Originally Posted by Scipio

Interestingly, measures that seek to root out inefficiency or that require justification for every dollar spent are often more costly than the inefficiencies they propose to combat. President Carter initiated a system called zero base budgeting where any agency or administrative unit that received money had to justify every dollar they received, not just increases or decreases from year to year. Traditionally, the budget process for next year begins with the budget from this year, and makes changes on the margin. As its name suggests, zero base budgeting starts from scratch.

A funny thing happened when they went through all the expenditures. They found that most of them were reasonable, and that a relatively small number of budget outlays were "bad." Moreover, the additional administrative overhead both in the agencies and in the budget process itself was found to be too costly to justify the gains.

Just a bit of history.