Policy and Priority in the Budgetary Process

Recent quantitative studies vastly understate the political conflicts and policy choices that are embedded in the budgetary process. The reason for this lies in the way these quantitative studies have organized budgetary data. Thus far the units of analysis have been federal agencies, the administrative categories of government. The “striking regularities” that have been reported reflect—quite accurately—the great stability of the administrative structure of government. However, these categories do not describe the intense competition between programs and policies that takes place within the framework. We argue, further, that the entire metaphor of an inert bureaucratic machine doing this year essentially what it did last year is erroneous. Rather, priority setting in the federal bureaucracy more resembles the market situation of nineteenth century capitalism where aggressive “policy entrepreneurs,” unequal in talent and resources, struggle to build and sustain support for their programs. The competition between policies is both reflected in and promoted by the budgetary process. By shifting the units of analysis to programs and transforming these data so that programs of different size are commensurate, we develop an index that reflects the relative growth and decay of programs as they compete for budgetary resources.