Making the Federal Budget

How do you spend four trillion dollars? Turns out, you don't; it takes the President and the Congress to allocate, authorize, appropriate, resolve, outlay, sequester, impound, and just plain spend that much in 2011. Such a process is baffling at times. It's so complex that you may marvel that Washington can get any action accomplished and paid for at all. So how does the federal budget happen?

Join the Mercatus Center's Capitol Hill Campus and Senior Research Fellow Jason J. Fichtner for a walk through the process of making the federal budget. He will explain the process from its beginnings in the halls of the White House, highlight the many roles Congress takes to authorize and enforce the budget, and navigate the twisting, puzzling conglomeration of bureaucratic steps, political goals, and accountancy rules that go into making our government function.

Jason J. Fichtner is Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. Previously, he served in several positions at the Social Security Administration (SSA) including Deputy Commissioner of Social Security (Acting), Chief Economist and Associate Commissioner for Retirement Policy. Prior to the Social Security Administration, Dr. Fichtner was a Senior Economist with the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the United States Congress. Dr. Fichtner’s primary research interests are Social Security, federal tax policy, budget issues, and policy proposals to increase saving and investment. 

Dr. Fichtner serves on the Adjunct Faculty at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and the Virginia Tech Center for Public Administration & Policy where he teaches courses in Public Policy Process, Public Management, and Public Budgeting Processes. You can read his full bio here.

This Capitol Hill Campus course is free and open to all full-time Congressional and Federal Agency staff. Lunch will be provided. Due to space constraints, please no interns without prior approval. To RSVP, simply use the form below. For questions, please contact Aaron Merrill at (703) 993 7729 or amerril2@gmu.edu.