(Questions 1-5 Writing in Word)
1. Describe the major events in the evolution of budgetary theory in the United States.
2. Describe the pros and cons of line item budgeting, performance budgeting, and program budgeting.
3. Describe the general phases of the public budgeting cycle at the federal and state level
4. What is the difference between outputs and outcomes in reference to performance budgeting?
5. Discuss how politics infiltrates the all aspects of the budgeting process (e.g. revenues, expenditures,
rules/regulations, implantation, etc.) and the steps public administrations must take to successfully
navigate the environment.
(Questions 6-7 in Excel)
6) Decide which is the better purchase.
Gas
Distance per year
Discount Rate
Purchase Price
Mileage Per Gallon
Maintenance per year
Residual value
Car A
$2.00
10000
4%
$18,000
25
$200
$5,000
Car B
2.00
10000
4%
$20,000
30
$150
$7000
7) Use (1) linear regression, (2) exponential smoothing, and (3) transformative moving average to forecast
revenue for FY F. Which of your three methods is most accurate?
FY A 23000
FY B 24300
FY C 27300
FY D 30300
FY E 38800
(Question 8 in Word)
8) Suppose you were doing a study for an organization to determine which of two programs they should
implement. The organization wants to have the largest impact at the lowest cost. After conducting your study
you find that Program A costs less and has a larger impact on the intended goal than Program B. The differences in
cost and impact between Program A and B are marginal. Program B, however, also indirectly helps fulfill other
organizational goals, which are not calculated your analysis.
The organization has asked you to give a presentation and recommendations for how they should proceed. In
your presentation you want to discuss the trade-offs of values when selecting one program over the other. Write
400-500 words discussing the values at stake and what the organization would have to do to make a choice.
1
1 The Politics of Public Budgets
A public budget links tasks to be performed with the amount of resources required to
accomplish those tasks, ensuring that money will be available to wage war, provide
housing, or maintain streets. Most of the work in drawing up a budget is technical,
such as estimating how much it will cost to feed a thousand shut-ins with a Meals-onWheels program or how much revenue a 1 percent tax on retail sales will produce. But
public budgeting is not only a technical, managerial process, it is also necessarily and
appropriately political.
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Budgets reflect choices about what government will and will not do. They reflect the
public consensus about what kinds of services governments should provide and
what citizens are entitled to as members of society. Should government provide
services that the private sector could provide, such as water, electricity,
transportation, and housing? Do all citizens have a guarantee of health care,
regardless of ability to pay? Is everyone entitled to some kind of housing? Should
government intervene when market failures threaten people’s savings and
investments?
Budgets reflect priorities—between police and flood control, day care and defense,
the Northeast and the Southwest. The budget process mediates among groups and
individuals who want different things from government and determines who gets
what. These decisions may influence whether the poor get job training or the police
get riot training—either one a response to an increased number of unemployed.
Budgets reflect the degree of importance that legislators place on satisfying their
constituents and responding to interest group demands. For example, legislators
may decide to spend more money to keep a military base open because the local
economy depends on it and to spend less money to improve combat readiness.
Budgets provide accountability for citizens who want to know how the government
is spending their money and whether government has generally followed their
preferences. Budgeting links citizen preferences and governmental outcomes; it is a
powerful tool for implementing democracy.
Budgets reflect citizens’ preferences for different forms and levels of taxation as well
as the ability of some taxpayer groups to shift tax burdens to others. The budget
indicates the degree to which the government redistributes wealth upward or
downward through the tax system.
At the national level, the budget influences the economy, and so fiscal policy
influences how many people are out of work at any time.
Budgetary decision-making provides a picture of the relative power of budget actors
within and between branches of government as well as of the importance of citizens,
interest groups, and political parties.
Budgeting is both an important and a unique arena of politics. It is important because
of the specific policy decisions it reflects: decisions about the scope of government,
the distribution of wealth, the openness of government to interest groups, and the
accountability of government to the public at large. It is unique because these
decisions take place in the context of budgeting, with its need for balance, its
openness to the environment, and its requirement for timely decisions so that
government can carry on without interruption.
Public budgets clearly have political implications, but what does it mean to say that
key political decisions are made in the context of budgeting? The answer has several
parts: First, what is budgeting? Second, what is public budgeting, as opposed to
individual or family budgeting or the budgeting of private organizations? Third, what
does political mean in the context of public budgeting?
What Is Budgeting?
The essence of budgeting is that it allocates scarce resources, implying choices among potential
expenditures. Budgeting implies balance between revenues and expenditures, and it requires
some kind of decision-making process.
Making Budgetary Choices
All budgeting, whether public or private, individual or organizational, involves choices between
possible expenditures. Since no one has unlimited resources, people budget all the time. A child
makes a budget (a plan for spending, balancing revenues and expenditures) when she decides to
spend money on a marshmallow rather than a chocolate rabbit, assuming she has money for only
one. The Air Force may choose between two different airplanes to replace current bombers.
These examples illustrate the simplest form of budgeting, because they involve only one actor,
one resource, one time, and two straightforward and comparable choices.
Budgeting is usually more complicated, with many possible options that are not always easily
comparable. To simplify this complexity, budgeters usually group together similar things that
can be reasonably compared. When I go to the supermarket, I compare main dishes with main
dishes, beverages with beverages, desserts with desserts. This gives me a common denominator
for comparison. For example, I may look at the main course and ask about the amount of protein
for the dollar. I may compare the desserts in terms of the amount of cholesterol or the calories.
Governmental budgeters also try to make comparisons within categories of similar things. For
example, weapons are compared with weapons and computers with computers. They could be
compared in terms of speed, reliability, and operating costs, and the one that did the most of what
you wanted it to do at the least cost would be the best choice. As long as there is agreement on
the goals to be achieved, the choice should be straightforward.
Sometimes, however, budgeting requires comparison of different, seemingly incomparable
things. How do I compare the benefits of providing shelters for the homeless with buying more
helicopters for the navy? I may move to more general comparisons, such as how clearly the need
was described or who received the benefits last time and whose turn it is this time. Are there any
specific contingencies that make one choice more likely than the other? For example, will the
country be embarrassed to show our treatment of the homeless in front of a visiting dignitary? Or
are disarmament negotiations coming up, in which we need to display strength or make a
symbolic gesture of restraint? Comparing dissimilar items may require agreement on priorities.
Such priorities may be highly controversial.
Not only does budgeting have to deal with a large number of sometimes incomparable possible
expenditures, it also involves multiple resources, resulting in multiple and sometimes unrelated
budgets. Budgeting often allocates money, but it can allocate any scarce resource—for example,
time. A student may choose between studying for an exam or playing softball and drinking beer
afterward. In this example, it is time that is at a premium, not money. It could be medical skills
that are in short supply, or expensive equipment, or apartment space, or water.
Government programs often involve a choice of resources and sometimes involve combinations
of resources, each of which has different characteristics. For example, some federal farm
programs involve direct cash payments plus loans at below-market interest rates, and welfare
programs often involve dollar payments plus food stamps, which allow recipients to pay less for
food. Federal budgets often assign agencies money, personnel, and sometimes borrowing
authority, three different kinds of resources. Some programs offer tax breaks, while others offer
direct payments and still others offer insurance that is unavailable or extraordinarily expensive in
the private sector.
Balancing and Borrowing
Budgets have to balance. A plan for expenditures that pays no attention to ensuring that revenues
cover expenditures is not a budget. That may sound odd in view of huge federal deficits, but a
budget may technically be balanced by borrowing. Balance means only that outgo is matched or
exceeded by income. Borrowing means spending more now and paying more in the future, when
the debt has to be paid off. It is a balance over time.
To illustrate the nature of budget balance, consider me as shopper again. Suppose I spend all my
weekly shopping money before I buy dessert. I have the option of treating my dollar limit as if it
were more flexible, by adding the dimension of time. I can buy the dessert and everything else in
the basket, going over my budget, and then eat less at the end of the month. Or I can pay the bill
with a credit card, assuming I will have more money in the future with which to pay off the bill
when it comes due. The possibility of borrowing against the future is part of most budget
choices.
A budget is not balanced if there is no plan for and reasonable expectation of paying back the
loan over time. Similarly, a budget is not balanced if insufficient money is set aside each year to
pay for future expenses. For example, a number of years ago, San Diego approved an increase in
pension benefits for its employees but did not increase its annual contributions to the pension
system to cover the increased costs, because pension board members hoped a strong stock
market would reduce the need for city contributions. When the market faltered, the city was
stuck with a huge deficit in the pension fund.
Process
Budgeting cannot proceed without some kind of decision process. The process determines who
will have a say at what point in the decision-making and structures the comparisons among
alternatives. A successful budget process assures that decisions are made in proper order and in a
timely way.
Returning to the shopping example, if I shop for the main course first and spend more money
than I intended on it because I found some fresh fish, there will be less money left for purchasing
the dessert. Hence, unless I set a firm limit on the amount of money to spend for each segment of
the meal, the order in which I do the purchasing counts. Of course, if I get to the end of my
shopping and do not have enough money left for dessert, I can put back some of the items
already in the cart and squeeze out enough money for dessert.
Governmental budgeting is also concerned with procedures for managing trade-offs between
large categories of spending. Budgeters may determine the relative importance of each category
first, attaching a dollar level in proportion to the assigned importance, or they may allow
purchasing in each area to go on independently, later reworking the choices until the balance
between the parts is acceptable.
