ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the damage that the planning-programming-budgeting system has done to the prospects of encouraging policy analysis in American national government. It suggests some ways of enabling policy analysis to thrive and prosper. A quick way of seeing what went wrong with Planning, Programming and Budgeting System is to examine the preconditions for the use of this approach in the Defense Department, from which it was exported throughout the federal government. Policy analysis is expensive in terms of time, talent, and money. Policy analysis and budgeting were presumably connected in order to see that high quality analysis did not languish in limbo but was translated into action through the critical budget process. The favorable conditions for the limited use of program budgeting in the Department of Defense do not exist in most domestic agencies. The chapter argues that the President of the United States has much more control over America’s foreign policy than over its domestic policy.
