Fragmented Budgets, Political Attention, and Coordination-Interface Compression

This literature-enhanced working paper explains why low-value components persist in fragmented public budgets and when top-down spending reviews can remove them. The key object is not nominal budget size but the reformable component, which may be subthreshold relative to fixed administrative, legal, informational, and political-processing costs. The theory separates administrative coordination interfaces from political attention and develops the mechanism of coordination-interface compression. The public release revision strengthens the related-literature integration across budget incrementalism, policy accumulation, veto points, transaction costs, network governance, policy termination, whole-of-government coordination, policy integration, and spending reviews. The package includes a carefully caveated Japan RS System public-data construction illustration for proposed compression measures.