It’s about time -- though it has actually come earlier than expected: The national Lego bricks game that comes once every presidential election, which often involves so much governmental reorganization that it resembles playing with the toy.

You have interlocking bricks, parts and connectors of all sorts. Let your imagination unfold by moving and shifting them around. Here comes a dragon. With some pulling and plugging, you turn the dragon into a car. An airplane in the next half hour. Onward to a ship. Creativity knows no limits.

As the presidential election is now looming, presidential hopefuls are in the process of creating their own plans of governmental reorganization.

In their plans, this state function goes to this ministry, that national function moves to another ministry, this role reverts back to its old home and that role finds a new foster home.

And then some ministries disappear, some are disassembled and some gobble up others to double their size.

Depending on where the bricks and parts end up, some government officials move to Seoul, while others catch the KTX bound for Sejong City or Busan. Never mind their families and children -- they are supposed to follow orders from the new commander-in-chief.

New ministries and agencies will acquire new names. I am not sure how many new ones are possible now, after the country having tried all the variations through experiments of the past five presidencies.

We now even have a ministry for “future creation.”

Perhaps our next administration might introduce a ministry for “virtual reality,” to relieve the mental stress of a public traumatized since fall.

We will hear a grandiose explanation from a stone-faced government spokesperson as to why the shift is being made and how the names are chosen.

With a new playbook dumped on them, people scramble to learn which ministry and agency does what.

Then comes the adoption of new agency logos. Business cards are now replaced with new ones with new names and logos. Yet again, our foreign emissaries and colleagues must figure out which is which and who is who.

By the time we get used to the new names, there will be another change as soon as the next presidential election is over.

Just the other day I was watching KBS news. In one of the segments reporting on North Korea related issues, the caption at the bottom was flashing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the former name of the present Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of course, this could have been an innocent mistake. But we observe similar mistakes way too often when ministries are mentioned. Constant changes have made many of us -- even the national broadcasting company -- fumble.

International reports commonly put former names in parentheses when they refer to the names of Korean ministries. Believe me, it takes a family tree to track down the ancestors and descendants of a particular ministry.

The problem is these changes do not come without costs. Nobody knows exactly how much we pay as a result of the constant change of ministerial functions, their portfolios and names. I figure it’s a lot.

More than anything else, frequent changes undercut the credibility of policies of an agency: The life span of a key policy is just five years and you don’t know who to talk to several years later.

Even at an individual level, who would readily deal with someone who changes his name and identity every five years.

Under the Korean legal system, the names of the ministries and agencies and their organizational structure are stipulated in law through the Government Organization Act, not the constitution. So, a new president can easily -- actually almost freely given the unrivaled authority at the beginning of a presidency -- amend the law and change the government organizational structure.

Such changes should be made more difficult, at least for some key ministries and agencies, whether through a constitutional amendment or something else.

But for now, whoever becomes the next president, we will see a whole new set of government ministries and agencies, a brainchild of the leader and his or her aides’ unprepared and half-baked Lego bricks experiment.


By Lee Jae-min

Lee Jae-min is a professor of law at Seoul National University. He can be reached at jaemin@snu.ac.kr. — Ed.