Abstract
In my 2007 Public Administration Review essay on the unraveling of the federal budget process, I argued that federal budgeting had deteriorated seriously since 1998. I evaluated the process in terms of four widely accepted standards of what the budget process should do in a democracy: provide transparency and accountability, predictability, prioritization, and balance. I concluded that this collapse of the budget process was important because [t]he growth of debt and the muddled and opaque budget processes that grow up to obscure deficit spending have major implications for democracy. When the rules change every year or are not adhered to, when guidelines on budget totals are buried in unrelated legislation, when expenditures are moved out of defense and then funded in a supple mental, when the impact of tax cuts is erased from the budget, the process may be neither fair nor open, neither democratic nor accountable.
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