Set Priorities for Budget Decisions
Washington State's
Priorities of Government
program uses
a structured process
for setting priorities to guide the governor’s budget, moving beyond incremental budgeting, and communicating the budget to the public. Broad-based teams of state leaders draw on public input to identify ten core, cross-agency results as the basis for state policy and budget decision-making.
Halfway through the FY 2001-2003 biennium, Washington Governor Gary Locke and the Legislature had cut $1.5 billion and eliminated 1,340 jobs. No easy choices remained to plug the state’s growing deficit. The traditional approaches to budgeting seemed inadequate to address the size of the fiscal problem without seriously weakening remaining government functions or increasing public cynicism.
Over a ten week period, the governor and teams of state staff and leaders implemented the Priorities of Government approach at a total cost of $200,000, including assistance from private consultants. It focuses on several
basic questions:
·
What are the results citizens expect from government?
·
What strategies are most effective in achieving those results?
·
How should we prioritize spending to buy the activities that are most critical to implementing these strategies?
·
How will we measure progress?
Recommendations for allocating available resources focused on ten results areas that citizen identified as priorities, rather than changes to the previous budget. Key indicators were identified that would measure, from the citizen point of view, whether or not the state was achieving the result.
Purchasing plans aligned spending with results, by indicating the top spending priorities, ranking all major spending in order of priority, and recommending elimination of certain budget items.
These and similar rankings provided by state agencies, provided the foundation for the governor’s FY 2003-2005 budget proposal, which successfully addressed the state’s $2.6 billion deficit. The Legislature embraced the approach and reporting on the ten general priorities of government a statutory requirement for the FY 2005-2007 biennial budget. The process still informs the governor’s budget decisions today.
Although many were skeptical of the new budgeting approach, it was well received by the media, Republican and Democratic legislators, and a broad range of interest groups.