RESEARCH PAPER. Presidential Leadership in Domestic/Budget Policy-Making

Presidential Leadership in Budget Policy Making
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Introduction
The president has a significant role in budget policy making. The last four decades have seen this significance remain a seminal statement of spending legislative and preference agenda through negotiations among the executive branch and Congress over federal expenditure. Budget proposal is a primary instrument for the president to have influence on the congressional budgeting process via different political and persuasive means. This implies the president has an important influence on the appropriation levels that Congress in the end integrates. Also, the president in an effective way leverages the budget proposal as a starting point and the threat of the veto of the proposed appropriation legislation later in budgeting as a mechanism to make sure that the policy preferences are shown in expenditure levels. Therefore, this paper presents the presidential role in budget policy making.
Presidential Leadership in Budget Policy Making
Although the President’s official role in the budgetary process is in a clear manner delineated as well as lacking in direct control of integrated expenditure levels, the president puts significant impact on the appropriation levels that come out. Firstly, at the starting of the Congressional budgetary process, the president establishes the tone of discussions with the budget proposal, offering an effective beginning point for negotiations with Congress that forms proposals and figures on which interest groups, media, and public may anchor. These beginning points challenge Congress politically into different spending degree that the president may find acceptable, coercing the legislature to accept the president’s preferences, specifically on local expenditure areas. Involving funding request in the president’s budget proposal is effective at making Congress integrate appropriations. This happens especially when the appropriations are unified with other politically persuasive instruments like appeals to the public specifically when the president’s party cannot control Congress.
As budgetary negotiations go on, the president may not directly establish funding levels since the final budget needs approval or override of veto by majority of the two congressional houses. Since the latter is very challenging to realize compared to the former, the Congress requires to get the president’s signature on the budget, and this forms an effective need for Congress to have an enough number of the president’s demands. Consequently, a president’s threat to veto a spending bill result in concessions from the Congress. Although veto threats are most impactful when the president looks to challenge federal expenditure, instead of increasing it, the president can utilize veto threats that have significant effects to achieve goals.
When the Congress budgetary process ends, the president can impact the distribution of federal expenditure in and between programs utilizing their importance as the executive branch leader. The president utilizes this power to pursue electoral goals and distribute more finances to regions that are politically loyal or electorally significant to the president. Since these distribution decisions are subjected to less oversight compared to Congress’ earmark expenditure and are opaque owing to bureaucracy, they are not directly scrutinized but indicate the President’s power.
The Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787 tasked Congress with all the influencing powers on the budgetary process, and the budget was in excess until the 1850s. The following five decades saw a deficit associated to costs of the Civil as well as the Spanish-American wars and the 1890s recession. This made the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 give the various budgetary functions to the president as well as the executive Branch (31 U.S.C. 1105). Specifically, the Act needed the president to draft provide a proposal budget to the Congress for Approval. Therefore, Congress and the president have the role of sharing the budgetary responsibilities as mandated by the Constitution. The president has a role of proposing the annual budget guidelines. It is then considered as well as amended by the Senate and House committees. The two houses work the diversities out in the appropriation bills and then the president signs the bills.
Visibly and explicitly the president can try to impact whole federal budget policy as well as certain line items in the budget via legal needed budget process. The president’s proposal impacts Congress implementation mainly by serving as an important signal to legislators of the policy preferences using the president’s power of persuasion, the relation with legislature, public sentiment and the presidential veto. Since the president can utilize the budget proposal as a powerful instrument to impact politically, he can grow its influence above its formal role to prospectively lower the need to depend on veto power to block undesired policies. For example, Obama’s administration did reject the Defense of Marriage Act. President Obama had a constitutional role to comply till the Supreme Court declared otherwise. Rationally, offering benefits to same-sex couples to defy the law would cause a dispute in the Republican House as well as risk the articles of impeachment. The president had an obligation as stated by Article II of the Constitution as he is required to make sure laws are faithfully implemented. However, Obama opted to disregard the law because he deemed it unconstitutional. Biblically, the Obama administration was just in blocking this law since Marriage is a union between a man and a wife (‎1 Corinthians 7:1-16). Section three offers definition to marriage as a legal union among one woman and one man as husband and wife whereas the word spouse refers to persons of opposite sex who is a wife or a husband.
Although the influence of the president’s budget proposal is bigger in foreign policy areas compared to domestic policies, this shows the president’s big executive responsibility in foreign roles compared to domestic policies, instead of specific part of the budgetary process. In a similar manner, whereas the president’s budget proposal is close to integrated expenditure levels in foreign and domestic programs at wartime compared to peacetime, this difference can simply show that Congress and the president have less divergent policy perspectives during wartime.
The budget acquires its impact from its responsibility as the most significant phase in a bilateral negotiation among the President and Congress. Asserting that the resident’s preferences come from the electoral coalition, the presidential budget reflects similar influences with an additional focus towards how t...