Congressional Budget Office: A Case Study

Since Congressional committees are ultimate decision makers, perceive that their staff individuals can have the critical impact over the course and content of legislation. Constituents are asked to keep up continuous contacts with these people, particularly subcommittee staff and the lawmakers' about particular authoritative helpers. These congressional meetings are very powerful because they also carry out legislations processes such as authorizing legislation, appropriation of bills, and entitlement legislation. Authorizing legislation is a bill that makes another government program, expands the life of a current program, or nullifications existing law. Approving bills generally set a point of confinement on the measure of assets that can

The budget process is a powerful planning tool for government to make important resource decisions. According the Carney and Schoenfeld‘s article on How to read a Budget, an operating budget is a reflection of government’s financial plans. When a budget is

Texas’ two-year budget takes roughly twice that quantity of time to prepare, develop and distribute. Offices develop their appropriations requests in the first year; the legislative body approves the “General Appropriation Act in the second year, and the budget implemented over the following two years.” The foremost step in preparing the budget is the evolution of a statewide vision for the future of Texas government. The regulator, in cooperation with the “Legislative Budget Board”, (LBB), handles making the mission statement for Texas.

When getting the specifics of something, the committee will most likely assign a subcommittee to look at something very specific (5). All the subcommittee is, is a small group of people from the original committee that get very specific information (5). While the committee and subcommittee is getting an experts analysis on the proposed bill, they are also checking so make sure that the bill has a high priority in society (5). To do this the committee hands the bill off to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) (5). The people in the GAO check and make sure that the bill is worth the time of the committee by judging how much of an impact that it will have on the government or the lives of everyone in the United States of America (5). Once the GAO has reached their decision, the committee then decides whether they will hold a meeting or not hold a meeting (5).

“The federal budget is the yearly plan for how the US government will spend the money it takes from taxes and borrowing.” After thoroughly analyzing the federal budget from 2012, it is unquestionably evident that a majority of the money is being put into a few major categories, leaving room for the rest of the smaller categories to be financially neglected. Is this fair? It seems that the money could be more fairly distributed, and that there is room for cuts in some of the larger categories, to improve the littler ones. In each of the three budget clusters, the US Government should make adjustments in the way it is distributing money; changes involving the big five, the middle

Investopedia defines Budget as an "estimation of the expenses and revenues over a specific future period of time. Budgets can be made for a group of people, family, person, country, business, government, organization or anything else that makes or spend money. The budget is a micro economic concept that shows the trade-offs made when one good is exchange for another." When looking at the year 9 budget for CB first thing that jumped out at me was the sales goal of 3510 is a 5247450. This is my first immediate concern considering that the storyline has clearly stated it is a down market due to the

A couple of large concerns always arise when discussing politics: the state of the Union, what the president is currently doing, and a few other topics. No topic, however, is as talked about in major concern than the federal budget. As tax payers, the American people always wishes to know where their tax dollars are going. The problem is that very few people actually know who sets the federal budget, and how much power this branch of government really has.

Congressional Budget Office, Congressional Budget Office , 22 June. 2015, https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/2013/44786 Accesses 8 Mar. 2017

     Like every other government controlled organization there is a group of people who are control of Fiscal Policy. There is a Council of Economics. These men are called Council of Economic Advisors. In the Council of Advisors there are three people. There is a Chairmen and two members. Even though there are not a lot of people in this council it is a very important council. These three men are very influential to the President. The Council of Economic Advisors haves five main jobs to do.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) acts as a financial planner to congress for our nations spending. The CBO is part of the legislative branch of government. The CBO aids congress by analyzing data to support the budget creation process. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is another entity with a similar responsibility.

The first step to creating the federal government budget is the President submits a budget request to Congress. The executive branch gets requests from the federal agencies saying that different things and projects need money or that they don’t need money. So basically they discuss what project is more important. Yet these are all only proposals so they can either be accepted or denied depending on what the people think the country needs.

The budget process may start with a sales forecast that describes "expected revenues from groups of products." (p. 485) Total revenues can be calculated based on a number of factors that include both the product markup as well as a fluctuating commodity price.

The central challenge that budget developers encounter is predicting what the future holds for the internal business and external factors. Reading the future is something that can never be done with perfect precision. The fast pace of technological change, the complexities of global competition and world events make developing effective budgets both more difficult and more important.

Historically, incrementalism has characterized public budgeting because at its core, budgeting has evolved: increased and decreased through gradual stages within the realm of the political arena. The need for this one step at a time type of response, found within incremental budgeting, would have likely been caused by the known fact that prior to the 1900’s public welfare programs, federal, states, and even city spending did not exist in the way in which is more than obviously observable in today’s society simply because America did not employ an actual budgetary system. Therefore, as with any unchartered territory, it was approached in stages, with caution, a little at a time in response to the growing needs of the public. Aaron Wildavsky made this case in his book “The politics of the budgetary process,” when he pointed out “budgeting is incremental, not comprehensive. The beginning of wisdom about an agency budget is that it is almost never actively reviewed as a whole every year in the sense of reconsidering the value of all existing programs as compared to all alternatives. Instead, it is based on last year’s budget with special attention given to a narrow range of increases or decreases.” (Wildavsky 1964, p. 15)

Budget and budgetary control practices are undeniably indispensable as organizations routinely go about their business activities and operations. These organizations are constantly on the alert on how actual levels of performance agree with planned or budgeted performance. A budget expresses a plan in monetary terms. It is prepared and approved prior to a particular budgeted period and explicitly may show the income, expenditure and the capital to be employed by organizations in achieving their goals and objectives.