ABSTRACT
Program budgeting is a relatively recent development in a long history of efforts to quantify and evaluate the output of the public sector. As early as 1912 the federal government's Taft Commission on Economy and Efficiency stressed the importance of budgeting in accordance with the subjects of work to be accomplished. The success of program budgeting in the Department of Defense must be viewed in an organizational context, against a fourteen-year background of difficulties with attempts to establish unified central direction over the whole of the defense establishment. A great many government budgets have traditionally been presented in terms of a functional classification that supplements a classification by organizational structure. The experiences with performance budgeting in the 1950s exhibited considerable variety; this is invariably the case with budgetary innovation. Benefit-cost can be viewed as an integral part of government budgeting.
