In a maneuver assailed as “Midnight Madness” by Republicans, legislative budget-writers last week put the fiscal punctuation on a valuable government agency: the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability.

OPEGA are the bad news guys. Through their sharp nonpartisan program analyses, they find the types of things that make government look, wellbad. Like the weak oversight of economic development programs, for example, or wasted funds by Maine’s various cultural agencies.

According to an assessment released late Friday by Sen. Kevin Raye, R-Washington County, the ranking Republican on the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee, OPEGA has uncovered $167,000 in misused funds, and recommended more than $2 million in overall savings.

During current budget deliberations, lawmakers booked $5 million in cuts from economic development agencies, based largely on the findings of a landmark OPEGA report last summer, then ordered an audit of the programs.

In short, OPEGA has proved its worth, and should continue to do so. So axing it for a $1.2 million savings seems nonsensical; the agency actually saves taxpayers money by rooting out waste, mismanagement and inefficiency. Why would anybody want to cut it?

Sen. Libby Mitchell, D-Kennebec County, is chair of the Government Oversight Committee. On Friday, she said the budget proposal is merging OPEGA with the Office of Fiscal and Policy Review, and creating a new bipartisan legislative committee for program evaluation, one assisted by two staffers paid by OFPR.

This, she says, will “do the job that OPEGA does.”

The question becomes whether this merger mechanism can evaluate and monitor government better than OPEGA. This is a leap of faith, given the savings and insight OPEGA has produced, and the breadth of topics the agency – rather than a committee – can efficiently review.

It behooved lawmakers to seek efficiencies anywhere they could, though, and if this new committee – similar in makeup and staffing as the Appropriations Committee, Mitchell says – can do OPEGA’s job better than OPEGA, while saving a million bucks, it deserves consideration.

What a high-wire act, though. If OPEGA is mothballed, and the committee fails to deliver results, the plummeting value of public confidence in lawmakers would make Bear Stearns seem like a bull market.

And hey, we’re a newspaper; we know what it’s like to deliver not-so-good news.

In this way, we’re simpatico with OPEGA, which works to provide honest, unvarnished program evaluations for the purpose of making government more accountable. This is a good way to become unpopular.

It’s no wonder they’re on the chopping block. But for the public good, OPEGA should remain.