Budgeting in a Newly Established Agency: The First Twenty Years of the United States Civil Rights Commission

Abstract

Contemporary research on the budgetary process places a strong emphasis on the striking regularity of budgetary decisionmaking in established governmental agencies. Newly formed and politically controversial public-agencies, however, may play the budgetary game by a different set of ground rules. Our expectation is that agencies of this type are likely to be more sensitive to variations in their political and economic contexts than are well-established agencies. In this paper we analyze the United States Civil Rights Commission as an example of a newly formed public-agency. Our findings suggest that the budget for the Commission has been sensitive to fluctuations in its policy-relevant conditions in the first twenty years of its existence.