As lawmakers gathered in Charleston for this April’s interim meetings, surely they were expecting better progress on the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources split. What they heard from Dr. Jeffrey Coben, the interim cabinet secretary for DHHR, amounted to “we’re working on it and we’ll get back to you.”

To be fair, bureaucracy isn’t good at self-examination and improvement. But it is built for enlarging itself — one would think such an opportunity would be embraced.

Instead, Coben told the Legislature he has not yet even put together a document regarding his plans for implementing the split. In an explanation that must have had those in private business rolling their eyes, Coben told lawmakers he is planning a meeting to discuss the plan.

“I hope following those meetings I will be able to come back to you with more specific plans that have been discussed and vetted with the Governor’s Office as well,” Coben said. “Those meetings will be in depth. They will be our initial meetings. Some decisions, I hope, will be made during that time. We may need to have subsequent meetings … to really finalize the plans as it relates to the governor’s thoughts moving forward.”

At that pace, we should be having one last meeting to discuss the results of the past eight months worth of planning discussions and meetings sometime around Christmas. But taxpayers will be forgiven if they wonder whether the split into a Department of Human Services, a Department of Health and a Department of Health Facilities will be completed by Jan. 1, 2024.

As Coben laid out concerns about implementing the DHHR split, House Deputy Speaker Matthew Rohrbach, R-Cabell, was right to push back a little on the excuses.

“I don’t believe we’re trying to do anything here that other states aren’t already doing,” Rohrbach said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here.”

Coben and other public officials may very well pull themselves together and complete the split of DHHR properly and on time. Doing so will require a shift in strategy toward less talk, fewer excuses and a lot more action.