Government executives favor smaller budgets than the public, study finds

The government's top career employees are more frugal than the general public when it comes to supporting federal programs, according to a new study. Contrary to popular belief, the government's senior executives favor less spending on federal programs ranging from welfare to Social Security and are not strongly motivated by self-interest when it comes to budget decisions, according to a study by Julie Dolan, an assistant professor of political science and public administration at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. The study was published in the Public Administration Review, a publication of the American Society for Public Administration. While senior executives and the public agreed on the types of programs that are priorities for government funding, the two groups disagreed on the amount of spending for each policy area. For example, while 47 percent of the general population called for more Social Security spending, fewer than 10 percent of senior executives wanted an increase. Of the 15 government programs included in Dolan's survey, senior executives proved more frugal than the public, preferring more spending on only two issues: the environment and foreign aid. "These findings question the assumption that bureaucrats uniformly prefer larger budgets," wrote Dolan, who conducted her research in 1996 and 1997 using surveys and interviews with the public and members of the Senior Executive Service. Senior executives were chosen for the study because of their intimate involvement in the policy-making process and their knowledge of government issues, Dolan said. Senior executives also do not favor increased spending on their own agency's programs over other government priorities, Dolan found. For example, career officials at the Health and Human Services Department advocated less spending than the public on health care, child care and AIDS research--three areas that fall under the agency's jurisdiction--while rating public schools more worthy of increased funding. "If they behaved as self-serving budget maximizers, we would expect to see greater discrepancies between their preferences for their own policies and those administered elsewhere in the federal government," Dolan wrote. Dolan acknowledged that the attitudes of senior executives may be closer to what people really want in government spending than the survey found. She pointed out that while public opinion polls show most Americans think the government is wasteful, people "hardly demonstrate fiscal prudence" when asked about their spending preferences for certain programs. Moreover, the attitudes of senior executives may be shaped by "a greater knowledge about current federal spending levels and political realities" than the general public. Despite her caveats, Dolan said that the study's findings suggest that "we should revise our theories about self-interested bureaucrats inflating government budgets for their own gain."