Budget Proposal

[Belsnickel]

(03-17-2017, 02:10 PM)Millhouse Wrote: Well he has to submit one because he ultimately will have to sign off on the finalized version sent back to him from Congress. Whether or not he means to actually go through with a lot of it, this is his first official stance on what he envisions the government should be spending taxpayers dollars on. 

And the kicker of it is it isnt about reducing the deficit and debt our country is in.

Not really. His role in the budget process isn't a part of his constitutional responsibilities, it is based on a nearly hundred year-old law, The General Accounting Act of 1921. This is what created what is now known as the OMB and the GAO. The OMB is tasked with taking budget proposals from the departments, who gather them from the ground up. The OMB then funnels them to POTUS who sends it to Congress. Before that, there really was no budget process. Appropriations were made when needed by Congress and that was that. But, with the growth of the federal government in the Progressive Era and with what was to come, a budget process was needed to make sense of it all.

All of that being said, the budget is damn near ignored by Congress these days. Instead of funding the executive branch based upon their expressed "needs," they give them some of what they want and then start looking for pork-barrels, earmarks, and then the ever present logrolling brings it full circle.