¹ The “traditional” literature on the budgetary process is immense. The text and references in either Smithies, Arthur, The Budgetary Process in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1955)Google Scholar, or Burkhead, Jesse, Governmental Budgeting (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956)Google Scholar, provide convenient guides. Of particular interest are: Neustadt, Richard E., “The Presidency and Legislation: The Growth of Central Clearance,” American Political Science Review, 48 (September, 1954), 641–671 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maass, Arthur, “In Accord with the President's Program,” in Friedrich, C. J. and Galbraith, K., eds., Public Policy, 4 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 77–93 Google Scholar; Marx, Fritz Morstein, “The Bureau of the Budget: Its Evolution and Present Role,” I and II, American Political Science Review, 39 (August and October, 1945), 653–684 and 869–898 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilmerding, Lucius Jr., The Spending Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943)Google Scholar. The notion of an “action forcing” mechanism is, of course, Richard E. Neustadt's.

² Wildavsky's, Aaron highly influential The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964)Google Scholar is the watershed. The ideas embodied in this analysis were more precisely formulated in Davis, Otto A., Dempster, M. A. H. and Wildavsky, Aaron, “A Theory of the Budgetary Process,” American Political Science Review, 60 (September 1966), 529–547 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, by the same authors, “On the Process of Budgeting: An Empirical Study of Congressional Appropriations,” in Papers on Non-Market Decision Making, ed. Tullock, Gordon (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy, 1966), pp. 63–133 Google Scholar. This general analytic approach has been importantly extended by John P. Crecine. See his “A Computer Simulation Model of Municipal Resource Allocation” (paper delivered at the Midwest Conference of Political Science, April, 1966), as well as Governmental Problem Solving (Chicago, Ill.: Markham Pub. Co., 1969)Google Scholar. See also Sharkansky, Ira, The Routines of Politics (New York: Van Nostrand, 1969)Google Scholar.

³ See in this regard Lindblom, Charles, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration Review, 29 (Spring, 1959), 79–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lindblom, Charles, The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making Through Mutual Adjustment (New York: The Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

⁴ Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky, p. 543.

⁵ See Arthur Maass, “In Accord with the President's Program,” for an excellent discussion of the great subtlety and variation with which this phrase is used.

⁶ For a thorough review of one such cycle, see Bupp, Irvin C., “Priorities in Nuclear Technology: Program Prosperity and Decay in the USAEC, 1956–1971” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1971)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

⁷ Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky, pp. 540–543, do make explicit provision for deviant cases in their analysis. These are cases that lie beyond the normal rules of budgeting that they describe; they are also cases that presumably involve controversy, change and innovation in the budgetary process. This line of thought is further developed in their subsequent article: “On the Process of Budgeting II: an Empirical Study of Congressional Appropriations,” Studies in Budgeting, eds. Byrne, R. F., Charnes, A., Cooper, W. W., and Gilfords, D. (North Holland, Amsterdam, 1971), pp. 292–375 Google Scholar.

⁸ Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky, p. 529.

⁹ Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky, p. 534.

¹⁰ Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky, p. 537.

¹¹ Fenno, Richard, “The House Appropriations Committee as a Political System: The Problem of Integration,” American Political Science Review, 56 (1962), 310–324 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fenno, Richard, The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1966)Google Scholar.

¹² Simon, Herbert A., Administrative Behavior, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957)Google Scholar; Simon, Herbert A., Models of Man (New York: Wiley, 1957)Google Scholar; Simon, Herbert A., Donald Smithburg, and Victor Thompson, Public Administration (New York: Knopf, 1950)Google Scholar; Braybrooke, David and Lindblom, Charles, A Strategy of Decision (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar; Cyert, Richard and March, James, eds., A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963)Google Scholar; Simon, H. A., “Theories of Decision Making in Economics and Behavioral Science,” American Economic Review, 59 (June, 1959) 253–283 Google Scholar; Clarkson, G. P. E. and Simon, H. A., “Simulation of Individual Group Behavior,” American Economic Review, 60 (Dec., 1960), 920–932 Google Scholar.

¹³ Crecine, , Governmental Problem Solving, p. 11 Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Simon, Herbert, “The Architecture of Complexity,” Reprint No. 113 of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Compare: Dye, Thomas, Politics, Economics, and the Public: Policy Outcomes in the American States (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1966)Google Scholar with Cyert, and March, , and Leiserson, William, American Trade Union Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959)Google Scholar with Crecine.

¹⁶ In policy terms, the entire metaphor of normal and deviant cases is vastly misleading. With it, Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky promote the idea that bureaucracy is largely inert, proceeding to do today essentially what it did yesterday, all without competition and controversy. The exceptions, by this logic, are reserved for a small number of deviant cases which involve “more complicated decision procedures.”

