From the Congressional Glossary – Including Legislative and Budget Terms
Unified Budget
Funding the Government: The Budget Process and Omnibus Spending Bills [Article I Initiative]
Under budget concepts set forth in the Report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts (October, 1967), a comprehensive budget in which receipts and outlays from federal and trust funds are consolidated. When these fund groups are consolidated to display budget totals, transactions that are outlays of one fund group for payment to the other fund group (that is, interfund transactions) are deducted to avoid double counting. The unified budget should, as conceived by the President’s Commission, take in the full range of federal activities. By law, budget authority, outlays, and receipts of off-budget programs (currently only the Postal Service and Social Security) are excluded from the current budget, but data relating to off-budget programs are displayed in the budget documents. However, the most prominent total in the budget is the unified total, which is the sum of the on-and off-budget totals. (See also Nonbudgetary; Off-Budget; On-Budget.)
From the Senate Budget Committee:
President’s Commission on Budget Concepts
In 1967, President Johnson appointed a commission to make a thorough study of the federal budget and the manner of its presentation. The Commission’s most important recommendation was that a unified budget presentation replace the several competing and confusing measures of the total scope of federal financial activity. The report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts serves as the foundation for most budgetary concepts used at the present time.
More
- Unified budget – Wikipedia
- “The Report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts: A Review,” by Joseph Scherer, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Monthly Review, December 1967 (8-page PDF
) - “Reconsidering the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts of 1967,” by M. Rodgers and D. Sullivan, Harvard Law School Federal Budget Policy Seminar, May 10, 2006 (27-page PDF)
- “Has the Unified Budget Undermined the Federal Government Trust Funds?” by Sita Nataraj and John B. Shoven, NBER Working Paper No. 10953, December 2004
- “Research Note #20: The Social Security Trust Funds and the Federal Budget,” Historian’s Office, Social Security
- “Staff Working Paper #1: Budget Concepts” from the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform
- “Budget Process and Enforcement,” Parliamentary Boot Camp (4-page PDF)
- “The Federal Budget: Overview and Issues for FY2018 and Beyond,” CRS Report R44881 (33-page PDF)
- “Budget Enforcement Procedures: The Senate Pay-As-You-Go (PayGO) Rule,” CRS Report RL31943 (28-page PDF)
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