In January the White House announced that the President’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2024 would be released Thursday, March 9th. Of course, the announcement occurred right before the budget is legislatively mandated to be released, but it’s hardly the first time a President has been tardy. And who knows, it may slip again. Regardless of timing, the day the budget is revealed is always an important and exciting date for people interested in maintaining a healthy, functioning democracy.

Interestingly for TCS, March 9 is the same day we’ll be meeting with several members of the Algerian government’s Supreme Audit Institution. This week, members of the country’s Ministry of Finance were in our offices to discuss the role of a budget watchdog in taxpayer advocacy and budget accountability and oversight.

Algeria is not the first country TCS has done this with. In previous years our staff has traveled as Financial Services Volunteer Corps volunteers to meet with Civil Service Organizations in Angola and Moldova, and in DC we met with representatives of the Tunisian, Japanese, and South Korean governments. TCS receives no funding for this outreach, and while not strictly in our mission, we see this as an opportunity to help other countries hone their budget oversight skills – and we learn as well. Call it our budgetary pay it forward.

What will we discuss? Tools of the trade. Reading budget documents and comparing them to previous years. You’ve heard us say it before, budgets aren’t only about numbers, they’re about priorities. How have those priorities shifted from year to year, does the government just put empty words on paper or do they try to accomplish what they preach? What has been enacted and how does that change what the government is seeking to achieve? What are the budget writers’ future assumptions? Are they realistic or do they use magic pixie dust economic growth projections that make everything seem better but have no basis in reality? That’s a lot of what we will be doing when the budget drops.

We will also talk about the importance of tools that are available here in the U.S. At TCS we conduct our own research of publicly available data from a range of agencies and independent entities to compile our own objective analyses and make our recommendations to advocate for taxpayers. The agencies include the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to determine budget scores of spending and revenue legislation. Or the Government Accountability Office (GAO) – the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress – for assessments of programs and proposals. They also serve as the Supreme Audit Institution of the U.S. There are others, Congressional Research Service (CRS) or agency data for instance. The public availability of data from numerous sources means you don’t have to simply trust what your government tells you. You can trust (or distrust) then verify.

The importance of pushing for greater transparency and public resources will come up. TCS was integral to getting USASpending.gov created and improved over the years. This is a federal spending tracking tool available to the public. Our work calling for transparency has improved disclosure of taxpayer issues like earmarks and disaster spending.

And we’ll be frank about where we still need improvement. One thing our nation fails to do is publish a Citizen’s Budget. Every year we go through the budget tomes (five volumes) and accessory documents including thousands and thousands of budget justification sheets produced by hundreds of agencies and subagencies (speaking of budget justifications, we got the government to house all of the budget justifications together at USASpending.gov, previously they were scattered at the various agencies). That’s our job. But other countries around the world publish a simplified version of their budget that is written in an accessible manner and explains pre-budget planning, revenue and spending in the budget, a mid-year check-in and post budget audit. The U.S. kinda, sorta, maybe does some of this. There is an overarching budget document, but it isn’t that accessible. Many of the summary docs read more like a campaign pamphlet. The CBO does a mid-year analysis of the government’s financial situation, but it isn’t necessarily budget related and isn’t an audit. There isn’t an overall audit of government and, heck, the Pentagon has yet to pass an audit.

The lack of auditing gets to another criticism we have of the budgeting process. Policymakers seem to follow the Ron Popiel late night rotisserie infomercial mantra “Set it (budget/spending) and forget it!” In other words, there is very little follow-up to see where the taxpayer funds went, how they were spent and whether they achieved the intended results. Too often oversight is, in fact, an oversight in the process.

So, what do we do with this data and analysis we’ve compiled? Well, we give it to you and policymakers. We write about it, work with journalists to get it published or put on TV, Tweet about it, send our findings to the Hill. Meet with policymakers, testify before Congress, do everything we can to fight for taxpayers. And you know what? All that helps our country have a better government with better outcomes for taxpayers. That’s what we will tell the Algerian government officials is the role of a budget watchdog. The president’s budget release is the perfect time to be reminded of and reinvigorated in this important role.