The order of decisions is important in another sense. I can first determine how much money I am
likely to have, and then set that as an absolute limit on expenditures, or I can determine what I
must have, what I wish to have, and what I need to set aside for emergencies and then go out and
try to find enough money to cover some or all of those expenditures. Especially in emergencies,
such as accidents or illnesses, people are likely to obligate the money first and worry about
where it will come from later. Governmental budgeting, too, may concentrate first on revenues
and later on expenditures or first on expenditures and later on income. Like individuals or
families, during emergencies governments commit expenditures first and worry about where the
money will come from later.
Governmental Budgeting
Public budgeting shares many of the characteristics of budgeting in general but differs from
personal and business budgeting in some key ways:
1. In public budgeting there are a variety of participants, who have different priorities and
different levels of power over the outcome. In family and business budgeting there may
be only one key actor or a few, and they may have similar views of what they want the
budget to achieve.
2. Individuals and small business owners spend their own money. By contrast, in
governmental budgeting, elected officials spend citizens’ money, not their own. Public
officials can force expenditures on citizens that they do not want, but citizens can vote the
politicians out of office. Consequently, public officials try not to stray too far from what
they think the public wants. Because of the variety of budgetary actors and demands,
there is no single set of demands to follow. To create enough coherence to guide
decisions, budget processes in the public sector involve the negotiation of consent among
representatives of competing groups and interests.
3. Because elected officials make spending decisions for citizens, accountability is an
important part of public budgeting. The budget document helps explain to the public how
its money was spent. That document is necessarily public, unlike business budgets, and
may be the focus of public controversy, if citizens do not like what they see or do not
fully understand it.
4. Public budgets are planned well in advance of the beginning of the fiscal year and are
intended to last a whole year or even two years. Many changes can occur over that period
of time—in the economy, in public opinion, in political coalitions, in the weather. Public
budgets need to be able to respond to such events during the year without major policy
changes. If the deals that were necessary to prepare the budget come undone during
budget implementation, budget actors will lose their trust in the process. Private sector
budgets are more flexible: They can be remade from week to week or month-to-month,
and policy changes can be adopted at any time. Private sector budgets are not designed to
last unchanged for eighteen months or more. Moreover, private sector budgets are less
open to pressures from the outside, from public opinion, or frequent changes in elected
officials.
5. Public budgets are incredibly constrained compared with those in the private sector.
There are often rules about the purposes for which revenue can be spent and the time
frame in which it can be spent as well as requirements for balance and limits on
borrowing. Capital projects may require public referendums for approval, and taxation
growth may be limited to the inflation rate unless citizens approve higher rates in a
referendum. Other levels of government may mandate some activity or expenditure or
limit the amount or form of taxation. Past agreements may bind current decision makers.
Courts may play a role in budgeting, sometimes telling jurisdictions that they must spend
more money on education or prisons or that a proposed program is illegal or that officials
cannot cut spending in some area because such reductions violate the constitution. Rather
than one bottom line, which is the business model, government agencies may have
multiple bottom lines, in each of several funds or accounts, each of which must balance.
The minicase concerning the DeKalb budget (see box on p. 8) should give the reader a feel for
governmental budgeting and some of the ways it differs from personal or business budgeting.
One key feature of public budgeting is an ongoing, not always courteous, dialogue between
opponents and supporters, because no matter how many interests are served by a budget, some
claimants will feel they did not get all they wanted or expected. Sometimes politicians and
professional staff ignore and at other times respond to the constant stream of criticism and lack
of understanding of the issues opponents demonstrate.
The venue of the Dekalb debate was the local newspaper. Accountability does not happen by
itself; budgets do not wade into crowds and attract circles of admiring readers. Budgets have to
be interpreted; someone has to tell a good story to get the readers involved. This is where
newspapers come in, but reporters are not necessarily knowledgeable, and newspapers are not
necessarily neutral. Public officials often think they are giving clear signals on the budget and are
puzzled by citizen responses. The budget can be harder to explain than elected officials imagine.
Public budgeting is complex and rule bound, whereas political dialogue is simple, simplifying,
and sometimes biased.
Another theme that emerges from the DeKalb minicase is that nearly all new administrations
have to run against their predecessors. They come into office and find a mess and try to clean it
up. If they get started without a process of reckoning, they are likely to be blamed for the
financial mistakes of their predecessors, who, as in this case, may have run down fund balances
and put off expenditures until the next administration. The inherited budget may be boobytrapped in a variety of ways, because time is an element in budgeting and expenditures can be
put off or revenue moved up.
Prior administrations may still be around to find fault, hoping to return to office. Other potential
electoral rivals can play a similar role, picking the budget apart, making normal decisions look
odd, emphasizing projects that have not been completed or that came in over estimated costs.
Taxpayer groups may criticize the budget from their own point of view. Politics thus infiltrates
budgeting whenever the budget goes public. Budgeters have to stay alert to the political
implications of their actions and the implications of politics for their actions. Keeping
governmental finances afloat can be difficult when others are intentionally rocking the boat.
There can be great temptation to keep parts of the budget obscure to prevent massive criticism
from political opponents.
The attack and defense of the DeKalb budget made clear that there is policy in the budget, not
just technical decisions about the timing of debt issuance or increases in the property tax rate.
The editorial was wrong in some of its charges, but it was right in noting the increase in fees for
developers. These fees were not just a way of balancing the budget; they reflected a judgment
about who should pay for government and who should benefit from public spending. In this case,
the former mayor had implemented a policy whereby all residents paid for growth. He claimed
that everyone benefited, but it seemed likely that developers and new businesses benefited
disproportionately compared with existing residents and businesses. In many cities, growth is
highly subsidized, often by citizens who do not benefit directly from it and who might prefer that
additional growth not take place. In DeKalb, the citizens were asked in a political campaign
precisely whether they wanted to continue to subsidize growth, and they said no, voting to
change mayors in order to change the existing policy. If politicians drift too far in their policies
from what citizens wish, they are likely to be turned out of office at the next opportunity.
The manager’s letter to the editor made clear that public budgeting is constrained—by other
levels of government, through prior agreements to earmark tax increases and by state-mandated
expenditures and by competition with surrounding jurisdictions. The manager defended the
charging of fees to developers by noting that surrounding towns were doing the same thing, so
the community would not lose development by charging a fee.
The point of the minicase is that public officials must not only do the right thing for the
community and follow the public will, as best they understand what that is, but also figure out a
way to explain and justify their choices. They are engaged in a dialogue in which there are
always other arguments, whose advocates represent legitimate interests. Equally important,
engaging in this dialogue is a way of getting the public involved and getting across information
about budgetary decisions in a way that people can understand.
In sum, public budgeting is necessarily and legitimately different from personal and business
budgeting. It is not only that the budget is fought out in public but that it involves a variety of
actors with different perspectives and interests. Moreover, those who make the decisions about
spending are not the ones who actually pay the bills, and that fact introduces problems of
responsiveness of elected officials and accountability to the public. More than personal or
business budgets, public budgets are highly constrained, surrounded by rules, and hence
somewhat rigid, while at the same time open to and necessarily influenced by changes in the
environment.
Minicase: City Manager Replies to Scathing Budget Critique
DeKalb, Illinois, has a council-manager form of government with an active, policy-oriented mayor. One mayor, who
favored business development and expansion, was defeated by a candidate who advocated a different balance between
new development and existing neighborhoods. Not long after the new mayor and a new manager took office, the local
newspaper ran an editorial criticizing the new manager for his fiscal practices.
Filled with innuendo, exaggeration, and outright mistakes, the editorial was a thinly disguised effort to discredit the new
administration and its policies of balanced growth. It argued that taxes and fees were growing, that the city was trying to
build too large a fund balance (demonstrating unnecessary taxation), and that it was unclear where the increased revenues
were going. The editorial further charged that the former administration had run a tight ship and that the city was in good
financial shape when the new mayor took over, but that now staff were resigning and were not being replaced, reportedly
to save money. The implication was that the new manager and mayor were fouling things up.
The new manager responded with a letter to the editor. In his reply, he documented the problems he had inherited from the
prior administration. The city finances had not been so fine when he began his term. Property taxes increased due to statemandated expenditures; the increase in sales taxes was obligated to the Tax Increment Financing District, a district formed
a number of years earlier to fund economic development, and to other units of government through existing
intergovernmental agreements. The actual amount of sales tax revenue going into the general fund was decreasing, not
increasing, so there was no puzzle about where the increased revenue was going, contrary to what the newspaper editorial
had said.
Finally, the editorial had correctly pointed out that the city had increased the fees levied on developers to pay the present
and future costs of growth. The new administration’s goal was for growth to fund itself, rather than be subsidized by the
existing community residents. The manager argued that such policies were common, not only elsewhere in the country,
but in the neighboring cities with which DeKalb was competing. This fee policy symbolized the policy difference between
the current and previous administrations.
A Variety of Actors
The actors involved in budgeting have different and often clashing motivations and goals. In the
executive branch, bureau chiefs, budget officers, and chief executives are involved in the budget
process; in the legislative branch, legislators and their staff members make proposals and react to
proposals given to them. Interest groups may be involved at intervals, and sometimes citizens get
into the act or the press gets involved in budget issues. At times, courts play a role in budgets.
