DUPLICATION AND CONFUSION IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH
Although the national government, unlike the states, has a single- headed executive, the executive departments are composed of a multitude of bureaus and other subdivisions that are not well organized in their relations to one another. There is overlapping, duplication, and even conflict of work. The director of finance of the War Department said that in the recent war,
The War Department entered this war without any fixed or carefully digested and prepared financial system. There were at the beginning of the war five … bureaus each independent of the others, each making its own contracts, doing its own purchasing, doing its own accounting, with as many different methods as there were bureaus. As a result they were competing with each other in a market where the supplies in many cases for which they were competing were restricted in amount … There was no central authority to prune, revise, or compare estimates submitted and to coordinate expenditures, and that naturally resulted in overlappings and duplications, and some of them of a large amount. [Footnote: Testimony before Budget Committee, quoted by Will Payne, "Your Budget," Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 32.]
The responsibility is partly in the executive department; but it is also partly in Congress, for it creates bureaus, defines their duties, appropriates money for them. And in Congress the responsibility is divided among various committees.
One committee or subcommittee has supervision of building the barracks at a given army post while another committee or subcommittee has supervision of building the hospital at the same post. One committee has jurisdiction of the guns, another committee has jurisdiction of the emplacement of the guns. All committees are jealous of their own prerogatives and sometimes more or less jealous of other committees. [Footnote: Will Payne, "Your Budget," SATURDAY EVENING POST, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 166.]
APPROPRIATIONS MADE MORE OR LESS BLINDLY
Each year the executive departments submit to the Secretary of the Treasury an estimate of the amount of money they think they will need. The Secretary of the Treasury puts these estimates together without revision and without criticism and submits them to Congress, together with an estimate of the probable revenues available. While there is a committee on appropriations in each house of Congress,
… one class of appropriations after another has been taken away from this committee and intrusted to other committees until, as a result, the work of preparing appropriations in the House of Representatives is broken up so that there are now no less than fourteen general appropriation bills prepared by seven different committees … In the preparation of their bills the committee on appropriations and the other committees in charge of appropriations are really compelled to work more or less blindly. Sometimes they hold extensive hearings endeavoring to get a complete grasp of the multitudinous detailed expenditures for which they must provide. But, of course, it is impossible for the several committees, in the time at their disposal, to give even minor matters the amount of attention demanded by sound public economy. [Footnote: C. A. Beard, AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, pp. 366, 367.]
THE PRINCIPLES OF A BUDGET SYSTEM
The first principles of a budget, according to students of government, are that it should be prepared by the executive branch of the government, which is responsible for spending the money; that it should be prepared by an agency responsible directly to the President, and with authority to revise and adjust the estimates of the several departments in the light of the needs and resources of the government as a whole; and that it should be based upon an accounting system that will show clearly how efficiently each department and minor subdivision is doing its work. As this chapter is being written, a bill is before Congress which, if passed, will more or less completely accomplish these results.