Budgets change at the margin rather than wholesale.
Wildavsky's 1964 study of US federal budgeting. Last year's base is not reopened; only the increment is contested, which is why programmes are far easier to start than to end.
In practice
- A department debates a 2% increment for six weeks and never opens the 98% inherited from last year.
- A grant funded as a two-year pilot is in its ninth year, because ending it requires a decision and continuing it requires none.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works