What are these actors trying to achieve?
Bureau Chiefs.
Many students of budgeting assume that agency heads always want to expand their agencies for
reasons of personal aggrandizement, but many bureaucrats are more motivated by the
opportunity to do good for people—to house the homeless, feed the hungry, find jobs for the
unemployed, and send out checks to the disabled.1 In the Office of Personnel Management
survey of federal employee attitudes in 2014, 95.3 percent of executives responding to the survey
indicated that they agreed or strongly agreed that the work they do is important. Not only are the
motivations for growth often less selfish than the traditional model suggests, but agency heads
sometimes refuse to expand when given the opportunity.2 Administrators may prefer to hire
fewer but more qualified employees and refuse to add employees if doing so would not add to
the agency’s capacity to get things done.3 Expansion may be seen as undesirable if a new
mission swamps the existing mission, if it appears contradictory to the existing mission, or if the
program requires more money to carry out than is provided, forcing the agency to spend money
designated for existing programs on new ones or do a poor job. Moreover, most bureaucrats, if
not all, believe that their role is to carry out the policies of the chief executive and the legislature.
If that means cutting back budgets, agency heads cut back the agencies. Agency heads may be
appointed precisely because they are willing to make cuts in their agencies.4
Bureaucrats, then, do not always try to expand their agencies’ budgets. They have other,
competing goals, which sometimes dominate. Also, their achievements can be measured in other
ways than by expanded budgets. They may try to attain some specific items in the budget,
without raising totals, or may try for changes in the wording of legislation. They may strive to
obtain a statutory basis for the agency and security of funding. They may take as a goal
providing more efficient and effective service rather than expanded or more expensive service.
The Executive Budget Office.
The traditional role of the budget office has been to scrutinize requests coming up from the
agencies, to find waste and eliminate it, and to discourage most requests for new money. The
executive budget office has been perceived as the naysayer, the protector of the public purse.
Most staff members in the budget office are very conscious of the need to balance the budget,
avoid deficits, and manage cash flow so that there is money on hand to pay bills. Hence they tend
to be skeptical of requests for new money.
At the national level, under President Ronald Reagan, budgeting became much more top-down,
with the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposing specific cuts and
negotiating them directly with Congress, without much scrutiny of requests coming up from
departments or bureaus. OMB became—and remains—more involved in trying to accomplish
the policy goals of the president through the budget.5 At the state level, too, there has been an
evolution of budget offices concerned primarily with technical goals toward more attention to
political and policy-related goals. When the governor is looking for new spending proposals,
these may come from the budget office.
Chief Executive Officers.
The goal of the chief executive officer (the mayor or city manager, the governor, the president)
cannot be predicted without knowledge of the individuals. Some chief executives have been
expansive, proposing new programs; others have been economy minded, cutting back proposals
generated by the legislatures, reorganizing staffs, and trying to maintain service levels without
increasing taxes or expenditures. Whatever the policy preferences of the chief executives, they
generally want more power to impose those preferences on the budget. In most states, the
governor frames the budget proposal, has a powerful veto, and often has the ability to make cuts
during the year to rebalance a budget if revenues fall short of projections. As the Missouri
minicase, which follows, demonstrates, those powers can be used to override the legislature’s
preferences. Similarly, in Wisconsin in 2008, voters passed a constitutional amendment to curtail
the governor’s so called Frankenstein veto, which allowed the governor to cross out words and
numbers from different sentences creating a new sentence that altered legislative decisions.
Governor Doyle had been using that power to increase spending on schools and to allow local
governments to increase property taxes more than the legislature wished. The Wisconsin
governor’s budget powers are still extremely strong, despite the amendment, as he or she can still
eliminate words within a sentence of the budget, delete sentences, and omit digits from a
number.
Minicase: Missouri Constitutional Amendment Reduces Governor’s
Powers
In Missouri in November 2014, voters passed a constitutional amendment permitting the legislature with a two-thirds
majority to overturn the governor’s decisions to withhold funds during the year. The amendment also prevents the
governor from proposing a budget with revenues the legislature has not already approved.
According to some observers, the Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, was using budget holdbacks as leverage to prevent the
legislature from passing additional tax breaks. The governor wanted the legislature to pass comprehensive tax credit
reform; he also wanted the legislature to approve using federal dollars to improve and expand Medicaid. He vetoed or
withheld spending additions to his budget request. He argued against legislative program spending increases that were
likely to balloon in future years. The governor maintained that the finances of the state could not depend on vetoes that
might be overridden, presumably his justification for cutting funds during the year in a way that the legislature could not
overturn.
Governor Nixon blocked billions of dollars in spending during his administration. In 2011, he cut funding for forty-five
programs during the year. He claimed that much of the money was going to storm relief, but a later audit showed that of
$172 million withheld that year, only $7.8 million was spent on disaster relief, giving rise to the belief that he was
imposing his goals over the legislature’s by remaking portions of the budget during the year. Through the constitutional
amendment, the Republican-dominated legislature handcuffed the Democratic governor and gave considerable power over
budget implementation back to the legislature.
Sources: Associated Press, “Voters Approve Amendment Limiting Governor’s Budget Powers,” November 4,
2014, http://www.abc17news.com/news/voters-approve-amendment-limiting-governors-budget-powers/29540868;
Marshall Griffin, “Schweich Releases Audit Critical of Nixon’s Withholding of Money from the Budget,” St. Louis Public
Radio, September 8, 2014, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/schweich-releases-audit-critical-nixons-withholding-moneybudget. See also Jay Nixon, Office of the Governor, “Governor Nixon Restricts $400 Million From Fiscal Year 2014
Budget, Citing Costs of House Bill 253, June 28, 2013,” online at https://governor.mo.gov/news/archive/gov-nixonrestricts-400-million-fiscal-year-2014-budget-citing-costs-house-bill-253.
Legislators.
Just as executives sometimes have been mischaracterized as always being fiscally conservative,
legislators have sometimes been depicted as always trying to increase spending.6 The argument
runs that their success in getting reelected depends on their ability to provide constituent services
and deliver “pork”—jobs and capital projects—to their districts. Legislators are reluctant to cut
one another’s pork, lest their own be cut in return. As a city council member described this norm
of reciprocity, “There is an unwritten rule that if something is in a councilman’s district, we’ll go
along and scratch each other’s back.”7
While there is some truth to this picture, the budgetary importance of pork—more properly
called legislative earmarks—has been exaggerated. Earmarks are directions in legislation for
spending money on particular companies, contracts, locations, or projects or for granting tax
breaks to particular companies or individuals. At their peak, earmarks never accounted for more
than 1 percent of the federal budget.
Earmarks came under fire at the national level, not because the dollar amounts were so huge, but
because the number and costs were growing seemingly out of control and because some of them
were embarrassingly wasteful. Even more important, they permit or even invite corruption: Some
legislators have rewarded campaign contributions or other favors and gifts with earmarked
contracts or tax breaks that benefit specific firms or individuals. The resulting scandals fueled a
drive for reform that resulted initially in greater transparency and later in partywide pledges to
abstain from earmarks. In 2007, President Bush instructed the agencies to ignore any legislative
earmarks that were not written into law. President Obama stated in his state of the union address
in 2011 that he would veto any bill with earmarks in it.
While some legislators have found ways around the controls, evidence suggests a dramatic drop
in spending for legislative earmarks. This decline is illustrated in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.2 shows
the decline in number of earmarks.
These days, legislators seem more likely to favor small government and tax reductions than
expanded programs. Predicting the policy goals of legislators in general is as difficult as
predicting the policy goals of executives. They have to be examined case by case.
Interest Groups.
Interest groups, too, have often been singled out as the driving force behind spending increases.
They are said to want more benefits for their members and to be undeterred by concerns for
overall budget balance or the negative effects of tax increases. Well-funded interest groups
reportedly wine and dine legislators and provide campaign money for candidates who agree with
their positions.
Figure 1.1 Pork-Barrel Spending, 1991 to 2015
Source: Reproduced with permission from Citizens Against Government Waste, 2015
Congressional Pig Book, online at http://cagw.org/reporting/2015-pig-book#historical_trends
Figure 1.2 Number of Pork Projects, 1991 to 2015
Source: Reproduced with permission from Citizens Against Government Waste, 2015
Congressional Pig Book, online at http://cagw.org/reporting/2015-pig-book#historical_trends
This picture is partly true but oversimplified. Interest groups have other policy goals besides
budget levels. Most probably deal with the budget only when a crisis occurs, such as a threat to
funding levels. Because they can be counted on to come to the defense of a threatened program,
they reduce the flexibility of budget decision-makers, who find it difficult to cut programs with
strong interest group backing. But many areas of the budget do not have strong interest group
backing. For example, foreign aid programs have few domestic constituencies. Agencies may
even have negative constituencies—that is, interest groups that want to reduce their funding and
terminate their programs. The American Medical Association sought for years to eliminate the
Health Planning Program. Often when interest groups are involved, there are many of them
rather than one, and the groups may have conflicting styles or conflicting goals, canceling one
another out or absorbing energy in battles among themselves. A coalition of interest groups
representing broad geographic areas and a variety of constituencies is likely to be more effective
at lobbying. To that end, coalitions may form, but some members of the coalition may not go
along with measures supported by others, so the range of items for which the unified group can
lobby may be narrow. Extensive negotiations and continual efforts are required to get two or
more independent groups together for a lobbying effort, and the arrangement can then fall apart.
