The future of federal budgeting: What will the government do? How will it make its choices?

Over the past quarter century, federal budgeting has been dominated by the federal budget deficit, and by episodic efforts to ‘rationalize’ the federal budget process. In the first instance, although the deficit has declined in each of the past four fiscal years, it is projected to rise once again in fiscal year 1997 and continue to do so into the next century. Getting a handle on future deficits will require reining in mandatory spending, which has proved difficult. Second, current efforts to use more performance information in the budget process face at least four obstacles: getting agreement on objectives; measuring costs accurately; establishing measures of outcomes; and getting policymakers to use performance information for decision-making.