Declining budget revenues, the coronavirus pandemic, economic sanctions imposed by unfriendly states, and other similar factors that have a significant impact on the budget and budget system require prompt management decisions. The fiscal policy of all budget levels is currently being implemented in conditions of turbulence, faced with the need to respond to the challenges of the new reality. The research hypothesis was that there are many facts and phenomena that reflect the presence of non-systemic external influence on the approval and execution of the budget. These include budget imbalance, deviation of its execution from the approved one, adjustments to the approved volumes of budget revenues and expenditures, asynchrony of its execution in during the financial year, etc. Using data collected from federal laws on the federal budget since 1999, as well as data from the Russian Treasury, we show that the above phenomena are generally characteristic of the budget policy of the Russian Federation, and elements of manual control only increase during crisis periods. At the same time, the lower levels of the budget system have fewer opportunities to respond to the challenges of turbulent time than the higher ones.