The subject of the study is the Unified Methodological Recommendations for Project Activities (UMR) as an element of methodological regulation of the project-related expenditures of the federal budget within the system of program-targeted planning of the Russian Federation. The article analyzes their legal nature, functional purpose, and actual regulatory impact on national projects, federal projects (both included and not included in national projects), and departmental projects. Special attention is given to identifying in the text of the UMR the prescriptive norms of prohibitive and mandatory nature that establish requirements for the structure of project passports, monitoring timelines and procedures, rules for making changes, and ensuring the consistency of financial parameters with federal budget execution data. The research aims to determine the place of UMR in the system of sources of financial law and to identify signs of quasi-normative regulation in the absence of a formal status as a normative legal act. It is argued that UMR operates as a tool of "soft imperative," exerting a systemic influence on budget planning, administration, and control of project expenditures. The work employs formal-legal, system-structural, and comparative-legal methods, as well as elements of doctrinal analysis of the concept of "soft law." The study is based on the analysis of normative and methodological acts in their interrelation with budgetary procedural institutions. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the comprehensive financial-legal interpretation of the Unified Methodological Recommendations for Project Activities as an element of quasi-normative regulation of the project-related expenditures of the federal budget. It is demonstrated that UMR is not limited to methodological support for project management but instead forms a system of prescriptive mandates of both mandatory and prohibitive nature, directly influencing the structure of project passports, the procedure for making changes, monitoring, and the comparability of budget parameters. For the first time, at the level of systemic analysis, the institutional relationship of UMR with the digital infrastructure "Electronic Budget" and their role in ensuring the consistency of federal budget execution data are shown. A conclusion is drawn about the existence of a "soft imperative" construct within program-targeted budgeting, where the methodological document effectively performs the functions of a normative regulator. The necessity of institutionalizing the existing methodological requirements in the form of a separate normative legal act at the departmental level is justified, which would eliminate legal uncertainty and ensure the systematic regulation of project expenditures.
Dmitrii Sergeevich Samorodskii (Sun,) studied this question.