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Federal Government's Difficulty in Adopting a Budget

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Over the past few years the federal government has experienced considerable difficulty in adopting a budget. Instead of agreeing to a budget that allows for the orderly operation of the government's various agencies and determines the nation's annual spending and revenue priorities, legislative and executive branches have been embroiled in acrimonious debate that has largely broken down along political lines. The presence budgetary process was originally created in 1974 (Keith, 1997) and there have been a number of abuses and problems over the years since in the use of the process but since the early 2000s the process has largely failed to serve the nation's needs. With increasing difficulty, Congress has, since that time, been unable to smoothly adopt a budget with most budgets since that time being delayed until well into the fiscal year and, most recently, a complete failure to adopt a budget. In the forty plus years since the present budgetary process was created, a variety of problems have developed which have hampered the operation of the government (Pew Commission, 2010). First among these problems is the fact that the present system does not require the executive and legislative branches to begin negotiating their potential differences over the budget until late in the budgetary process. By the time that the two branches are expected to begin discussing their differences the budgetary process has been proceeding for months and the various agencies dependent on the

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