Chapter 5 provides voluminous discussion about how the executive branch of the federal government has changed over time. And, since you have started reading this text, you have become an expert at locating government about federal government expenditures using OMB as a resource. Importantly, your informed intuition has probably led you to understand that government spending is likely to be closely tied to public policy. The two are inextricably related, right? Since OMB provides outlays (expenditures) by agency, you should be able to tie changes over time to changes in executive branch agencies, right? See if this is the case. Direct your browser to OMB’s Historical Tables at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals. Open Table 4.1 called “Outlays by Agency: 1962-2021” (in XLS format). You should immediately notice that OMB has done a terrific job at providing what seems to be a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive account of government spending by agency. This is especially remarkable given that the constitution of agencies has changed over time. For example, the Department of Homeland Security did not exist in 1962 (it came about in 2002), but expenditures are listed for that year up to the present year (OMB has tied similar agencies’ spending to this single line).

1. Pick at least three agencies provided in Table 4.1 and chart their respective outlay changes in five-year intervals from 1965 to 2010 (skip the years in between). This will require creating a table! Have the years run horizontally as column headers. Include columns for percentage increase or decrease from year to year.

Provide a short write up describing the changes that you observe over time. It is important to look for the trend in the change in outlay. Do percentages seem gradual or drastic? Can you offer any explanation of this?

2. Your text has clearly tied the relationship between the federal budget and federal policymaking. Therefore, you should easily be able to connect a public event, political stance, or a passage of a statute, for example, to a change in these expenditures. Based on the data that you collected for question 1, search relevant government resources for at least one important event mentioned by Congress or the president—during this time period—that may have elicited a noticeable change in outlays. There is no right or wrong answer, but do not use the events of September 11, 2001 as your example (leading to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security). Rather than rely on news websites located on the Internet, it is highly recommended that you search actual government documents from government resources. For example, some digging in the U.S. Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDSYS) (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/home.action) should turn up many leads. FDSYS contains both presidential documents and selected Congressional hearing records. As you’ve done in past exercises, you may wish to search Congress.gov.