In this timely book Irene Rubin focuses on how government tried and eventually succeeded in balancing the U.S. federal budget in 1998. With characteristic insight and a lively narrative, Rubin describes the successive efforts of Congress and the administration over seventeen years to shape a process that would encourage balance, as well as the reactions of federal agencies to the pressure.

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1. 1981–1998: Balancing the Budget: What Have We Learned?
2. What Happened and What was Learned?

Part One. Eating the Seed Corn?

3. Information Agencies: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of the Census
4. Budget Offices
5. General Accounting Office

Part Two. Trimming the Herds?

6. Department of Agriculture
7. Department of Commerce
8. Department of Housing and Urban Development
9. Office of Personnel Management
10. Eating the Seed Corn and Trimming the Herds

Irene Rubin is Professor Emerita of Public Administration at Northern Illinois University. Her teaching, research, and writing have focused on public budgeting and qualitative research design and methods. Within public budgeting, she has concentrated on the politics and administration of governments in financial trouble and on techniques and implications of contracting out, especially for public enterprises such as water and wastewater treatment. Recent research has included work on the relationship between executive budgeting and fiscal health and on long term budgeting for entitlements. Her books on budgeting include Balancing the Federal Budget: Trimming the Herds or Eating the Seed Corn and Class, Tax, and Power: Municipal Budgeting in the United States. A former editor of Public Budgeting and Finance and Public Administration Review, she has also done editing projects for GFOA and the American Water Works Association. Her B.A. is from Barnard College, her M.A. is from Harvard, and her PhD is from the University of Chicago. As an activist, in recent years she has been advocating for the pension system in her state, and as a practitioner, she sat on the board of the budget review committee for a small city for several years, taking budgets apart and examining them line by line. The awards she is most proud of include the Aaron Wildavsky award for lifetime achievements in scholarship in public budgeting and a Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.