Zero-Base Budgeting: The Texas Experience
The history of public budgeting in the United States has been short and controversial. Prior to the early 1900s, there was little if anything written about the public budgeting process. In 1934 a pioneering work of A. E. Buck, entitled The Budget of Government Today, was the first real attempt to pull the process together and present discussion of the process in published form [1]. In 1940, V. O. Key of Johns Hopkins University addressed the lack of budgeting theory. In an article written for the American Political Science Review Key stated: "On the most significant aspect of public budgeting, i.e., the allocation of expenditures among different purposes so as to achieve the greatest return, American budgetary literature is singularly arid" [3, pp. 1137-44]. In the 1960s, Aaron Wildavsky wrote on the budgeting process, the problems of the budgeting technique known as Planning Programming and Budgeting (PPB), cost benefit analysis in program budgeting, and an attempt to implement Zero Base Budgeting (ZBB) in the Department of Agriculture [11, 12, 13, 14]. The agriculture study was the first attempt to evaluate the zero-base concept in an actual situation of application.