Pity the poor State Planning Office. It was targeted for extinction by Gov. LePage, and is now the topic for a task force led by former GOP Congressman David Emery.

Abolishing government agencies is a staple of Republican platforms. Ronald Reagan set the pattern when he vowed during his 1980 presidential campaign to dismantle the departments of energy and education, which had just been created by Jimmy Carter. Three decades later, both are still with us, though GOP presidential candidates still pledge to get rid of them.

For a governor, it’s harder. There are fewer departments and even the small ones have dedicated constituencies. It’s hard to see much political mileage in trying to ax the Department of Agriculture, for instance.

So LePage decided on the SPO, as it’s known. The state planning agency, located in the governor’s office, was created by Gov. Ken Curtis in 1968, a time more optimistic about state government’s competence and potential.

For awhile, SPO looked like it might achieve the mission of becoming state government’s think tank. Dick Barringer was a visionary director for Gov. Joseph Brennan, a Democrat, and Evan Richert played the same role for Angus King, an independent. Both occasionally got a little ahead of their bosses, but Barringer’s work on natural resources and Richert’s on the downside of sprawl were notable achievements.

Yet even at its best, SPO lacked coherence. It became more a collection of programs no one knew what else to do with than a disciplined organization with its own strong focus. When King disbanded the Solid Waste Management Agency, created during Republican John McKernan’s administration, its remaining functions went to SPO. The biggest single unit within SPO is the Coastal Program, a federally funded natural resource planning effort.

So when LePage decided SPO must go, there wasn’t a big outcry. Yet since there are so many different functions within the agency, it was hard to figure out where they should go. The Legislature rejected LePage’s initial proposal, and Emery’s task force was created to sort things out.

The Land for Maine’s Future program is wildly popular with the public, regularly winning two-thirds support for its bond issues, and its bipartisan legislative support is equally solid. But LePage dislikes it, so it’s slated to go to the Bureau of Geologic Services and Natural Areas, perhaps in the hope it won’t be heard from again.

The solid waste programs, which monitor and boost recycling, are supposed to go to the Department of Environmental Protection, mostly. But then there’s the tricky matter of the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill, taken over from Georgia-Pacific in the vain hope of salvaging its Old Town mill — and now the major destination for trash in northern Maine. DEP already regulates landfills, so it would be a conflict to operate one. Where does it go? To the Bureau of General Services.

BGS performs landlord functions for state government – finding and leasing space, in particular. It’s generally effective, although its recent approval of a sale of state land to a prison warden was rescinded after the attorney general ruled it illegal.

GSA is in the office space business. How is it supposed to know how to run a landfill, that — need we say? — has substantial potential liabilities, both legal and financial?

It turns out abolishing SPO isn’t so easy. Although the plan would eliminate the positions of director, deputy director and two senior planners, LePage wants the funding to be redeployed in a new Office of Policy and Management. The administration has described it as being like the federal Office of Management and Budget, without the budget part.

What it’s evidently intended to do is help downsize state government, saving at least its $1 million cost each year. That’s certainly in line with LePage’s approach — not much chance of a brand-new program emerging from OPM.

Overall, adopting the Emery task force recommendations would save $400,000 a year — pocket change, even these days.

This may partially explain LePage’s current effort to slash $220 million from the Department of Health and Human Services in midbudget, based on a unverified gap created largely by his administration’s own errors and miscalculations. This astonishing proposal sweeps through everything from prescription programs for seniors, Head Start for toddlers, and assisted living for the disabled with a zeal that can only be described as draconian. Unable to save money through reorganization, why not declare a fiscal crisis and start slashing?

Perhaps the Legislature should have let him abolish SPO, after all.