Austerity governance and the performance anxieties of the tax state

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Austerity might not have reduced the net spend of the state, but it has certainly transformed it into something more centralised, coercive, and managerial. The austerity literature often explains this as the governance implications of a neoliberal drive to cut spending. In contrast, I argue it reflects a distinct managerial lineage of austerity. To make this argument, I theorise austerity through a history of budgetary planning. This was an approach to budgeting that emerged in the United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960s. It was motivated less by a concern that spending was too high and more by a feeling it was too diffuse across welfare beneficiaries, subsidised corporations, and delegated agencies. Budgetary planning addressed this by remaking budgets from democratic spaces of negotiation into centralised instruments of decision-making focused on pursuing ‘effective’ policy. The austerity literature has overlooked budgetary planning because it focuses on changes to tax revenue structures, macroeconomic dynamics, and cost control. Instead, I address microeconomic tools of public expenditure management. Historicising budgetary planning in this way invites us to theorise austerity not only in terms of how much government spends, but also who gets to decide what it buys.