Strategies Used to Increase Departmental Budget – Public Administration Discussion Question

Question:

Imagine you are an administrator seeking to increase the current departmental budget allotment for the upcoming fiscal year. Explain some of the strategies you would employ to ensure that your objectives are met. Please use public administration examples where possible to illustrate your understanding of the question above.

Answer:

In public administration, the purpose of a budget is to communicate the intentions of the government with regards to the allocation of scarce resources to various policy needs. It is used as a political tool to influence government’s resource allocation and achieve government goals such as income distribution, economic growth, employment and economic stabilization. However, each department or government institution pushes for more resource allocations through the budget due to limited resources. Thus, government administrators must develop key strategies to increase their departmental budget allotments.

As an administrator seeking increased departmental budget allotment, I would use the following strategies to achieve that goal: legal mandates, matching the competition, stating that it’s too small, and persuading interest groups. I would provide an argument from a legal perspective to show that the program serves a legal mandate, and requires more income to support it.

The second strategy is to argue that the program or project to be funded matches the competition. In this case, the public administrator would suggest that increased departmental budget allotment will enable the program or project to match other similar projects by other departments.

Thirdly, as a public administrator I would use the strategy of arguing that the current budget allocation is too small to meet the required needs of the department. This requires the department to provide objective data and records to support the proposal.

Lastly, influencing interest groups is an important strategy to gain support for the increased departmental budget allotment. Budgets and budgeting processes are political tools used to influence government decisions, and interest groups play an important role in this political process. They show how the budgets can affect their interest in certain programs or projects which need funding. Therefore, getting the support of interest groups is critical to achieving increased budget allocations.