ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the long history of performance budgeting reform in the US, the institutional contexts behind the reform, and the hurdles faced by US reformers. The US experiences show that performance budgeting reform is likely to be a long journey of institutional evolution with many ups and downs because of changing political, economic, and fiscal contexts. At the beginning of the twentieth century, US policymakers at all levels were struggling with these questions. As municipal and state budgetary reforms took off in the late 1900s and early 1910s, US federal policymakers began to take notice. The momentum of federal reforms increased when some of the state and municipal reform leaders assumed federal positions. Federal performance budgeting reform was relatively silent in the 1980s and the early 1990s because the US Congress, President Ronald Reagan, and his successor President George H. W. Bush were preoccupied with the mounting federal deficit problems and tax reform debates.