Interest groups are sometimes more interested in maintaining their autonomy than joining an
effective lobbying coalition that may not press their issues enthusiastically. Moreover, some
interest groups are interested in lowering taxes rather than maintaining or increasing spending.
Citizens.
Citizens play a role in budgeting when they vote on referendums to limit revenues, forbid some
forms of taxation, require budgetary balance, or amend the constitution to limit executive budget
power. They may initiate legislation that requires some given percent of revenues to be spent on
education or otherwise lock in their budget priorities. They sometimes voice their opinions at
budget hearings, reply to public opinion polls, and call or write their elected representatives.
Their knowledge of the budget usually is not detailed, but their feelings about the acceptability of
taxation and priorities for spending constrain public budgeting. The public’s preferences for lessvisible taxes and for taxes earmarked for specific expenditures have been especially important in
shaping tax structures. Citizens have reacted to reports of corruption by voting affirmatively on
referenda to create offices of the Inspector General to oversee spending and uncover fraud and
abuse.
In twenty-four states, citizens can put a proposal on the ballot. Many of these proposals have
budgetary implications, sometimes mandating the expenditure of funds without any source of
revenue or cutting taxes without any parallel cuts in spending or offsetting tax increases. In
Washington state, for example, a citizens’ initiative to increase class sizes was estimated to cost
the state about $2 billion for fiscal years 2016 and 2017; the cost was projected to increase to
$2.7 billion for the following two years. There was no mention of where this money was
supposed to come from.8
The Courts.
The courts play an intermittent role in budgeting.9 They become involved when some budget
actors, often interest groups, bring suit against the government. Suits that affect the budget may
involve service levels or the legality of particular forms of taxation. If a particular tax is judged
unconstitutional, the result is usually lost revenues. If there is a suit concerning levels of service,
a government may be forced to spend more money on that service.
Constitutional requirements to provide adequate funding for public schools or to avoid cruel and
unusual punishments have often gotten courts involved in mandating spending. For example,
after years of underfunding the public schools, the state supreme court in Washington fined the
state $100,000 per day for each day that it continued to defy the court mandate to provide
adequate spending for education, reducing class sizes, and improving teacher pay. The court had
mandated improvements in 2012, but according to the court, the state had done too little to
comply. In September of 2015, the court ruled the state in contempt but agreed to wait until the
end of the 2015 legislative session before imposing sanctions. When the governor and legislature
failed to come up with a plan, the penalty was imposed. Other states have also had battles with
courts over school funding that resulted in threatened sanctions. The New Jersey Supreme Court
once shut down the schools for eight days, and in 2016, the supreme court in Kansas threatened
to shut down the schools if adequate funding was not provided.10
Damage suits against governments can also affect expenditures. These are usually settled without
regard to the government’s ability to pay. The result may be forced cuts in other areas of the
budget, tax increases, or even bankruptcy. When the courts get involved, they may impose
budget priorities. They introduce a kind of rigidity into the budget that says do this or pay this
first.
The courts also may intervene in decisions about which actors have more power over budget
decisions. In New York, the courts decided in favor of the governor over the legislature; in
Maryland, the courts decided that the governor had to fund programs that the legislature had
passed and he had approved in prior years. In Chicago, the courts have gotten involved in
determining the degree of independence of the inspector general.
Courts sometimes judge whether programs are legal and whether rights have been violated. At
the national level, the Supreme Court judged the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s
health reform law, which contains both revenue increases and spending cuts. Typical areas in
which courts have mandated expenditures by state and local governments, besides school
funding, are prison overcrowding (declared cruel and unusual punishment) and the
deinstitutionalization of mentally ill and mentally handicapped patients. From the perspective of
the courts, the priority of rights outweighs immediate concerns over balanced budgets, autonomy
of governmental units, and local priorities.
The courts have increasingly gotten involved in both bankruptcy cases and pension funding
issues. In both these situations, one key concern is the circumstances under which a government
can go back on prior legal and sometimes constitutionally protected commitments. (See
the minicase of New Jersey on p. 17 for one example.)
Minicase: The Courts and New Jersey Pension Reform
In New Jersey in 2011, the governor engineered a pension reform to begin to remedy years of state failure to contribute the
annually required contributions to the state pension system. The agreement required additional contributions from both the
workers and the state to make up for prior underfunding. The reform included a binding promise from the state to
discontinue its practice of failing to make its whole payment. The workers were granted an enforceable contractual right to
the increased contributions from the state.
Violating his own reform law, the governor then failed to put in the whole state share. The resulting lawsuits reached the
state supreme court. The judges decided 5–2 that the governor and legislature could not legally require an increased
payment to the pension system, because the state’s constitution prohibits lawmakers from binding the state to financial
obligations greater than 1 percent of the budget without citizen approval in a referendum. Under the reform law, the state
payment would be closer to 7 percent of the budget.
The employee unions questioned whether the 2011 deal created any new debt or only required the payment of existing
debt, but the judges argued that it didn’t matter and invalidated the 2011 reform that prevented the state from
shortchanging the pensions. The court argued that although the governor and legislature intended to create a contract, they
did not have the legal authority to do so and hence could later violate that illegal contract.
Source: Andrew Seidman and Maddie Hanna, “N.J. Supreme Court Sides With Christie in Pension Case,” Inquirer
Trenton Bureau, June 9, 2015 online
at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/20150610_N_J__Supreme_Court_sides_with_Christie_in_pension_case.ht
ml#IUpA1ttsFLpkJwfE.99
The Press.
The press plays several roles in budgeting. First, it helps spread the word about budgetary
decisions, explaining the significance of those decisions in more understandable terms than those
in the budget document. They frame the issues for the public. Second, reporters tend to look for
conflicts, for scandals, or for abuses that make good stories. Third, editorials may call for
spending decreases and tax reductions or argue against particular proposed spending cuts. They
advise the public on whether to vote for or against referenda and inform citizens of the likely
consequence of passage or failure to pass such measures.
Not only do these various budget actors have different and potentially clashing budgetary goals,
they wield different levels of power at different times. The courts, the press, and the public are
not routinely involved in decision-making, they episodically influence and sometimes determine
budgetary decisions. For the routine actors, the combination of different preferences and
different levels of power has to be orchestrated by the budget process in such a way that
agreement is reached and the players stay in the game, continuing to abide by the rules. If some
actors lose on important issues during the creation or approval of budget proposals, they may try
later to influence budget implementation to favor themselves. Or the actors with less budget
power may try to change the budget process so that they have a better chance of influencing the
outcome next time. If some actors feel too powerless over the budget, they may cease to
participate or become obstructionist. Why participate in negotiations if the decision will go
against you regardless of what you do?
Separation of Payer and Decider
One of the major characteristics of public budgeting is that those who pay the bills are not the
ones who make the decisions on how the money is to be spent. The possibility exists that elected
officials will spend the money differently than taxpayers wish. This problem and its solution
over time have been clearly visible at the local level.
In some cities in the later 1800s, the problem was solved by having taxpayer groups elect their
own members as mayors and council or board members.11 Payer and decider were, if not the
same individuals, then of the same social class with the same interests. At that time, nearly all
local taxation was based on property taxes, and only those who owned property could vote or run
for office in many places. Under the control of these taxpayers, local officials spent money on
projects that would benefit those paying the taxes—projects such as public markets, ports, roads,
and bridges.
Over the years, as more poor people moved into the cities and were permitted to vote without
property ownership, a gap began to open between the wealthy people who were paying the bills
and poorer people who benefited from government services and elected people who would
provide them those benefits. Those who made the taxing and spending decisions were no longer
under the thumb of the major taxpayers. What the wealthy wished to spend their tax money on
and what elected officials actually spent the money on began to diverge. When tax money was
not being spent on the wealthy, they opposed taxation. Antitax revolts subsequently became
widespread.
During the twentieth century, property ownership broadened as immigrants and blue-collar
workers bought their own homes. Also, over the last generation taxation at the local level has
shifted away from dependence on property taxes and toward sales taxes. The result is that there
is not now a class of taxpayers and a class of tax users or consumers of government services.
Everyone pays local taxes, including the relatively poor in many cities. The result has been to
shift the focus of concern to whether everyone benefits from public taxation or only a few. For
those services that benefit only a few, the question arises, why should everyone have to pay for
them?
At the national level and in some states, the tension between those who pay the taxes and those
who benefit from them remains, because the graduated income tax exempts the very poor and
taxes the very rich more heavily than the middle class. The result has been an ongoing effort to
shift the burden of taxation up or down in a moderated form of class warfare.
At all levels of government, those who demand services that benefit only a narrow group and
want others to pay for those benefits have to be strategic. They may form a coalition with others
who also want narrow benefits; they tolerate some projects that others want, in exchange for
support on their favored projects. Still, there are expenditures in many budgets that benefit one
group or interest that are not balanced by benefits to other groups or interests. Such expenditures
can be politically contentious and may be disguised or obscured.
