Brown's Shrinking Universe

The office of Governor Jerry Brown should be focused on finding a path to big, structural changes that restore democracy, accountability, and honest budgeting to California.

Instead, the governor's office decided it was going to spend its time micromanaging requests by state workers for out-of-state travel.

Yes, God is in the details. But Brown's obsession with the small -- including his recent announcement that he will ban non-essential travel -- is starting to look less like a strategy to win a budget deal and more like a fetish.

And orders like the non-essential travel directive, which put the governor's office in charge of overseeing out-of-state travel, may create more problems than it solves. Brown's understaffed governor's office is struggling to keep up with demands, and focus on the big pictures. The last thing the governor's team needs is the distraction of wading through travel requests.

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