Deconstructing Budgets, Reconstructing Budgeting: Contemporary Literary Theory and Public Policy in Action

Text and reading. What, you might well ask, do these have to do with making policy and its analysis more useful? The answer: Text and reading are core to contemporary literary theory's focus on the narrative, and this theory and focus prove immensely helpful in addressing the major policy issues of our day. To see how, we consider one of those issues that confronts readers in the United States and elsewhere, namely, the worldwide disarray in national budgeting systems.

This chapter is a first step toward understanding chapter 2's discussion of what a policy narrative is. I show that even a rudimentary understanding of contemporary theory can improve our understanding and making of public policy.

The Problem

It is not just the so-called Third World countries that cannot cope budgetarily, but the United States as well. We here in the States have had an increasingly hard time keeping to the federal budget. "How we Americans used to deride the 'banana republics' of the world for their 'repetitive budgeting' under which the budget was reallocated many times during the year, until it became hardly recognizable.... Yet resolutions that continue last year's funding for agencies, for want of ability to agree on this year's, are becoming a way of life in the United States," as Aaron Wildavsky put the problem a decade ago. Since then, Wildavsky has argued that continuously remaking the national budget "has now become standard practice in relatively rich nations."

Descriptions of national budgeting systems occur again and again in the work of Aaron Wildavsky, particularly The Politics of the Budgetary Process, Budgeting: A Comparative Theory of Budgetary Processes, and Naomi Caiden and Wildavsky's Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries. These documents are regarded as the most influential post–World War II books on U.S. budgeting and comparative budgeting generally and provided some of the most recent information we have had on national budgeting systems. I have distilled seven major features of current national budgets from this material. After discussing these features, I draw out some of their important implications. The seven features underscore why current budgetary practice has a great deal in common with contemporary literary practice, in particular, deconstruction.

A qualification before proceeding further. What follows is not a comprehensive review of the literature on government budgeting. What is reviewed scarcely touches on the project implementation and program evaluation literatures. The sole aim of the next section is to distill features of budgeting that reproduce concerns in a field we normally in no way associate with budgeting, namely, literary theory.

Key Features of National Budgets

Budgets are, first of all, texts. Usually budgetary figures are "embodied in a document that may be called the budget, but the budget is much more than that. It is the outcome of a process," comments one expert. Yet for all the accent on budgetary process and politics in the political science literature, the budget as written text is virtually always the starting point in that literature. Almost unavoidably, the first chapter of The Politics of the Budgetary Process begins, "In the most literal sense, a budget is a document, containing words and figures, which proposes expenditures on certain items." So central is the printed budget to our understanding of what government is all about that the inability to publish a national budget is easily one of the best measures we have of a government whose very existence is under threat. Politically plagued Angola, for example, apparently did not publish a budget for years.

National budgeting extends, of course, beyond the written word. Budgeting is a way to set priorities, a mechanism for expenditure control, a means of staff coordination, and more. Still, the printed budget and its documentation remain core even to these other efforts. The national budget is, in reality, often not just one published text but many. The Government of Kenya's budget, for instance, has been a set of publications covering annually its development estimates, recurrent estimates, supplementary estimates, ministerial budget speech, revenue estimates, and survey of current and future economic conditions. The U.S. federal budget has, in contrast, summarized many of these same topics in two documents, the budget and its appendix. In addition, each of the conventional stages of the budget process—compilation, approval, execution, and audit—requires its own documentation. The more or less dispersed nature of the printed budget within and over its various stages and functions has profound implications for how closely budgets, money, and power are related, as we shall see.

Budget texts are increasingly fictional National budgets are notorious for trying, by way of figures and statistics, to simplify, quantify, and commodity into commensurable units a reality that revolts against such reductionism. The fictional character of national budgets also derives from areas other than this inherent problem of using numbers on the page to refer to things out there. For Caiden and Wildavsky,

the failure of budgets to have predictive value, that is, to calculate expected national income accurately, to relate expenditures to it over the year, to allocate these resources to various purposes, and to have them spent as authorized is a noteworthy phenomenon in many poor countries. To speak of a budget as "a great lie" ... is sometimes no exaggeration.

The description still holds for many Third World countries and now presents a fair picture of parts of the U.S. federal budget as well. The more written texts there are to the national budget, the more the sense of fiction amplifies this sense not of lies or deliberate distortion as much as drastic simplification and inherent nonreferentiality. For instance, substantial differences have existed between what was printed in the five-year National Development Plan of the Government of Kenya (GoK) and what the GoK eventually budgeted in its three-year forward budget, between that printed forward budget and what was eventually budgeted annually in the published estimates,...