Sometimes whether there will be political stress depends on perception or presentation, not on
the characteristics of the actual program. Taxpayers who earn regular incomes often bridle at
paying for welfare for those who do not work, seeing it as an outlay from which they do not and
will not benefit. Viewed differently, anyone could end up needing unemployment benefits or
even welfare, when the economy performs poorly or downsizing throws older workers out of
their jobs. If taxpayers see themselves as possible future beneficiaries of a safety net, they may
be willing to support it; to the extent that they see such expenditures as only for others and
believe that they will never need such services, they are more likely to oppose it. The separation
between taxpayer and budgetary decision-maker highlights the importance of symbolic
politics—that is, the way expenditures are presented and viewed. Expenditures that benefit some
narrow group may survive if they are represented as being for the collective good, whether they
are in fact or not.
Sometimes it is difficult to make a convincing argument that everyone benefits from an
expenditure aimed at a few or from a tax break that benefits a narrow group. Elected officials
may try to obscure such costs or make them seem smaller than they are in order to avoid
controversy or quiet opposition. Because some budgetary decisions will not be acceptable to
everyone, budgets have not always been clear about the decisions that underlie them.
In a democracy, the budget document is an important means of public accountability, reporting
to the payers what the deciders have done with tax money. The clarity and openness of the
document is critical. Did the public’s representatives spend tax revenue as the majority of
citizens wished, or did they spend it on some project, program, or tax break demanded by a few
who had political influence? Citizens do not typically watch the decision-making, but they and
the press have access to the budget document and can look for the answers. They can see
whether officials kept their promises if the budget is clear enough.
In recent years, there has been progress in making budgets more readable, inclusive, and
informative. To achieve more transparency, budgeters have tried grouping expenditures by
program and establishing performance goals and measurements for each program. At the
national level, the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA), updated in 2011
by the GPRA Modernization Act, required that all federal agencies create program plans and
performance measures. The goal of performance budgeting at all levels of government has been
to broaden the notion of accountability from a record of where the money was spent to how well
the money was spent and to hold public officials accountable for program outcomes and impacts.
The movement toward improved accountability, better reporting, and more readable budgets
suggests that public officials should be free from prior constraints and should be allowed to use
their training and best judgment but should be held accountable for their choices after the fact.
Accurate reporting of what they have done and the consequences of those decisions is absolutely
necessary for this model to work. But if elected officials have made choices that some members
of the public disapprove of, officials may be reluctant to report the details of their decisions, lest
they open themselves to attack. Political opponents can use performance data to attack an
agency, program, or administration. The vulnerability to attack contributes to ambivalence about
collecting possibly damaging data and making it public. If officials have made mistakes, they
may be reluctant to reveal them (see the minicase “Doctoring Audit Reports” on p. 21).
Every budget is selective to some degree about what it will present and how. The art of selective
revelation is part of public budgeting. The amount of secrecy in budgets goes up and down with
different administrations and requires constant monitoring.
Minicase: Doctoring Audit Reports
Audit reports are essential to after-the-fact accountability. They must be honest and open beyond question. But the
temptation to hide wrongdoing or the suggestion of cronyism, ineptitude, laxness of supervision, or outright corruption
sometimes leads to refusal to make audit reports public or to editing out (called redacting) the suggestive portions. In one
recent case, the inspector general for USAID was accused by whistle-blowers of removing critical portions of reports from
2011 to 2013. He was only in an acting capacity and had applied for the permanent position; reportedly, as a result he tried
to avoid controversy and downplayed criticism of the agency to win support for his application. The Washington
Post noted that one report from his office was edited down from 20 pages to 9.
Source: Scott Higham and Steven Rich, “Whistleblowers say USAID’s IG removed critical details from public
reports,” Washington Post, October 22, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/whistleblowers-say-usaidsig-removed-critical-details-from-public-reports/2014/10/22/68fbc1a0–4031–11e4-b03fde718edeb92f_story.html?hpid=z2.
Openness to the Environment
The need for accountability means that the budget passed in public should be the budget actually
implemented and that the budget should reasonably reflect public desires and the deals that were
struck between actors with different goals. But public budgets are open to the
environment, which means that they also have to be reasonably flexible and adaptive.
Openness to the environment includes a number of different factors, such as the overall level of
resources available (changes in the amount of taxable wealth or in current economic conditions)
and a variety of emergencies, such as heavy snowfall, tornadoes, wars, bridge collapses, drought
or floods, chemical explosions, terrorist attacks, or water pollution. Changes in public opinion
may bring about changes in budget priorities.
The federal system and the resulting intergovernmental relations between national, state, and
local governments are also a key part of the changing environment for budget actors. A state
government can—as California has done—take over a local revenue source, leaving the local
governments with shortfalls, or—as New York State has done—put caps on local property taxes
while keeping in place expensive state mandates on local governments. The federal government
may offer state or local governments grants, the size of which may vary from year to year. The
requirement that some grants be spent on particular items or that a recipient match grant amounts
may result in a pattern of spending different from what the state or local government would have
preferred.
Budgeting is open to the environment not only in the sense of changing amounts of revenue,
emergency demands on spending, and the changing intergovernmental system that frames
responsibilities and revenue sources but also in the sense that decision-making itself is public.
Committee hearings on the budget are public. Revenue and expenditure proposals are public.
They are reported in newspapers and debated in editorials, blogs, and letters to the editor. The
budget as proposed and as adopted is available for public inspection as are reported comparisons
of plans and actual spending. The whole budget process takes place under public scrutiny.
Potentially embarrassing mistakes are harder to hide than in the private sector, which may lead to
a kind of caution. Public officials adapt to working in a room with glass walls and no window
blinds.
The openness of public budgets to the environment means that budgets have to be adaptable
when unexpected events occur. At the national level, supplemental appropriations legislation
may help the government deal with emergencies, such as wars, hurricanes, or earthquakes. At the
state and local levels, there may be contingency accounts to provide for unexpected events.
Budget makers aim to build in enough flexibility to manage the problems that arise without
changing the underlying policies that have emerged from complex public negotiations among
multiple actors with different points of view.
Constraints
Public budgeting is much more constrained than private sector or family budgeting. The federal
government can mandate unrelated state expenditures as conditions of receiving grants; states
can tell their local government what to do and how to do it. Some state governments tell local
governments what format to use for a budget and what information has to be included. States
may limit borrowing by local governments or even require that the state government approves all
local borrowing. The reason for the current emphasis on after-the-fact reporting rather than prior
controls is that there were so many prior controls that government managers had a difficult time
getting anything done. Despite the recent emphasis on after-the-fact reporting, few prior
constraints have actually been removed.
One of the constraints in the public sector is the fund structure. Public budgeting is based on
“funds”—that is, separate accounts for separate purposes. Money can be spent only through
those accounts and cannot be freely swapped between accounts. Such transfers normally require
justification and explicit permission. Each account or fund must balance; that is, revenue must
equal or exceed expenditures. The result is not one bottom line, as in a family or business, but
multiple bottom lines. Creating some flexibility within these constraints requires continuing
effort.
Tax and borrowing limits provide major constraints on budgeting. For state and local
governments, revenue limits spending, because balance is required by law. If levels of borrowing
and total accumulated debt are also limited, it is more difficult to circumvent the requirement for
balance by borrowing. Tax limits are a common feature of state laws and constitutions.
Procedural requirements for legislative supermajorities to pass tax increases have made it more
difficult to raise taxes in some states, regardless of the actual spending level.
At the national level, much of the politics of constraint has been concerned with the level of
borrowing. (See the minicase on the federal debt limit below for how this particular constraint
has worked.) At the state level, the focus in recent years has been more on limiting taxes. One of
the most drastic of the constraints on revenue is Colorado’s Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR),
a constitutional amendment passed in 1992. It has been seen as a model for other states, but its
tight constraints have caused many problems in Colorado and eroded its popularity. (See
the minicase “Highly Constrained Budgeting—Colorado’s TABOR Amendment” on p. 25.)
Minicase: The Federal Debt Limit as a Constraint
Unlike the state and local governments, the federal government is not required to balance its budget every year; it may
borrow to cover gaps between revenue and spending. Since 1917, the federal government has had a debt limit.
Historically, the debt limit has been increased in sufficient time to permit required borrowing. Federal borrowing reflects
spending commitments already made, so that a failure to raise the debt limit would result in failure to pay bills on time,
with major consequences to the perceived creditworthiness of the nation. In a highly controversial move in 2011,
Republicans withheld their support for raising the debt limit unless the Democrats and the president accepted their terms
for cutting future spending.
The consequences of failure to raise the debt limit and subsequent default were considered so severe that Democrats in
Congress and the president yielded to Republican demands for billions of dollars of spending cuts as the price for
Republican votes for an increased debt ceiling. In February of 2014, with the president adamant about not yielding to
Republican threats a second time, Congress suspended the debt ceiling for a year. By March 2015, the country had again
reached its debt limit, forcing the treasury department to take extraordinary measures to assure there was enough cash on
hand to pay bills. By late fall of 2015, when these measures would have been exhausted, Congress agreed to suspend the
debt ceiling until early 2017.
Sources: Mindy R. Levit, Clinton T. Brass, Thomas J. Nicola, Dawn Nuschler, and Alison M. Shelton, Reaching the Debt
Limit: Background and Potential Effects on Government Operations, Congressional Research Service, July 27, 2011.
Peter Schroeder, “Debt Limit Deadline Now Seen at End of 2015,” The Hill, May 18,
2015 http://thehill.com/policy/finance/242404-debt-limit-deadline-now-seen-at-end-of-2015. Chad Stone, “Four Things to
Like in the Budget Deal,” U.S. News and World Report, November 6, 2015, http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economicintelligence/2015/11/06/4-things-to-like-in-the-debt-ceiling-budget-deal.
