Sharpening the Knife That Cuts the Public Pie

Abstract

G JOVERNMENTS, LIKE MOST OF US, have limited resources relative to their collective appetite for public goods and services. And like most of us, governments must make difficult choices about how to allocate collective resources. To make the choices every government has machinery or institutions. Periodically our government has tried to improve that machinery. It is in that optimistic tradition that a little over two years ago President Johnson became persuaded that the federal government could do a better job in developing the executive budget and legislative program. He mandated and directed the civilian agencies to develop a planning programming budgeting system (PPBS) along the lines of the one instituted in the Defense Department under Robert McNamara. I would like to tell you the story of PPBS in HEW. The principal features of the system are: a long-term (five-year) plan and a method of linking the plan to the annual budget and legislative program. Now neither of these features was born two or even seven years ago. Planning is not new, and legislation and budgeting get older every year. What's new is putting them all together and forging links between them which make each relevant to the others. In other words, it's the S in PPBS which is new and different.