Presidential Influence on Congressional Appropriations Decisions

Abstract

We investigate the extent to which possession of the veto allows the president to influence congressional decisions regarding regular annual appropriations legislation. The most important implication of our analysis is that the influence the veto conveys is asymmetrical: it allows the president to restrain Congress when he prefers to appropriate less to an agency than they do; it does not provide him an effective means of extracting higher appropriations from Congress when he prefers to spend more than they do. This asymmetry derives from Constitutional limitations on the veto, the sequencing of the appropriations process provided by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1920, and the presence of a de facto reversionary expenditure level contained in continuing resolutions (Fanno, 1966). We find strong support for this proposition in a regression of presidential requests upon congressional appropriations decisions.