Abstract
Several suggestions to improve, clarify, and extend the discussion of the budget’s journey through Congress at the individual program level are offered in the concluding chapter. The chapter also provides some reflections of whether volatile budgets are good or bad for American democracy and its citizens.
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Notes
- 1.
Wildavsky (1979), p. 5.
- 2.
For an excellent, in-depth narrative account of the fiscal year 1998 budget process as it unfolded inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, see Wilson (2000).
- 3.
See Padgett’s model of serial judgment, which generally reinforces marginal changes in budgetary outcomes using program-level data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but demonstrates that “occasionally, as the normal outcome of serial judgment decision-making, more radical and ‘catastrophic’ changes are also produced.” Padgett (1980), p. 370.
- 4.
LeLoup and Moreland (1978), pp. 238–239; Natchez and Bupp conclude that “the Atomic Energy Commission has been a fairly stable agency both in administrative organization and actual spending levels for the past ten years. That we find such great variation in the relative prosperity of programs here seems to suggest that we can expect greater fluctuations elsewhere…” Natchez and Bupp (1973).
References
LeLoup, Lance, and William Moreland. 1978. Agency strategies and executive review: the hidden politics of budgeting. Public Administration Review 38: 232–239.
Natchez, Peter, and Irvin Bupp. 1973. Policy and priority in the budgetary process. American Political Science Review 67:951–963.
Padgett, John. 1980. Bounded rationality in budgetary research. American Political Science Review 74:354–372.
Wildavsky, Aaron. 1979. The Politics of the Budgetary Process. 3rd ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Wilson, George C. 2000. This War Really Matters. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
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Demarest, H.B. (2017). Reconciling Volatility and Stability in the Defense Budget. In: US Defense Budget Outcomes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52301-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52301-9_8
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