The entire thrust of our argument is that the logic of the budgetary process involves public policies in a continuous struggle for scarce resources; that, if there is any “normal state of affairs” in the policy process, it is one of intense competition between programs for public funds. Further, this logic holds equally for policies that desire nothing more than to continue to do what they were doing last year. There is nothing simple or automatic about continuing. Again we must stress that we are speaking of policies and programs here, not the administrative framework in which they are managed. Thus when Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky (pp. 544–545) suggest that the analysis of individual programs follows from the broad outlines established in their own work, we must respond that their emphasis on normal and deviant cases has started such research off in the wrong direction.

¹⁷ McKean, Roland N. and Awshen, Melvin, “Limitations, Risks and Problems,” in Program Budgeting: Program Analysis and the Federal Budget, ed. Novick, David (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) p. 286 Google Scholar.

¹⁸ For a thoughtful discussion which complements many of these points, see Schultze, Charles L., The Politics and Economics of Public Spending (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1968)Google Scholar. Indirect, but vivid, support for many of the same arguments can be found in Schultze, Charles L., Fried, Edward R., Rivlin, Alice M., and Teeters, Nancy H., Setting National Priorities: The 1972 Budget (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1971)Google Scholar. And at the municipal level see Jackson's, John E. perceptive essay, “Politics and the Budgetary Process,” Social Science Research, 1 (April, 1972) 35–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Newman, James R. and Miller, Byron S., The Control of Atomic Energy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1948)Google Scholar. See also Lilienthal, David E., The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1964)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Hewlett, Richard G. and Anderson, Oscar E. Jr., The New World, 1939–1946, A History of the VSAEC, Vol. 1 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Hewlett, Richard G. and Duncan, Francis, Atomic Shield, 1947–1953, A History of the USAEC, Vol. 2 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. A separate study of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has also been prepared by Richard Hewlett and Francis Duncan and is scheduled for publication in the Fall of 1973.

²¹ One of the authors (Irvin Bupp), was for several years on the staff of the secretariat of the AEC and hence had access to the agency's internal financial records. This association led to AEC support under the auspices of the Office of the Historian for the research reported here.

It is perhaps also worth noting that the AEC is one of the very few executive agencies to have followed a generally consistent “output” format in its budgetary practices since its creation. This fortunate circumstance considerably simplified the problem of isolating and tracing distinct programs.

²² This fifth “appeal” stage is the only one not strictly comparable across all fifteen years. Records of this process were often difficult to locate, and for FY 1959 and FY 1960 there is no evidence that an “appeal” as such was allowed at all.

²³ Congressional action is not included in our calculations, although a good case could be made for doing so. Congress is, after all, quite active in the budgetary process through its committee and subcommittee system; see Fenno, Power of the Purse. We are concerned, however, with the formulation of program budgets, not with their review. Congressional review of the budget really moves on to a different level of analysis. Of course, much of congressional influence is informal. As such, it should be entered into any explanation of why some programs prosper and others fail. This is again a different analytical problem from developing an index of program prosperity—the results of which can then be searched for appropriate causes.

²⁴ For a somewhat different, but also highly imaginative, approach to this problem, see John Jackson, “Politics and the Budgetary Process.”

²⁵ For any given year or stage, the totals reflected in Table 2 are equal to about 90 per cent of the comparable total operating budget, the remaining 10 per cent being that portion of the AEC budget which we were unable to allocate to meaningful output categories. Since we are explicitly interested in competition among programs, the aggregated totals shown have been used as the basis for the transformation described in the text.

²⁶ For a full discussion of all twenty-three programs, see Bupp, chapters 1–3.

²⁷ Cf. Lindblom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through.’”

²⁸ Hewlett and Duncan, 362–409.

²⁹ For a more careful definition of “program strength,” see Bupp, chapter 2.

³⁰ Schultze, et al. (1971), Setting National Priorities Google Scholar.

³¹ Schultze, et al., Setting National Priorities, 19–21 Google Scholar.

³² Russett, Bruce, “Who Pays for Defense?” American Political Science Review, 63 (June, 1969), 412–426 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Russett, Bruce, What Price Vigilance: The Burdens of National Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, especially chapters 5 and 6.

³³ These observations are based on a series of interviews with officials in AEC and the Office of Management and Budget.

³⁴ Russett's substantive conclusions have recently been challenged. See Hollenhorst, Jerry and Ault, Gary, “An Alternative Answer to: Who Pays for Defense,” American Political Science Review, 65 (Sept., 1971), 760–764 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

By respecifying Russett's regression model to include several dummy variables, Hollenhorst and Ault claim to detect important “sub-period effects.” This more methodologically sophisticated approach, however, seems to us merely to compound the original theoretical error. The posited relationships are spurious.

³⁵ See, Lambright, W. Henry, “Shooting Down the Nuclear Plane,” Inter-University Case Program, ICP Case Series No. 104 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Congress appears to be much more active in the area of social policy. An excellent account of administrative policy in this area refers again and again to congressional intervention in specific programs. See Steiner, Gilbert Y., The State of Welfare (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1971)Google Scholar. Or in a different area, Maass, Arthur, Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.