Efforts to control borrowing have resulted in one set of constraints. A second set results from
efforts to stop perceived abuses of discretion. Once in place, these controls sometimes become
rigid, even constitutional, remaining in place for years, sometimes long after the problem that
generated the constraint has disappeared. A third reason for budget constraints is to facilitate
supervision. States cannot easily monitor local budgeting and financial conditions if each
jurisdiction puts its budget in a different format or includes different information and uses a
different definition of balance. Because the states are ultimately responsible for the finances of
local governments, they have an interest in keeping local governments financially healthy and
identifying those that might be headed for trouble.
Prior constraints in public budgeting include the fund or account structure and constraints on
transfers, tax limits, borrowing limits, requirements that tax increases or general obligation bond
issues be approved by the public in a referendum, uniform budget formats, and uniform
accounting rules. There may be separate rules limiting the number of employees and their rank or
requiring the comparative bidding of contracts or purchases over a given dollar amount.
Reforms in recent years have reduced some of these prior controls—such as separate limits on
total spending and on the number of personnel. Proposals for reducing constraints sometimes run
into the reason for the constraint in the first place. Weakening controls may remove some
political or policy tool that is still cherished. Thus in 1993 and 1994 the Clinton administration
urged greater discretion for executive branch officials, including discretion over staffing levels.
Soon thereafter, the administration and Congress proceeded to pass the Workforce Restructuring
Act, reducing federal employment levels by some 270,000. Despite the plea for more agency
autonomy, each agency still had an assigned personnel ceiling.
Minicase: Highly Constrained Budgeting—Colorado’s TABOR
Amendment
The Colorado Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) limited the revenue the state could collect in any given year to the
previous year’s level, plus a factor for population growth and inflation. In 2000, to protect education from the resulting
cuts, opponents of TABOR successfully passed Amendment 23, which required the state to increase spending on K–12
education by the inflation rate plus 1 percent every year through 2010.
Beginning in 2001, an economic slowdown affected many states, including Colorado. However, Colorado’s problem was
compounded by the combination of these two prior constraints, one holding down revenues, the other mandating increases
in spending.
Rather than keeping the size of the government budget stable, TABOR had a notorious ratchet effect: The base on which
maximum allowable tax revenue is calculated drops with recessions, and the provisions in the constitution make it
impossible for the state either to recover former revenue levels or to provide a substantial rainy-day fund to buffer against
recession revenue losses. With declining revenues and mandated increases in a major portion of the budget, state officials
were forced to cut other areas of the budget deeply. What made this vise so difficult to escape is that TABOR had strong
Republican support while Amendment 23 had strong Democratic support, and neither party was willing to compromise.
In November 2005, a new referendum was held. Referendum C eliminated the infamous downward ratcheting effect
permanently, while TABOR’s spending limits were suspended for five years, with the constraint that revenues over the
TABOR ceiling had to be spent on public K–12 education, higher education, health care, and transportation.1
The suspension of TABOR ended in 2010, but as a result of the recession and spending limits modified upward by
Referendum C, revenues for the state were less than the ceiling in TABOR for years, so TABOR had no immediate effect.
Nevertheless, the battle against TABOR continued. In 2011, opponents brought a federal suit against TABOR, arguing
that the amendment violated the federal Constitution, because it removes the power to tax from the legislature. In 2015,
The Supreme Court of the United States kicked the case back to the circuit court, asking the lower court to reconsider its
decision that legislators had standing to bring the suit. The court’s decision regarding the TABOR challenge was related to
a recent case in Arizona in which the court ruled that the people were the originating source of all governmental powers
and defined legislative powers as belonging to the people. The people could thus pass laws, even when powers were
explicitly granted to the legislature. It looks as if TABOR survived the constitutional challenge.
Coloradans have had to live with the law, but when its constraints became too tight, they voted to lift the limits. Douglas
Bruce was the person who brought the TABOR amendment to Colorado; overriding the limitations in the law through
local referenda is thus called de-Brucing. Cities and counties have made de-Brucing or asking for overrides of the TABOR
law from voters commonplace in Colorado. Out of a total of 543 municipal referenda for de-Brucing from 1993 to 2015,
86.4 percent passed.2
In 2012, Denver, experiencing fiscal stress, de-Bruced its sales tax permanently and also de-Bruced its property tax, so that
the city could keep any growth in revenue that exceeded the narrow limits of TABOR. Recently at the state level, the
governor proposed a workaround to TABOR that required treating some earmarked funds as something other than
revenue, so the TABOR excess revenue trigger for tax rebates would not be reached. The Senate rejected the proposal.
The rules for what would happen to any excess revenue past the TABOR limits have changed over the years. In 2015, the
first use of any excess would go to pay for an earned income tax credit (EITC), which helps poor working people. The
amount of the rebate would be 10 percent of the federal EITC. Once triggered, it would become a permanent tax credit. If
there was enough revenue left after that amount, it would be used for a temporary reduction in the income tax rate. If there
was not enough money left over to pay for that reduction or if there was money left over after that reduction, it would go
to tax payers according to their incomes, with richer people getting more money. In 2015, for the first time in fifteen years,
the state was expecting enough revenue to trigger the rebate. However, the amount of rebate could shrink if the legislature
passed and the governor signed other tax breaks that would reduce the amount of revenue.
In an ironic twist, the rebate was scheduled for 2016, despite a looming deficit, because the rebate is triggered by an
increase in revenue that is greater than the growth in population and inflation, not by the existence or size of a budgetary
surplus. Revenue growth exceeded TABOR limits but was insufficient to pay the bills, creating a budget gap that would
probably require spending cuts at the same time that citizens were getting a tax rebate. And since the state EITC will be
funded, the tax rebate will create an ongoing obligation to keep up this tax break for the working poor.
1. Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, Issue Brief, November 9, 2005.
2. Colorado Municipal League, “Municipal Elections, Revenue and Spending Changes,” 1993–Fall 2014, pdf, online
at www.cml.org.
Other sources: “Lawsuit Seeking to Overturn TABOR Faces Federal Ruling on Justiciability,” Huffington Post, February
15, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/colorado-lawsuit-against-tabor_n_1279854.html. Megan Verlee, “How
TABOR works: Tracking the Fate of Your 2015 Refund,” Colorado Public Radio, May 7,
2015, http://www.cpr.org/news/story/how-tabor-works-tracking-fate-your-2015-refund.
The Meaning of Politics in Public Budgeting
Public budgets, unlike personal or family budgets, are necessarily political. The literature
suggests at least five major ways of viewing politics in the budget: reformism, incrementalist
bargaining, interest group determinism, process, and policymaking.
•
•
•
•
•
The first is a reform orientation, which argues that politics and budgeting are or should
be antithetical, that budgeting should be primarily or exclusively technical, and that
comparisons among items should be based on efficiency and effectiveness. Politics—in
the sense of the opinions and priorities of elected officials, interest groups, and voters—is
an unwanted intrusion that reduces efficiency and makes decision-making less rational.
The politics of reform involves a clash of views between professional staff and elected
officials over the boundary between technical budget decisions and properly political
ones.
The second perspective is the incrementalist view, which sees budgeting as negotiations
among a group of routine actors—bureaucrats, budget officers, chief executives, and
legislators—who meet each year (or biennium) and bargain to resolution. To the extent
that interest groups are included at all in this view, they are conceived of in the pluralist
model. The process is open, anyone can play and win, and the overall outcome is good;
conflict is held down because everyone wins something and no one wins too much.
The third view, determinism, is that interest groups are dominant in the budget process. In
its extreme form, this argument posits that richer and more powerful interest groups
determine the budget. Some interests are represented by interest groups, and others either
are not or are represented by weaker interest groups; the outcome does not approximate
democracy. There may be big winners and big losers in this model. Conflict is more
extensive than in the incrementalist model. This view of politics in budgeting raises the
question of whether the interest groups represent narrow or broad coalitions or possibly
even class interests. To what extent do these interest groups represent the oil or banking
industries or the homeless, and to what extent do they represent business and labor more
broadly?
The fourth view, the politics of process, is that the budget process itself is the center and
focus of budget politics. Those with particular budget goals try to change the budget
process to favor their policy preferences. Branches of government struggle with one
another over budgetary power through the budget process; the budget process becomes
the means of achieving or denying separation and balance between the branches of
government. The degree of examination of budget requests and the degree to which
review is technical or political, cursory or detailed, are regulated by the budget process.
The ability of interest groups to influence the budget, the role of the public in budget
decisions, the openness of budget decision-making—all these are part of the politics of
process. In this view of politics, the individual actors and their strategies and goals may
or may not be important, depending on the role assigned to individual actors in the budget
process and depending on whether the external environment allows any flexibility.
The fifth view, policymaking, is that the politics of budgeting centers in policy debates,
including debates about the role of the budget. Spending levels, taxing policies, and
willingness to borrow to sustain spending during recessions are all major policy issues
that have to be resolved one way or another during budget deliberations. Budgets may
reflect a policy of moderating economic cycles, or they may express a policy of allowing
the economy to run its course. Similarly, budgets must allocate funding to particular
programs and, in the course of doing so, decide priorities for federal, state, and local
governments. This view of politics in the budget emphasizes trade-offs, especially those
that occur between major areas of the budget, such as social services and defense or
police. This view also emphasizes the role of the budget office in making policy and the
format of the budget in encouraging comparisons between programs.
