The Road Forward: The Federal Budget and Budgeting Profession

In 2011, Grant Thornton joined forces with the American Association for Budget and Program Analysis (AABPA) for a first-time, online survey of 231 federal budget professionals. Survey topics included budget formulation and execution, budget and performance integration, budget cutting, Congress, budget technology, and human capital. The survey finds budgeteers primed for the coming budget battles.

Other findings include:

• Preparing and justifying budgets remains their most important job.
• Integrating budget and performance data is critical for program success but underlying difficulties make this problematic.
• Budgeteers know how to cut their budgets, but agency bureaucracies seem to have trouble executing the cuts.
• They need better budget technology to support large amounts of data.
• Analytics, crisp writing, and working cooperatively under pressure are key attributes needed by new budgeteers.
• In spite of problems and frustrations, job satisfaction is very good.

 

Download the report Here..