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¶ … federal bureaucracies accountable for their actions? How are they held accountable?
In general terms, there are a number of ways by which federal bureaucracies are held accountable. One example would be the President holding Cabinet members responsible for the actions or inactions of their agency employees and personnel. For example, if someone "drops the ball" at the Veteran Affairs Administration, the Internal Revenue Service or other agencies, the people that lead that organization is supposed to be regulating that behavior (or dealing with misdeeds) and the person who appointed the leader (usually the President) will be the first line of defense. There are also regulatory and review committees in Congress that exercise oversight at one level or another in terms of spending, actions, inactions, compliance with the law and so forth. Lastly, there is the American voter and the public opinion movements among the taxpayers and citizens. Indeed, if the people who are voted into power are not playing their part in the oversight process, they can be voted out in either a primary or general election. Agency heads or employees can be fired if they are not bound to their office or position via an election or a contract. Further, anyone in the chain (elected or appointed) can be charged criminally...
For example, Richard Nixon could have been charged for what he did but that was foregone because he stepped down.
2. Describe the process by which the federal budget is developed.
The process starts with the budgetary requests and preferences of the President, whomever that might be at the time. Right now, that would be Barack Obama. The budget would include everything that requires payment or funds such as interest on the national debt, programs that are automatically part of any new budget (e.g. Social Security, Medicare, etc.) and the items that can be added or removed every year welfare, military spending and so forth. After the President weighs in, Congress (the House and the Senate) has to come up with a Congressional budget resolution. Once the resolution is decided upon, it has to be enacted by Congress via passage in both houses of the legislature. If there is any difference in discord in the versions that are passed by the two houses, they meet up and hammer out those differences until a singular and complete budget framework is defined and finalized. If this process breaks down or simply does not happen, then the parameters of the last resolution passed would still be binding (Patterson, 2013).
3. How do state and local…
References
Patterson, T. (2013). The American democracy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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With these criteria in mind, we will turn attention to the current federal budget, which has been in deficit status since 2002, and seems destined to remain so for the next several years. The FY2006 proposed budget includes a $390 billion deficit, not including potential expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan or any social security reform measures undertaken -- a seemingly huge discrepancy between government revenue and spending (Cashell 2005, p.
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