ABSTRACT
In the Spring of 1962, the Department of Agriculture shunted aside traditional methods of budgeting and attempted a comprehensive and simultaneous evaluation of all departmental programs. This chapter aims to describe the experiment and to evaluate its results, especially as they bear upon the controversy surrounding incremental versus comprehensive approaches to decision-making. It describes the procedures used by officials in the Department of Agriculture in comprehensive budgeting. The major purpose of the zero-base budget was to examine all programs at the same time and from the ground up to discover programs continuing through inertia or design that did not warrant being continued at all or at their present level of expenditure. The chapter attempts to determine the extent to which the intended objectives of comprehensive budgeting were achieved, and to describe a number of unanticipated consequences of using this approach.
