250 Years of Federal Budgeting: What Has Changed and What Can We Learn Today?

As America approaches its 250th birthday, Senior Fellow Doug Branch, Director of Outreach at the Fiscal Lab, takes a whirlwind tour through the history of federal budgeting and asks a simple question: have things always been done the way they are now? This Fiscal Lab update explores: How Congress controlled the budget before 1920, from dispersed appropriations to project-specific bonds The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and the rise of executive branch control over spending The 1974 Budget Act, which created the CBO and the House and Senate Budget Committees but failed to curb annual deficits How reconciliation evolved into a tool for bypassing the Senate filibuster rather than reducing deficits The striking shift from 83 surpluses in the nation's first 125 fiscal years to persistent deficits ever since Two and a half centuries in, budgeting reform is a topic ripe for reconsideration, and there may be lessons worth reclaiming from how we did things before.