anyone who depends on a service provided by state government. It would be a shame if people who truly need the help of government were to go without because an obsolete bureaucracy was chewing up resources that could have gone to better use.

These days, every dollar wasted, every minute not used productively, hurts. Big time.