he entire federal government in the 1960s, and President Carter adopted the zerobase approach in the late 1970s. Conceptually, PPBS was exciting, but few government officials had a clear understanding of how to approach such comprehensive rational budgeting. It was Secretary Robert McNamara who was the first to implement PPBS for the Department of Defense in 1961. Although few studies were conducted to measure the effectiveness of PPBS in the Department of Defense, rational budgeting remained the dominant approach well into the 1990s (Axelrod, 1995, pp. 292-294).
Planning, Programming, Budgeting System reflected the very model of rational budgeting. All of the key concepts of rational budgeting were including in the overall model: resources were allocated based on programmatic analysis; objectives of government programs were identified for the medium-term and long-term; costs of alternative programs were compared; performance indicators were developed; results were emphasized; and choices by decisionmakers were expanded. This model implies a multi-year program budgeting process with long-term goals. Performance toward achieving these long-term goals should be measurable and used in adjusting the allocation of resources in an on-going basis. It emphasizes more than before analytical techniques that had long been in use, such as cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and systems analysis.
PPBS never worked as expected, however. Many government departments simply were not prepared to make the transition away from traditional budgeting. The way in which President Johnson offered the program was too inflexible. Different agencies should have been permitted to develop their own variants of the program, but Johnson wanted it uniformly applied across agencies.
Wildavsky and others argued that PPBS was doomed from the start. Wildavsky argued that such comprehensive rational budget was as political as economic, riddled with...