Compendium of Budget Accounts

Each year, the President is required by law to submit a budget to Congress. In effect, the President's budget analyzes and compiles separate presentations for hundreds of budget accounts, covering all fiscal activities of the federal government, including such "off-budget" accounts as the Social Security Trust Funds and the Postal Service Fund. The budget contains a wealth of information presented in a daunting array of schedules, tables, graphs, and narrative summaries. The comprehensiveness of the President's budget is its main strength, but it also accounts for its most obvious weaknesses--its sheer size and complexity. For example, for fiscal year 1999, the President's budget spanned five volumes and more than 2,500 pages. This compendium provides users with a convenient way to sort through the fiscal structure of the federal government and to determine the level of budgetary resources--used, estimated, or requested by fiscal year--for individual accounts.

GAO noted that: (1) this compendium follows the same organizational pattern as that used in the budget of the United States Government, FY 1999 appendix; (2) account summaries for the legislative and judicial branches precede listings for the executive branch, which is organized alphabetically by major departments and agencies, followed by other independent agencies; (3) individual accounts are then grouped by major subordinate organization--usually a bureau, service, or administration--or by major program area; (4) for each account, GAO reports gross obligations in millions of nominal dollars; gross obligations reflect a financial estimate of orders placed, contracts awarded, services received, and other similar transactions during the fiscal year; (5) GAO selected gross obligations as the display criterion because it best describes the relative size of each budget account, expressed in terms of financial commitments made within a given fiscal year, without regard to the type of underlying budgetary resource or when resulting outlays may occur; (6) in addition to the account title and budgetary data by fiscal year, GAO appended two additional codes to each account to enhance utility; (7) to provide perspective on mission and purpose, each account includes a code reflecting the budget function or subfunction most directly associated with the transactions financed by that account; a general description of each function is provided at the beginning of the account listing for each major department and agency; (8) GAO has coded each account by the cognizant congressional appropriations subcommittee to clarify the locus of congressional oversight for the specific budget account; (9) appendix II summarizes the cognizant congressional committee codes used in this document; and (10) the general designation authorizing committee is used, either singularly or in combination with an appropriations subcommittee designation, for those accounts whose spending authority is provided, in whole or in part, in laws other than appropriations acts.