At the request of Democratic Gov . Bev Perdue, a special panel has started looking into ways to make state government spending more efficient.

The Budget Reform and Accountability Commission is investigating ways to cut waste. Perdue said the state is facing the biggest budget shortfall since the Great Depression. The General Assembly just passed a budget about three weeks ago but the governor said that wasn't the right time for the budget commission to mix with state lawmakers.

"I felt like we couldn't lose the focus of the cuts and the investments that the budget team and the General Assembly had to make," Perdue said.

But now her focus is moving forward and making fundamental changes to the way the state budgets.

"I do believe we need to re-examine where we're investing and how we're investing," Perdue explained to the members of the commission Tuesday.

The commission will look at which programs and services can be cut or combined. Co-chair Norris Tolson has worked in the private sector and state government. He said over the years programs have been layered on top of each other.

"When that happens we don't always stop long enough to say, wait a minute, we did a program that looked a little bit like this 10 years ago, 5 years ago," Tolson said.

Tolson said the problem now is that it's too hard to track down all of the state funded programs.

"We ought to be able to put together some kind of a structure that makes it easier for a governor and a legislature working together to be able to look at those big buckets of expenditures and say , what are we going to do about it?" Tolson said.

Some ideas might require some legislative action, so the deadline to get the recommendations to the governor and General Assembly is February 2010 for the short session and October 2010 for the long session.

"It's going to be up to the policy makers to decide if that's something they can really do," Tolson said.