The Executive Budget

The president's budget is issued at the beginning of each year, shortly after the president's State of the Union address.^[7] To this writing, it remains the only document that resembles our commonsense notion of a budget: a detailed summary of anticipated expenses and revenues, summed to totals that represent the fiscal policy of the U.S. government, a financial plan. The budget is produced by the entire executive branch in a process of planning and projection that begins more than a year before the president submits it to Congress. Its preparation is overseen by an elite executive agency of more than five hundred employees (once the Bureau of the Budget; now the Office of Management and Budget). The budget is a six-hundred-page book, accompanied by an appendix roughly as large as the Manhattan telephone directory. Agencies submit tens of thousands of pages of further documentation that are supposed to support presidential proposals and provide detailed plans for using the resources Congress agrees to provide. The president's program sets a standard; proponents of increases to one or another category have to explain not merely why that program needs more money but why it should be allowed to throw the whole budget out of whack. Agency heads must argue for the president's proposals even if they had originally requested greater spending.

The president's budget is only a proposal, without legal force, but it gives him a loud voice in the budget debate. It is the president's program, endorsed by the only official "elected by all the people." The effort expended in its preparation argues for its support; the executive claims to have assembled and considered far more information than Congress could ever manage. If the executive agencies behave and support the budget (a huge "if"), the president can claim that the people who run the programs have asked for these amounts. Because the president ultimately hires and fires, the agencies have reason to go along.

Until 1975, the president could also claim that only his set of choices was calibrated to the needs of fiscal policy, managing the economy through manipulating the deficit. He had economic specialists, in the Treasury Department and the Council of Economic Advisers, to justify his choices. Congress had no comparable set of experts to respond, no means to develop its own fiscal policy.

The president's budget-making powers stem from the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. Before that act, agencies submitted their estimates directly to Congress. Although, like all legislation, it had multiple causes, the 1921 Act passed largely because, as Frederick C. Mosher explains, the First World War, "with its tremendous expenditures and

debt, magnified the enthusiasm among the public and particularly in the Congress for any measures that promised reduction of alleged governmental extravagance and taxes, and this was exactly what supporters of a budget system offered."^[8] Reformers interested in making the government more businesslike had argued for several decades that the process of review and coordination of a national budget would make the government more efficient. The idea had strong popular support, and apparently many members of Congress who objected to giving the president new powers felt forced to go along.^[9]

Congress, however, took steps to limit the grant. Most important, Congress still had to pass the laws; it had the last word. The 1921 Act also took the accounting oversight function away from the Treasury and vested it in the General Accounting Office (GAO), under a comptroller general appointed for a fifteen-year term with the advice and consent of the Senate and explicitly not subject to removal by the president. GAO was to be Congress's check on executive operations. Finally, in separate action, Congress strengthened its appropriations committees, in form at least, centralizing itself in response to the new central power within the executive.

This new set of procedures had one major advantage for Congress: it gave the president primary responsibility for proposing cuts, viewing him as better equipped for such a task because he can impose priorities within the executive branch far more easily than any group in Congress can impose its will on colleagues. (The executive is in principle, and in part in fact, a hierarchy; Congress is anything but a hierarchy.) Once the president imposed priorities, members of Congress could then respond to the budget, changing it where it differed too much from their own priorities or where constituency pressures were too great and leaving the president with the blame for other decisions.

In order to justify altering the president's budget, however, Congess had to claim comparable knowledge and ability to look at the whole picture. It opposed to the president's massive budget, documents the equally copious record of appropriations hearings. And the appropriations committees, while broadly decentralized in operation, somehow always managed to stay within the president's totals.^[10]