ASSIGNMENT

Assignment

Assignment

Impact of the Budget Act Of 1921

The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 established the Bureau of the Budget (BB) within the Treasury Department (Shuman, 19). This legislation also created the General Accounting Office (GAO) which serves Congress as an internal auditing agency of the federal budget. The establishment of the Bureau of the Budget gave the President a great deal of influence over the budget in terms of the formulation of budget figures and priorities. In 1933, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, executive power over the budget increased when the Bureau of the Budget was granted "power to make, wave, and modify apportionments of appropriations."

Under this new arrangement, all executive departments, agencies, and other bureaucratic units had to funnel their budget requests through the Office of Management and Budget and the President. The idea was to use the budget as a management tool. If bureaucratic units had to depend on the OMB and the President for the processing of their budget requests for the next year, these bureaucratic units would more likely follow the wishes of the President. This reorganization plan thus tended to centralize the budget making process within the Executive Branch and strengthen the hand of the President.     In Congress, on the other hand, the budget was not treated as a single entity, but rather existed as the sum total of 13 separate appropriation bills drafted by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and various pieces of tax and other revenue raising legislation drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee and reworked by the Senate Finance Committee. Budget debate in Congress began each year on January 1 and was supposed to be completed by July 1, at that time the beginning of the federal fiscal (or budget) year. The budgetary process in Congress was generally both confusing and uncoordinated.

Widavasky's term of "Camel Nose"

The camel's nose is a metaphor for a situation where permitting some small undesirable situation will allow gradual and unavoidable worsening. A typical usage is this, from Widavasky in 1958. The phrase has also been used by Judges in legal proceedings, like in Reed v. King (193 CA Rptr. 130 - 1983): "The paramount argument against an affirmative conclusion is it permits the camel's nose of unrestrained irrationality admission to the tent. If such an "irrational" consideration is permitted as a basis of rescission the stability of all conveyances will be seriously undermined." Basically, the Judge was saying that if he allowed the respective plaintiff to win the case, that the proverbial "floodgates" would thereafter be opened, inviting further potentially frivolous lawsuits (torts). The case in question however, was arguably infrivolous, it involved a plaintiff suing the defendant because the defendant sold the plaintiff a house without telling them that the house's previous inhabitants had been brutally murdered 10 years earlier. Therefore, the Judge's main concern was not so much for the plaintiff, but rather for the future of legal precedents, hence "the camel's nose", where this case was painted as merely "the camel's nose" where the ...