Scholar takes readers inside OMB

Going inside the Office of Management and Budget is probably not the average federal manager's idea of a good time.

But for the intrepid and open-minded manager, Inside OMB: Politics and Process in the President's Budget Office, a new book by scholar Shelley Lynne Tomkin takes a 312-page peek at the inner workings of the powerful and secretive office. The book starts with the 1921 creation of OMB's predecessor, the Bureau of Budget, and weaves through the agency's history to the present day. Tomkin examines the office's structure, politics and decision-making process and dissects OMB's relationship with federal agencies.

OMB staff are "the President's surrogates, the executive branch's nemeses, and the Congress's competitors," Georgetown University's Stephen J. Wayne writes in the book's foreword. "They enforce precedent, meet bottom lines and find buried bones all over the government. Often regarded as the people who say, 'NO,' they are the feared overseers of Presidents, and their executive branch enforcers."

One OMB manager instructed budget examiners to view themselves as bank tellers who release money, Tomkin says. The manager encouraged examiners to get as much information as they could to determine if agencies should get funds. Budget examiners must protect the President from civil servants who stray too far from White House policies, Tomkin says.

Meanwhile, agency officials lament OMB's strict budget controls and voluminous information requests. Officials also complain that individual budget examiners sometimes micromanage agency programs.

Inside OMB explains the official (and unofficial) channels of communication between OMB and the agencies, reviews the executive branch budget process, and describes new roles OMB has taken on following the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act, the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, and other laws and executive orders that have added mass to OMB's muscles.

Tomkin devotes several pages to a pivotal time in OMB-agency relations: The first years of the Clinton administration, when civil servants got the chance to challenge OMB authority as part of the National Performance Review.

"Many of the original NPR staff who were largely drawn from departments and agencies came saddled with grievances against OMB which had been accrued over the past two administrations," Tomkin says.

At first, some NPR staff argued for reducing OMB's role, cutting its size and transferring OMB responsibilities to other agencies. Some OMB staffers, meanwhile, decried any plan to "minimize OMB's role to that of green eyeshade number crunchers," as one staff person said. But the initial distrust has given way over the years to a hope that the two can complement each other, Tomkin writes.

NPR can initiate reinvention while "OMB maintains the discipline and constant pressure to keep reinvention going," one NPR official told Tomkin.

Tomkin is associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Washington. She has conducted research on OMB and the federal budget process for the past 20 years.

Despite its power over executive branch operations, OMB is "unexplainable to everyone who lives outside the Beltway and misunderstood by nearly everyone who lives inside the Beltway," former OMB Deputy Director Paul O'Neill told OMB staffers in a speech in 1988. Inside OMB is the first book-length attempt at unraveling the mystery surrounding OMB in 20 years, Wayne says in his foreword.