These five views of politics have been developed over time and often contradict each other.
However, parts of each may be true, and one definition or another may describe different parts of
budgetary decision-making or be true of budgetary decision-making at different times or at
different levels of government.
Budgetary Decision-Making
This book explores the kind of politics that occurs in budgetary decision-making. What is
budgetary decision-making like? We have already discovered that public budgeting is open to
environmental changes and that it deals with policy conflicts. Policy conflicts can delay
particular decisions or prevent them from being made at all; other budget decisions must be
independent enough to be made without the missing pieces. They can be corrected later when
missing pieces fall into place. Environmental emergencies can reorder priorities and alter targets
that have already been determined. As a result, public budgeting must be segmentable and
interruptible. The need for segmentation and interruptibility is satisfied by dividing budgeting
into separate but linked decision clusters: revenues, process, expenditures, balance, and
implementation.
Decision-making in each cluster proceeds somewhat separately from, but with reference to,
decisions made or anticipated in other decision streams. Decisions on spending are made with an
eye on revenue totals, even though revenue estimates may not yet be firm. Decisions in different
streams may be made iteratively, with tentative revenue estimates followed by tentative spending
estimates, followed by updated revenue estimates and fine-tuning of spending estimates. The
order of decision-making may vary from year to year. In one year, there may be no change in the
definition of balance, so that prior years’ definitions frame the current year’s deliberations. In
another year, the definition of balance may change during the deliberations, requiring
adjustments in spending or revenue plans. Sometimes the decision-making moves faster in one
cluster than in another and decision makers in the cluster that is ahead may have to guess or
anticipate what the decisions will be in other clusters and revise later if necessary.
Each cluster attracts a different characteristic set of actors and generates its own typical pattern
of politics. Some clusters attract heavy interest group activity, while others have virtually none.
Some clusters are marked by intense competition and negotiations and efforts to bind future
decisions to restrict open competition. Some are marked by deep ideological splits, while others
seem not to be ideological at all. In some, a technical perspective prevails, while others are
clearly determined by the priorities of elected officials and the public, and still others represent a
blend of the two.
The Revenue Cluster
Revenue decisions include technical estimates of how much income will be available for the
following year, assuming no change in tax structures, and policy decisions about changes in the
level or type of taxation. Will taxes be raised or lowered? Will tax breaks be granted, and if so, to
whom and for what purpose? Which tax sources will be emphasized, and which deemphasized,
with what effect on regions, economic classes, or age groups? How visible will the tax burden
be? Interest groups are intensely involved in the revenue cluster. The revenue cluster emphasizes
the scarcity of resources that is an essential element in budgeting and illustrates the tension
between accountability and acceptability that is a characteristic of public budgets. Revenues are
also extremely sensitive to the environment because changes in the economy influence revenue
levels and because the perception of public opinion influences the public officials’ willingness to
increase taxes.
The Budget Process
The process cluster concerns how to make budget decisions. Who should participate in the
budget deliberations? Should the agency heads have power independent of the central budget
office? How influential should interest groups be? How much power should the legislature or the
chief executive have? How should the work be divided, and when should particular decisions be
made? Interest groups play a minor role, if any at all. The politics of process may revolve around
individuals or groups trying to maximize their power through rearranging the budget process.
This jockeying for power rises to importance when the competing parties represent the executive
and legislative branches and try to influence the separation and balance between the branches of
government. The politics of process may revolve around the policy issues of the level of
spending and the ability of government to balance its budget.
The Expenditure Cluster
The expenditure cluster involves some technical estimates of likely expenditures, such as those
for grants that are dependent on formulas and benefit programs whose costs depend on the level
of unemployment. But many expenditure decisions are policy relevant—which programs will be
funded at what level, who will benefit from public programs and who will not, where and how
cuts will be made, and whose interests will be protected. Agency heads are more involved in
these decisions than in taxation or process decisions, and interest groups are also often active.
The expenditure portion of the budget emphasizes competition for limited resources and the
resulting trade-offs—choices between specific sets of alternatives. If we want more money spent
on streets, does that translate into less money spent on day care? Does more money spent on
hurricane relief translate into less money for defense or housing for the poor?
The Balance Cluster
The balance cluster concerns the basic budgetary question of whether the budget has to be
balanced each year with each year’s revenues or whether borrowing is allowed to balance the
budget, and if so, how much, for how long, and for what purposes. The politics of balance deals
with questions of whether balance should be achieved by increasing revenues, decreasing
expenditures, or both, and hence it reflects policies about the desirable scope of government.
Sometimes the politics of balance emphasizes definitions, as the group in power seeks to make
its deficits look smaller by defining them away. The balance cluster also deals with questions of
how deficits should be eliminated once they occur. At the national level, because deficits may be
incurred during recessions in an effort to help the economy recover, the ability to run a deficit is
linked to policies favoring or opposing use of the budget to influence the economy, and in
particular to moderate unemployment. These issues—whether budgets should balance, the proper
scope of government and level of taxation, and the role of government in moderating
unemployment—are issues of public concern. Citizens care about which programs and services
may be cut back as well as which taxes or fees may be raised. Businesses and investors care
about which bills or bonds may not be repaid on time or in full. They may participate in this
decision cluster through referendums and opinion polls. Further, broad groups of taxpayers and
interest group coalitions representing broad segments of society may lobby on this issue.
Political parties may include their policies toward deficits in their election platforms.
Budget Implementation
Finally, there is a cluster of decisions around budget implementation. How close should actual
expenditures be to the ones planned in the budget? How can one justify variation from the budget
plan? Can the budget be remade after it is approved, during the budget year? The key issues here
revolve around the need to implement decisions exactly as made and the need to make changes
during the year because of changes in the environment. The potential conflict is usually resolved
by treating implementation as technical rather than policy related. Executive branch staff play the
major role in implementation, with much smaller
and more occasional roles for the legislature. Interest groups play virtually no role in
implementation. The allowance for technical changes does open the door to policy changes
during the year, but these are normally carefully monitored and may cause open conflict when
they occur. The implementation cluster deals not only with how close actual spending is to
planned spending, but also to how well, how honestly, and how transparently the money was
spent.
Microbudgeting and Macrobudgeting
The five clusters of decision-making outline the nature of the decisions being made, but they tell
little about how and why they are made. On the one hand there are a number of budget actors, all
of whom have individual motivations, who strategize to get what they want from the budget. The
focus on the actors and their strategies is called microbudgeting. But the actors do not simply
bargain with one another or with whomever they meet in the corridor. The actors are assigned
budget roles by the budget process; the budget process also often regulates the issues they
examine and the timing and coordination of their decisions. There are choices that they are not
free to make because they are against the law or because the courts have decreed it or because
previous decision makers have bound their hands. The total amount of revenue available is a
kind of constraint, as are popular demands for some programs and popular dislike of others.
Budgetary decision-making has to account not just for budgetary actors and their strategies but
also for budget processes and the environment. This more top-down and systemic perspective on
budgeting is called macrobudgeting. Contemporary budgeting gives attention to both
macrobudgeting and microbudgeting.
One way of viewing the determinants of budgetary outcomes is as a causal model, depicted
in Figure 1.3. In this schema, the environment, budget processes, and individuals’ strategies all
affect outcomes. The environment influences budgetary outcomes both directly and indirectly
through process and through individual strategies. It influences outcomes directly, without going
through either budget process or individual strategies, when it imposes emergencies that reorder
priorities. Thus a war or a natural disaster preempts normal budgetary decision-making.
Figure 1.3 Decision-Making: Environment, Process, and Strategies
The environment influences the budget process in several ways. The level of resources
available—both the actual level of wealth and the willingness of the citizens to pay their taxes—
influences the degree of centralization of budgeting. When resources are especially scarce and
there is apparent need either to cut back according to a given set of policies or to make each
dollar count toward specific economic goals, there is no room for bottom-up demands that result
in compromises and a little bit of gain for everyone regardless of need. When resources are
abundant, a more decentralized model of process may hold, with less emphasis on comparing
policies and less competition between supporters of different policies.
The environment may influence the format of the budget as well. When revenues are growing,
there may be more emphasis on planning and on linking the budget to future community goals to
stimulate public demands for new spending. When there is little new money, planning may seem
superfluous. Changing direction or setting new goals may seem impossible in the face of
declining revenues that make current goals difficult to sustain.
Environment, in the sense of the results of prior decisions, may also influence process. If there is
a huge accumulation of debt and little apparent way to control it or if the budget has been
growing rapidly for reasons other than war, there may be attempts to change the budget process
in an effort to control spending and debt. In contrast, if the environment suggests a need for
additional spending and the current budget process is delivering very slow growth, the process
may be changed to make spending decisions quicker and easier.
The environment influences not only the budget process but also the strategies of the budget
actors. The level of resources available determines whether actors press for new programs and
expansion of existing ones or strive to prevent cuts and protect their revenue sources from
encroachment by other programs. The certainty of funding influences strategies as well. If
whatever an agency was promised may never arrive, agency heads are likely to engage in
continuous lobbying for their money. Long-term or future agreements will be perceived as
worthless; the possibility of toning down conflict by stretching out budget allocation times will
disappear. Attention will focus on going after what is available now, whether it is what you want
or not, inasmuch as what you really want may never show up and hence is not worth waiting for.
