Barack Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2011 was released yesterday, of course (“here’s”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/ the official document), and there has been immediate attention to the ups and downs of total spending and the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ within it. (“Here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/01/AR2010020101869.html?hpid=topnews’s the Washington _Post_ story on that point, and “Politico’s”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32350.html.) There will be special attention on its rather red bottom line (here’s the take of the less holier-than-thou-than-it-sounds “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget”:http://crfb.org/document/crfb-reacts-presidents-fy-2011-budget.)
It’s worth remembering in all this that Congress retains the “power of the purse.” But what I want to stress here, given the quick sequence of presidential messages these past days, is that over time the budget has arguably become more important than the State of the Union in presenting the president’s legislative agenda. As early as January 1946, in fact, Harry Truman melded his State of the Union and proposed Budget into a single “message to Congress”:http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12467&st=&st1=. “It is clear that the budgetary program and the general program of the Government are actually inseparable,” Truman said. “The president bears the responsibility for recommending to the Congress a comprehensive set of proposals on all Government activities and their financing.” Obama didn’t literally combine the two, of course, but one can’t fully understand the appealing rhetorical references to reform in the State of the Union without filling in the sometimes less-appealing details from the Budget Message.
By the way, these days, Truman’s claim that “the president bears the responsibility” for pulling together “a comprehensive set of proposals on all Government activities” seems like stating the obvious. We judge presidents by their legislative leadership, and that includes their programmatic prowess. But in 1946 Truman was laying claim to some important interbranch turf — not up there with _Marbury v. Madison_, maybe, but a big step past the “constitutional invitation”:http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii#section3 (not requirement) to “recommend to [congressional] consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
Indeed, the fact of a president’s annual legislative program — different from presidents taking positions on key issues of the day — reflects something of a power grab for the right to set the national agenda. And a successful one, if aided and abetted by Congress itself.
What happened? Back to the Truman years we go…
Part of the story, six decades ago, is that a new budget process happened. Another part is that party politics happened. Another is that Congress happened.
_The Budget_. It wasn’t until the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act that presidents were required (or allowed) to compile a single budget document to be submitted to Congress for its consideration. Prior to that departments sent their spending requests to legislators in largely uncoordinated fashion; there was little effort by the executive, and even less by the legislative branch, to make sure those requests coincided with revenues, or even, substantively, with each other. However, the onset of deficit spending in World War I, combined with then-current attitudes towards “scientific administration” that stressed executive unity, pushed Congress into passing the BAA. It included a Bureau of the Budget, the forerunner to OMB.
The Budget Bureau was originally housed in the Treasury, but was moved to the Executive Office of the President in 1939 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The latter move was critical in creating what scholars (e.g., John Burke) these days call the “institutional presidency”:http://www.amazon.com/Institutional-Presidency-Organizing-Managing-Interpreting/dp/0801865018/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265123510&sr=1-1. This, combined with the savvy ramping up of Budget Bureau staff under FDR and especially Truman — to more than 400 people — was key. It gave presidents massive resources for budget analysis not matched by Congress until the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created the Congressional Budget Office. It allowed pro-active departmental oversight and the ability to conduct “central clearance” of budgetary and legislative proposals. It was, even today, thought of as the “golden age” of OMB. This is often thought of as an era of “neutral competence” — but that competence fed presidential power, as Matt Dickinson and I have argued “here”:http://www.jstor.org/pss/20202433.
Relatedly, the 1946 Employment Act created the Council of Economic Advisers and gave presidents the statutory duty to provide an annual “program for carrying out… a policy” that would “promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” This may have been wishful thinking, but it again focused attention (and blame?) on the presidency for legislative formulation, which now had the resources to make that happen.
_Party Politics_. In the November 1946 midterm elections Republicans had taken control of Congress for the first time since the early 1930s. By the end of 1947, the Truman administration had figured out that it wanted to attack the “do nothing” Congress in the 1948 election; to do so, it needed to propose something for Congress to do nothing about. A lot of somethings — Charlie Murphy, Truman’s counsel, said later that the aim was “to have a special message ready to go to Congress every Monday morning.” The aggregate result was to institutionalize the aim of the 1946 Budget/State of the Union message noted above with a systematic agenda. Every president since has had to do this, even when they didn’t want to.
_Congress_. Thing was, it turned out that Congress liked this system. It met the needs of legislators and of bureaucrats too — providing the former with a ready-made method of organizing their own limited time (made more limited by travel schedules that increasingly took them out of Washington during the working week) and the latter with a means of getting departmental initiatives on the presidential radar screen. When Dwight Eisenhower was slow in getting out his legislative items in 1953, he was admonished by a House committee chair: “don’t expect us to start from scratch on what you people want. That’s not the way we do things here — _you_ draft the bills and _we_ work them out.”
Truman’s experiment in communications, combining the State of the Union and budget messages, was abandoned after a single year. But his institutional advances — and the centrality of budgeting to the presidential agenda and toolkit — have remained, cemented in what Stephen Wayne termed the “legislative presidency”:http://www.amazon.com/legislative-Presidency-Stephen-J-Wayne/dp/0060469641/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265059101&sr=8-2.
Next time — more recent developments.