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As the budgeting and allocations process was originally conceived, the budget proposed and the funding legislation allocated money to the various agencies of the government to fulfill various categories of expense. Within the categories, the civil servants running the agencies decided exactly how to itemize expenditures.
So the degree to which elected officials could control how tightly the funding was allocated among categories depended on the breadth of focus of a particular funding bill.
Long, long ago, the way the process worked was thus:
Each agency of the bureaucracy solicited budgets from its various sub-agencies, branches, etc., and they were routed up through the layers to the agency's directorate, generally a cabinet-level office such as (for example) Transportation, Agriculture, Defense, etc. So the office of (for example) the Sec'y of Agriculture received the products of long, detailed budgeting processes from dozens of departments and agencies.
As with every budget ever created, each participant's expenditures needs were well-padded, resulting in a request total among all those departments that would make the top of a GAO accountant's head fly off. The budgets would get kicked back, cut, manipulated, etc., until the total amounted to something the Secretary thought they could reasonably make a case for to the President and Congress. At this stage just the numbers part (exclusive of the multi-volume justifications attached thereto) already totalled hundreds of pages and thousands of categories for each agency.
The various agencies having thrashed out their internal processes and aggregated them into agency requests, the truckloads of paper from each agency were then delivered to the President's Budget Office, where (remember, we're talking about the Good Old Days, here) people who actually understood economics, accounting, and the functions of the various agencies would review the mind-boggling total. The cutting, kicking back, manipulation, etc., would begin, with the Secretary advocating diligently for the needs of her/his agency and the Presidential Budget Office wielding the red pencil. Sometimes (are you surprised?) politics would rear its ugly head at this stage, as in (for example) when a President had campaign promises to keep ("I promise to put 100,000 more police officers on the streets of America's cities!")
Finally all of the revised, hacked, reconstituted, rejustified agency budgets would be reorganized and summarized and reformatted as the President's official Budget Request for the biennium. Trucks would roll up to the Executive Office Building, pick up the cases and cases of paper that represented each copy of the budget, and schlepp them over to the Congressional Office Buildings, where they would be formally presented.
The Congressional Budget Office would then check the numbers, analyze the whole thing, prepare a summary, and then break it into sections related to various Congressional Committee's areas of responsibility. Each section would then be analyzed, a summary relating that section to the other sections prepared, and sent to the Committee.
The Committee staff would summarize the summaries for the Committee leadership, some preliminary Committee meetings would be held reviewing that section of the budget as presented by the President, and the Committee members would point out what had been left out, and what was incredibly stupid to include, and the results of all this would then go to the Congressional staff to be drafted into an omnibus appropriations bill.
Still with me? This was back in the days when things were SIMPLE, believe it or not.
Once the omnibus bill was prepared, the committee would meet on it again, give it a preliminary okay, then split it up into smaller pieces for the subcommittees to work on. The subcommittees were where the rubber (finally) hit the road and the horsetrading went on. Categories would be expanded, language specifying what the categories could include as allowable expenses, rules and formulae about how to allocate cash within the categories, etc., were all fought out in a mind-numbingly picky process. Congressional Budget Office staff, Executive Budget staff, and staffs of the various departments and agencies would give testimony to supplement the written justifications, answer questions, and generally try to smarm the subcommittee members into not cutting their specific appropriation.
Once the subcommittees had peed in it until the taste was finally to their liking, they'd send their section back to the Committee to be re-aggregated in the final Omnibus Appropriations Bill. The Committee would pee in it a little more, just to mark their territory (as it were,) and additional hearings might (or might not) be held. The Omnibus would then be sent to the floor for a vote.
By this time, the Omnibus (for example) Transportation Appropriations Bill for (Budget Cycle) would vastly exceed in size, weight, and complexity the original Budget as presented by the civil servants whose work would depend on that funding. Things they desperately wanted and saw urgent immediate needs for would be long gone. Weird-ass crap they had not a clue what to do with would have been grafted in. Programs that had functioned smoothly, if inadequately, for years would have been gutted and redesigned by a simple formula change empowering state agencies to poke fingers in the allocations pies, etc. Departmental staff would go on three day benders and pop quaaludes while watching the final stages of the process, threaten to quit when the Bill was passed, and begin Machiavellian plans to do what they knew needed to be done ANYWAY in spite of the Bill.
They would then spend the next two years implementing those Machiavellian plans, while people who fondly believed that their elected representatives had "fixed" whatever they thought needed fixing stood by with dropped jaws going, "Bu... but... but..."
Earmarking came about as a way of (essentially) micromanaging the civil servants into delivering on the elected officials' campaign promises.
It has evolved into the "Candy Store" process in which he who most effectively bribes/threatens/etc. the most powerful Committee leadership gets whatever they want and the rest of us stand around going "Bu... but... but..."
See?
Simple, ain't it?
cynically,
Bright
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