The intergovernmental grant structure is part of the environment that may influence strategies.
Because some grant money may seem free, state and local governments may focus their energies
on getting grants instead of raising local revenues. Or they may seek to decrease the amount of
match required for a grant or increase their authority over how the money can be spent.
Intergovernmental grants may make some expenditures relatively cheap and some cutbacks
relatively expensive and, hence, frame choices for state and local budget officials.
The legal environment also influences strategies. For example, if public school teachers want tax
rises to fund education and there is a provision in the state constitution forbidding income taxes,
the teachers must either campaign for a constitutional revision (a time-consuming and difficult
task) or support a tax they know to be more burdensome to the poor. Thus the environment can
frame choices and influence strategies.
In Figure 1.3, the budget process influences strategies and to a lesser extent outcomes, directly.
But there is a double-headed arrow on the link between budget processes and strategies,
suggesting that individuals’ strategies also influence budget processes.
Budget processes influence strategies in some obvious ways. If the budget process includes
detailed budget hearings that are open to the public and interest groups and that actually
influence decisions, then various actors are likely to concentrate their efforts on making a good
impression at those hearings. If the chief executive prepares the budget, which is subject to only
superficial scrutiny and pro forma hearings before being approved by the legislature, anyone who
wants to influence the budget—including the legislators themselves—must make his or her
opinions heard earlier in the process, before the final executive proposal is put together. Informal
discussion with department heads or even telephone calls to the budget office may be the route to
influence. If the budget is made two or three times, with only the last time being effective, then
actors may grandstand initially, taking extreme positions to attract media attention, and adopt
more reasoned and moderate positions later when the final decisions are made. The budget
process orders the decisions in such a way that some of them are critical; budget actors focus
their strategies on those key decisions no matter where they are located or when they occur.
When budget outcomes contradict some group’s preference, the group may try to change the
budget process to help it obtain the outcomes it prefers. When coalitions of the dissatisfied can
agree on particular changes, fairly substantial changes in process may result. A change in process
will bring about a change in outcome, if the change in process shifts power from one group of
individuals who want to accomplish one goal to another group with different goals.
The final link in the figure is between the strategies of budget actors and outcomes. The effect of
different strategies on the outcomes is hard to gauge, but strategies that ignore the process or the
environment are likely to fail. Budget actors have to figure out where the flexibility is before
they can influence how that flexibility will be used. Strategies that try to bypass superiors or fool
legislators generally do not work; strategies that involve careful documentation of need and
appear to save money are generally more successful.12
Summary and Conclusions
Public budgeting shares the characteristics of all budgeting. It makes choices between possible
expenditures, it has to balance, and it includes a decision-making process. But public budgeting
has a number of additional features peculiar to itself, such as its openness to the environment; the
variety of actors involved, all of whom come to it with different goals; the separation of
taxpayers from budget decision makers; the use of the budget document as a means of public
accountability; and numerous constraints.
Public budgeting is both technical and political. “Politics” takes on some special meanings in the
context of budgetary decision-making. Budgetary decision-making must be flexible, adaptive,
and interruptible, which leads to a structure of five semi-independent strands of decision-making:
revenues, process, expenditures, balance, and implementation. Each strand generates its own
political characteristics.
Budget outcomes are not solely the result of budget actors’ negotiating with one another in a
free-for-all; outcomes depend on the environment and on the budget process as well as individual
strategies. Budgetary decision-making changes over time: Interest group power waxes and
wanes, competition in the budget increases and decreases, and the budget process itself varies.
Changes in process take place in response to individuals, committees, and branches of
government jockeying for power; to changes in the environment from rich to lean or vice versa;
to changes in the power of interest groups; and to scandals or excesses of various kinds.
Chapters 2 to 8 describe the patterns of politics associated with each of the decision streams and
the sources and patterns of change over time. The final chapter integrates the decision streams
into one model of budgetary decision-making and points out the commonalities and differences
among the decision streams.
2 Revenue Politics
But if you really want to raise taxes, I do want to have an argument.
—Grover Norquist
And I don’t think you can have a rule that you’re never going to raise taxes or that you’re never
going to lower taxes. I don’t want to rule anything out.
—Rep. Peter K. King
In public budgeting, the tax payers and the decision makers who determine tax and
spending levels are separated. This separation sets up the possibility of some radical
disagreements. Citizens would undoubtedly be happier about paying taxes if they
could choose the services they wanted and pay only what they felt those services were
worth. They might be even happier if they could get others to pay the taxes while they
received the services. Individual taxpayers usually do not control the mix of services
and may have to pay for some programs they do not want. Moreover, many citizens
are convinced that they are paying for waste and mismanagement and that others are
getting away with paying less than they pay. They resent being forced to pay what
they consider to be more than their share.
Elected officials often have legal power to raise taxes, but they cannot do so willynilly. The ability to raise taxes is highly constrained, by legislative or constitutional
tax limits, by politicians’ campaign promises and written pledges not to increase
taxes, and by the often justified belief that the public will throw out of office any
elected officials who raise taxes. Active lobby groups continually push for reductions
in taxes and oppose increases. Further, many elected officials express the need to
avoid putting an undue burden on businesses that would make it difficult for them to
compete. Given all these constraints on raising taxes, the puzzle is not why—as some
have asked—government grows in a democracy, but rather how government can ever
raise taxes to pay the bills.1
This chapter describes the difficulty of raising taxes and the variety of strategies
employed. It then discusses the various tax breaks granted to offset inequitable tax
burdens and to respond to interest group demands and the resulting complexity of tax
codes at all levels of government. Finally, the chapter addresses efforts to reform the
tax system, to make it simpler, more productive, and more equitable.
Raising Taxes
Raising taxes is problematic, not only because citizens get angry when their taxes are raised, but
also because some states have passed laws making it intentionally difficult to raise taxes. States
sometimes limit the permissible rate of growth of tax revenue (see the minicase of TABOR in
Colorado for one example, in Chapter 1) or require public referendums for tax increases. Some
states require difficult-to-obtain supermajorities in the legislature to pass tax increases. These
constraints on revenues can be more or less restrictive and easier or harder to change. Some are
written into state constitutions, a particularly inflexible constraint.
In our federal system, the states have power over the local governments. States have found it
tempting to impose limits on taxes at the local level. By limiting local taxes, state elected
officials get the credit for tax relief without unbalancing the state budget. As a result, local
officials may find it difficult to raise sufficient revenue to pay for basic services. Sometimes the
states replace the lost revenue for the local governments, but when times get tough, as during
recessions, this assistance may be reduced or disappear.
Raising taxes is not only unpopular; it can be embarrassing. In order to force elected officials to
keep their campaign promises not to raise taxes, Grover Norquist of the Americans for Tax
Reform has asked those running for office to sign a written pledge that they will not raise taxes.
If they fail to keep their word at any time after they sign and while they are still in office,
Norquist publicizes and criticizes their defection, threatening them with electoral defeat. The
written agreement, called a taxpayer protection pledge, is a promise to oppose any tax increase.
Norquist makes no exceptions for emergencies. Elimination of tax breaks is treated as a tax
increase and hence prohibited. Some of Norquist’s Republican supporters complained that they
did not think when they signed his document that it would be binding perpetually, regardless of
the circumstances or the amount of time passing. One, Representative Frank Wolf, R-VA,
charged that the pledge made it more difficult to tackle the deficit problem at the federal level.2
Despite the occasional complaint, signing the pledge is almost a prerequisite for running for
statewide or national office among Republicans and among Democrats running in Republican
districts. Though there has been a noticeable drop in the past few years, the numbers of those
bound by the no-tax-increase pledge are still impressive. According to the Americans for Tax
Reform database, the 2015 numbers are 221 House members and 49 Senators.3 At least eleven of
those listed as incumbent pledgers on the Americans for Tax Reform website had repudiated part
or all of the pledge (Coburn, McCain, Graham, Corker, Alexander, and Crapo in the Senate, and
Rigell, Fortenberry, Cole, Desjarlais, and King in the House). One of the retired senators who
repudiated the pledge, Saxby Chambliss, was still listed as an incumbent; one of the defeated
representatives, Cantor, was also still listed as a pledger, though no longer as an incumbent. A
corrected total for 2015 is 216 in the House and 42 in the Senate.
There were thirteen Republican governors in office in 2015 who had taken the pledge, with few
surprises: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. In addition to the governors,
over a thousand state legislators had taken the pledge. However, some of the newer
congresspersons and two of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates expressed
reluctance to sign the pledge: Jeb Bush and Donald Trump. Even if the pledge has lost some of
its obligatory nature, the large number of signers has made it more difficult to raise taxes,
especially where Republicans are in the majority or where supermajorities are required to raise
taxes.
Never raising taxes is a difficult promise to keep. During recessions, revenue levels fall and need
increases simultaneously, creating budget gaps. States that have sharply reduced tax rates have
often created budget gaps for themselves as well. Continual deep spending cuts have put pressure
on these states to raise revenues in some manner. Even without recessions or tax cuts, without
service expansion or new programs, the costs for state and local governments may grow more
quickly than revenues, opening budget gaps that need to be closed.
Minicase: Louisiana—Getting A...
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