The 2025 Budget exemplified the dysfunction in the UK’s Budget process, with systematic and selective briefing of underlying forecast details—meant to be private between the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Treasury—to the media since the 2022 ‘mini-budget’ crisis. In all documented occasions, this has come from the Treasury, with the OBR remaining silent allowing the Treasury to bed in a narrative based on partial information, with real costs in terms of prolonged uncertainty and market volatility. This article proposes a relatively narrow reform to the process that would see the OBR ‘bookend’ the Budget. The OBR would publish its pre-measures forecast three weeks before a fiscal statement—the same timing as it currently delivers it internally to the Treasury. The Treasury would then respond with its policy measures on Budget Day, with an OBR assessment following some days or a couple of weeks later. Key benefits of this reform are: increased transparency and democratic accountability; removing the OBR from politically contentious judgements about second-round effects of policies before they are announced and under pressure from the Treasury to hit particular fiscal rule targets; reducing the window for market uncertainty by providing a published baseline; and restricting speculation after OBR publication to policy decisions. This would be achieved while minimising the impact on the established forecast timetable. This design, adopting established practice from the Netherlands in publishing the pre-measures forecast to the UK’s institutional setup, can help guard the OBR’s independence while reducing the window for market volatility.

In order to establish a new national budget system during the Progressive Era, Congress had to overcome an earlier convention in which it used detailed appropriations in an attempt to control the budgetary actions of federal agencies and the president served no formal role. Incremental changes to strengthen congressional budgetary controls proved inadequate but provided reformers with an opportunity to supplant the existing orthodoxy, resulting in the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. Although most studies have focused on the Act in terms of its effects on presidential power and presidential/congressional relations, this study focuses on congressional actions and debates to show how reform was rooted in long-standing congressional concerns about the need to control agency budgetary actions and was understood at the time as a culmination of those efforts, not simply as a case of Congress enhancing presidential power at its own expense.

To constrain legislative taxing power, 16 U.S. state constitutions require a supermajority in both chambers to increase or impose taxes. Both supporters and opponents of the requirement argue that its effect fades away because states circumvent it in various ways, especially by raising fees that are not subject to the requirement. Existing literature, however, offers little and inconsistent evidence on whether the effect decays over time and whether the decay results from fee hikes. This article documents legal cases to show the ways in which states have responded to the requirement, estimates whether the effects of the requirement decay over time, and tests whether states raise fees instead of taxes after adopting such a requirement. Using state-level panel data, I find that the initial effectiveness of the requirement on tax burden does decay approximately a decade after enactment and that the decay is not the result of fee increases.

My article examines whether supermajority vote requirements (SMVR) to raise taxes in California's constitution suppresses state tax burdens. SMVR is a politically popular but contentious measure that 16 states have adopted and many other states have attempted to adopt. The rationale behind the rule is to contain the growth of government by making it costly to form a winning coalition to raise taxes. Nonetheless, the current empirical literature is mixed at best and suffers from causal inference. I take a different approach from extant literature and estimate the causal effect of SMVR on tax burdens in California by using synthetic control methods. The results show that, from 1979 to 2008, SMVR reduced the state nonproperty tax burden by an average of $1.44 per $100 of personal income, which is equivalent to 21% of the total tax burden for each year. The effect of SMVR was immediate after its adoption, but has abated over time.