When are budget submissions worth your time? (Part two)

Will your work stand out in the crowded process?

As US President Joe Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Budgets are the foundation of the policy agenda. If you’re an organization that cares about public policy, can you afford not to weigh in?

There are three main factors to consider when deciding whether to make a budget submission: what you’re trying to accomplish with a submission, how to operate within a crowded process, and what else you could be doing instead. This short series of posts takes each in turn.

Here are two (mostly) true stories:

1. Budget submission season is the best time to articulate your policy recommendations. There is an open invitation for organizations outside government to voice their ideas, there is money to be spent (or saved) by government, and the plan for the next year is being written. Join in or be left behind.
2. Budget submission season is the worst time to articulate your policy recommendations. It’s hard to stand out when every organization is submitting their vision for what should go in the budget at once, the process is opaque and impersonal, and your organization may not (yet) have completely articulated how it thinks government should act or react. Join in and have your hard work get lost in the shuffle.

Which of these stories applies to you, and whether your organization should spend time drafting a budget submission, depends on what the official submission process can — and cannot — do, especially on its own.

Submissions to a government’s budget consultation process are delivered to the federal or provincial Department of Finance, which is responsible for drafting the budget document itself. Only some of the ideas suggested in budget submissions actually make their way into the budget. And of course, the Department of Finance is not limited to ideas it receives in submissions. Submission recommendations tend to make up a small minority of budget commitments in most cases.

Separately, a parliamentary standing committee on finance (e.g., the House of Commons committee for the federal government) receives submissions from the public on what should go into the budget, and presents a synthesis of this in a report back to the house of commons or legislative assembly. The committee includes members of the government party and members of the opposition. The government in power is not obliged to take any particular action regarding the report, but it is another pool of recommendations from which the Department of Finance may draw. This typically takes place earlier in the cycle — often launched up to six months ahead of the government’s process.

How, then, are decisions reached about what recommendations are plucked from these pools and brought into the budget itself? The choices about what goes into the budget document are influenced by a network of actors, from Ministers, well-positioned MPs/MPPs/MLAs, through to the Prime Minister’s or Premier’s Office, and from different Ministries and Departments through the Privy Council/Cabinet office, with the Department of Finance applying scrutiny, advice, analysis and writing throughout. Ultimately the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister/Premier decide what’s in and what’s out, working with their core advisors in conversation and compromise with the broader network.

To graduate from a pool of recommendations to the budget document, a recommendation needs a champion somewhere within that network, and preferably more than one.

So budget submissions are most worthwhile when they are accompanied by activities that cultivate champions, or equip existing champions with the particulars they need to advance your shared priorities. If you are already a key stakeholder for a given department, they may be able to pull your submission out of the general pools and make the case for your recommendations This is especially the case if your submission goes to your champion as well as to the main consultation portal, and even more the case where your submission reflects a clear understanding of the department’s priorities, timeframes, and ambitions.

A quick test

To see whether your submission is worth your time, meaning it stands a chance of moving from the general pool of submissions into the budget itself, you should ask:

• Who within government will spend their time and political capital advocating for this idea?
• Who will highlight this submission and argue that its recommendations should be adopted?
• Are we in a position to equip them with a credible, feasible proposal so they can do so effectively?
• Whose mandate is made easier to fulfill by adopting these recommendations?

If you cannot imagine the actor within government who would make the case for your recommendations, then a budget submission might not be the right tool for policy influence this year.

In our next (and final) post in this series, we cover the third key factor to consider when thinking about making a budget submission: what could you be doing instead?