"Political Implications of Budget Reform:" A Retrospective

Glenn Deck and Marcia Lynn Whickerfollow. A large part of the literature on budgeting in the United States is concerned with reform. The goals of the proposed reforms are couched in similar language-economy, efficiency, improvement, or just budgeting. The President, the Congress and its committees, administrative agencies, even the interested citizenry are all to gain by some change in the way the budget is formulated, presented, or evaluated. There is little or no realization among the reformers, however, that any effective change in budgetary relationships must necessarily alter the outcomes of the budgetary process. Otherwise, why bother? Far from being a neutral matter of better budgeting, proposed reforms inevitably contain important implications for the political system, that is for the who gets what of governmental decisions.