Understanding gov't bureaucracy budgetese
As the SJ City Council prepares to tackle its $45m budget shortfall, citizens should get ready for a blizzard of arcane language that'll likely leave us utterly confused. The FlashReport provides a quick primer to help clarify what is meant to be obscure.
First is to understand the meaning of the baseline budget in “budgetese” (that is the meaning of the word as meant by the bureaucrats in charge of the budgets). The “base” in a baseline budget is how much money the bureaucracy, in their line item in the budget, got last year. Every budget starts with the assumption that what was budgeted last year is necessary this year. The state bureaucrats then submit, what they call in budgetese, a “Budget Change Proposal” (BCP) to last year’s budget. The Legislature’s budget committees then address and vote on those BCPs. Legislators rarely look at any program or line item to determine if that program or line item is necessary. They tend to accept the base as necessary, and make changes to that base to achieve a “baseline” budget number. In good times they build up the base and add to the baseline number.
When revenues drop at the state level, the Legislature make small changes to the new base, because the state Constitution requires a balanced budget. At the federal level, Congress just borrows the money to pay any shortfall, since there is no balanced budget requirement for the federal budget.
The BCPs mentioned above are prepared using statements like the bureaucracy needs “X number of new employees” or the law requires increased spending due to “anticipated growth in population utilizing the program and increased spending due to inflation.” The baseline budget is the size of the line item in the budget, that is, the current base plus the growth in the number of employees, population and inflation. When the Legislature acts on the BCPs, they cut or expand the bureaucrats’ proposals to the growth of government. If you hear the words that the Legislature is “cutting the budget,” the fact is they are not. They are cutting the BCPs. There are not cuts to the base, there are cuts to the anticipated growth of government. So a new budget word — cuts don’t mean cuts to the program, simply cuts to the increases in the program.
The next word to learn is “program budgeting.” In their BCPs, the bureaucrats ask for more money for employees “positions” (meaning new employees they think they need) and for other office space, technology, materials or support equipment (like computers, cars and the like) to advance their mission. However, just because they ask for more money for, as an example, “ten new” employees or “thirty new” computers, that doesn’t mean they have to use the money to hire the new employees or buy the new computers, as long as they use the money for the “program.” If someone compares last year’s BCP to the actual budget activity in the budget year, and sees that they got money for ten positions or thirty new computers, but only hired five new positions or spent the computer money for free cars for the chief budgeting bureaucrat, that chief budgeting bureaucrat will say “Hey, program budgeting lets me spend the money on the program, so you shouldn’t eliminate the money for the positions or for the computers. I used that money for the program.” So, once again, normal English would mean a claim for needed new employees would mean they were going to hire new employees. Budgetese means the bureaucrats can come back in the new budget year, show that the previous year’s expenditures were for the program no matter what the BCP said, and ask for increased spending for those exact same positions and/or computers and claim that last year’s increase for those positions or computers should not be cut, because they spent it on the program.
Read the whole thing here.
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