Idaho Budget Cutting

Idaho Budget Cutting

Sharon Fisher has an article at New West's blog about the painful process of budget cutting for Idaho state government:

If legislators are going to be cutting individual programmatic functions in other agencies, though, it’s going to be interesting to see how they do it. Currently, the Legislative Budget Book used by the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee JFAC) uses an “incremental” way of describing the budget for the new fiscal year. In other words, it starts with the amount the agency received the previous year, then makes various adjustments to that figure to produce a “maintenance” figure—which would allow the agency to continue doing what it’s been doing—then adds new programs and requests.

In other words, the programs that have been approved in previous years aren’t listed in detail in the budget book, at least as it currently exists. So it’s not clear how members of JFAC would receive program-specific information in order to cut existing programs. Certainly the budget development manual provided by DFM to the agencies doesn’t look any different.

This is, as I understand it, how the federal government does budgeting as well--start with an assumption that every program is necessary, and at its current level, and then adjust accordingly. Now, if every governmental program was created for good reasons, and those reasons remain just as valid today as they did when it was created, this would be just fine.

But we all know that programs acquire a life of their own, and even when they no longer make sense--or at least, don't justify as big a slice of the pie as they used to--they survive. I gave two examples to my students last week: the strategic helium reserve (originally in support of our warfighting dirigible fleet) that persisted into the 1990s. The last I checked, this program was still consuming money in figuring out how to dispose of the assets and liabilities. The other was the program that required U.S. military bases in Germany to use anthracite coal from the U.S. for power generation, shipped in American bottoms. More than a decade after our bases stopped burning anthracite coal, at the request of the German government, we were still shipping it over--and then burying it on leased land.

It's a big project to sit down and revisit the decisions to create every program. But when a budget crisis arrives, maybe that's what they need to do. They may not get much else done in the meantime, but perhaps that a feature, not a bug.