increments above 80 percent are just as much increments as increments above some other base. To put it bluntly, the name zero-base budgeting is a fraud.
Facts Don’t Support
The facts don’t even support the glowing reports about what happened with respect to the amounts above the 80 percent. In 1974, 13 heads of Georgia departments were interviewed, and only two went so far as to say that zero-base budgeting “may” have led to a reallocation of resources. (The whole idea of budgeting is to allocate resources.) None of 32 budget analysts reported that the system involved a “large” shifting of financial resources, and only 7 said it caused “some” shifting: 21 said there was no apparent shifting, and four were uncertain.
People experienced in budgeting know that zero-base budgeting won’t work. Basically, the idea is that the entire annual budget request is to be broken down in “decision packages.” These packages are to be ranked in order of priority, and budget decisions are made for each package according to the justification contained therein and its relative priority ranking. There are several things wrong with this approach.
Most important is that large numbers of decision packages are unmanageable. In Georgia, there were 11,000 of them. If the governor set aside four hours every day for two months he could spend about a minute on each decision package, not enough time to read it let alone analyze the merits. If he delegated the job to others, the whole idea of comparing priorities is compromised.
In the Defense Department, whose budget is 30 times as large as Georgia’s, top management makes budget judgments on a few hundred items,, certainly not as many as a thousand.
Even if the numbers of decision packages were reduced to a manageable size, it is not possible to make a thorough analysis during the time available in the annual budget process. In a good control system, basic decisions are made during the programming process, which precedes the budget process. And the annual budget process is essentially one of fine tuning the financial plan required to implement these decisions during the budget year; there is not time to do anything else.
In zero-base budgeting, there is no mention of a programming process. The assumption evidently is that program decisions are made concurrently with budget decisions. The simply can’t be done in an organization of any size; there isn’t time.
Experience also shows that the idea of ranking decision packages according to priority doesn’t work. Such rankings have been attempted from time to time in government agencies, as far back as 1960. They have been abandoned. Honest agency heads will admit that program priority is influenced by the amount of funds likely to be available, rather than the other way around. If they are less than honest, they will deliberately structure priorities so that essential or politically popular decision packages are given low priority, knowing they will probably be approved and that their approval will automatically constitute approval of packages listed as having a higher priority. Only quite naïve people would not expect this to happen.
The budget process is not primarily a ranking process. It is primarily the fine tuning of an approved program. The worth of programs can’t be determined by reading words on a two-page