Budgeting committees at the federal government level have the difficult task of “allocating scarce resources among competing purposes” (Joyce, 2003, p 6). Furthermore, the lack of both evaluation process and information on the performance of agencies causes the making of such decisions to be difficult. This is due partly by the absence of measurements to evaluate agency dollars and performance when agencies present their budgetary budget proposal with traditional budgetary process. Both performance-enhanced budgeting and performance-information budgeting can greatly improve the budgetary process because agencies will have information to not only evaluate their programs, but will also be beneficial to both governmental agencies and the general public because budgets that will benefit the tax payer will be better funded.
Traditional Budgeting vs. Performance-Enhanced Budgeting
Traditional budgeting at the federal level has had aspects of both top-down and bottom-up procedures. Rubin (2010, p 87) states that an extreme top-down budgeting can “virtually ignore bureau chiefs…the chief executive may not ask bureau chiefs for their budget request.” However, with the fragmentation of power caused by the 1974 Congressional Budget Reform Act, which “limited some of the president’s budgetary discretion and enhanced Congress’s ability to check executive branch revenue projections and economic assumptions” both the President and Congress have to work together to approve budgets (Rubin, 2010, p. 111). An example of top-down budgeting at the federal level occurs at the begging stage of the budgeting process when “the President submits to Congress a detailed budget request for the coming federal fiscal year” (Budgeting, 2010, p 1). Furthermore, the next step in the traditional budgeting process has characteristics of Bottom-up