COLUMBUS (AP) — After just eight weeks in office, Republican Gov. John Kasich has already begun to shake things up throughout Ohio government.

Economic development efforts have been privatized, the bargaining rights of public sector unions have been targeted, and state regulators have been instructed to back off small businesses for the sake of the economy.

How it all fits into the new governor’s vision for bringing back Ohio’s economy and closing an $8 billion budget gap will become clear over the next two weeks.

The process begins Tuesday, when Kasich delivers his first State of the State speech to a joint session of the state Legislature.

In his usual down-to-earth manner, and without a teleprompter, Kasich will likely lay out political principles and steer clear of focusing on most of the painful details of the dramatically reduced two-year state operating budget he’s said he will unveil seven days later.

Kasich said Friday that the address wouldn’t include “a long laundry list of things,” which might mean those initiatives that past governors have pinpointed in the speech as ways to meet key political goals. Those decisions will be linked to the introduction of the budget, which Kasich referred to in a recent Fox News interview as “a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen.”

“The state of the state is in our hands. And I’m going to lay out the challenges that we face, the difficulties that we’re in, what I think it’s going to take to get out of them, and the fact that we have a lot of things going for us in Ohio,” Kasich told reporters Friday. “And if we hang together, we’ll be OK.”

In that way, the address will not be dissimilar from the inaugural address that Kasich delivered on his first day in office Jan. 10.

“We’ll just see how it goes, and hopefully I won’t screw it up,” he said. He said he considered the inaugural speech to be important, too. “This is important, but you know, they’re all important.”

Since he replaced Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland two months ago, Kasich’s first priority — the public-private partnership known as JobsOhio — has been enacted into law as a replacement for the state-run Ohio Department of Development’s job creation efforts. Development Director Mark Kvamme was the first person that Kasich mentioned publicly as being headed onto the entity’s nine-member board of CEOs and other business whizzes. Kasich will be its chair.

On Friday, he signed into law regulatory changes that allow state rule makers to prioritize the needs of small businesses when weighing the value of certain regulations.

Tuesday’s speech could shed more light on the direction Kasich will move on other privatization efforts he’s exploring to balance his budget. Those include selling or leasing the Ohio Turnpike and returning, by his estimate, $2.5 billion to state infrastructure programs. It could include liquor sales, which Kasich says could net $1 billion for the state, or farming out more prison operations to private operators like one where his new prisons director recently did work.

Kasich could also be looking to take some public university expenses off the state’s books through a charter concept supported by his new chancellor, Jim Petro. The governor also is an advocate of expanded school choice options.

The governor has predicted that a bill moving quickly through the Republican-led state Legislature stripping unions of many of their collective bargaining rights will pass easily and be signed by him without fanfare. The Statehouse has been deluged with protesters for weeks as the bill moved through the Ohio Senate, where it was passed and sent to the House last week.

How associated savings — which the state says would have been $217 million a year under the more restrictive unamended bill — work into Kasich’s plans is unlikely to be mentioned in a his Tuesday speech. Despite being targeted by union groups and commentators for it, Kasich says he is not anti-union and will resist fanning the flames of the controversy by gloating.

In late February, the state panel that controls millions of dollars of school construction contracts — now controlled by members of Kasich’s new Cabinet — voted to no longer support union-scale wage requirements on job sites. It’s widely expected that university-level construction projects will be the next target.

More favored subjects for the speech could be Kasich’s plans in the areas of education and health.

State lawmakers are already on their way to dismantling key elements of a sweeping school-funding reform package — dubbed the Evidence Based Model — that Strickland championed. The proposal was a far-reaching attempt to address what the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled is an unconstitutional overreliance on property taxes — but it was also largely unfunded. And much of the budget gap Kasich’s team is grappling with comes from a hole that will be left from federal stimulus dollars for education that will not be available in the next budget cycle.

In January, Kasich created the Governor’s Office of Health Transformation, which has been hard at work looking for methods for reinventing Ohio’s cash-strapped health care delivery system, particularly Medicaid, in order to cut costs.

Kasich’s health director has been an advocate for Ohio’s participation in a growing movement to change how primary care is practiced through what’s called a medical home, which allow nurses, physician assistants and disease educators to resolve more problems so that doctors can be freed up to spend more time with the sickest patients.

Kasich has also asked the directors of to explore ways to consolidate functions at the state departments of Development Disabilities, Mental Health, and Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services.