What to Expect When You’re Expecting a New Administration
While Federal offices have sucked up most of the recent attention paid to the 2024 election post-season, Americans also elected many new state and local officials who will lead government units after being sworn in this winter. Newly elected Mayors, Governors, County Executives and Board chairs take office with their own agendas, approaches, and campaign promises, assuming oversight of a wide range of public services and public servants tasked with fulfilling their priorities. Government employees who have not yet been through a transition may wonder how their new top boss will affect the substance and culture of their work. In today’s post from the W&Y blog, we’ll address some of these concerns from the perspective of the budget office.
How will newly elected officials change the budget?
Fiscal campaign promises aside – anyone who’s spent a cycle in a budget office can tell you how hard it is to make cuts and reprioritize government funding. Simply put – the majority of state and local funding is either purpose-restricted or “sticky” thanks to prior decision-making. Labor agreements, debt service, core service expectations, and other large budget drivers are typically non-discretionary. On a percentage basis in any given year, elected officials only manage to make small changes to the budget to enhance, create, or reduce programs. New leadership may have significantly different ideas about which programs those should be – but the fundamental laws requiring a balanced budget and upholding existing contracts preclude dramatic budgetary shifts from fiscal year to fiscal year.
Existing Expertise for New Priorities
The budget office is a custodian of institutional memory. It touches every department but is not captured by any department’s previous or future policy agenda. Your analytical expertise and program knowledge is just as invaluable to your employer as it was before the transition. In many ways – the priorities may shift, but the role stays the same. It remains your responsibility to understand and present all sides of the issue and to provide context to your recommendations. Moreover, these new priorities may create opportunities to review and apply finer-toothed analysis to program areas that didn’t get as much attention under the prior administration. In government, there is always something that can be made better and more effective. And in your role as a budgeteer, there are always new stones to turn, new data to review, and new opportunities to deliver improvements to the public.
Risk Mitigation and Quality Analysis
It should go without saying, but another part of your expertise in the budget office is your command of key legal and operational risks in the field. You know whether a particular budget decision is going to create unsustainable fiscal pressure in a few years. You know whether reneging on prior agreements is worth the fight. And you know whether exercising an option will have a negative impact on your government’s credit rating. Simply put, budgeteers have been around the block. You have seen what works and what does not. Continuing to ground your recommendations in thorough, balanced, quality analysis can help ensure good decision-making in the new administration and better outcomes for the public.
Learning the New Boss’s Style
Just as it did before, your job relies on being able to get into the big boss’s head and anticipate their desired approach to any given issue or situation. You may have to revisit your old methods and structures – will the new official respond better to visualizations or expository writing? Presentations or memos? Do they like tables or graphs? The quick hits of an outline, or the long story in a report? And all that is before you get to their governance strategy and methodology. You may have to iterate a bit in your communications and spend some time learning how they think. But the more quickly you can get up to speed on them, the smoother your work will go.
