IV. Development and Oversight of the National Drug Control Budget
ONDCP plays a critical role in formulating the National Drug Control Budget through the authorities provided by Congress. Our authorizing legislation is now expired, but during this first session of the 109 th Congress, the Administration will seek to reauthorize ONDCP, retaining our current budget and policy oversight responsibilities. I know these activities are of keen interest to this Committee. This legislation is critical to fulfilling our mission.
ONDCP Budget Authorities
ONDCP authority to assist in coordinating the President's drug control program includes the important ability to review agency budgets. This is a two-tiered process, consisting of a summer review of bureau-level submissions and a fall review and certification of agency submissions. For each of these stages of review, budgets are judged based on funding guidance I am required by law to provide to the Cabinet in the spring. My evaluation of these proposals is also closely tied to demonstrated results from these drug programs. ONDCP's budget review and certification process is an instrument in focusing resources toward critical initiatives that support the President's Drug Strategy.
Modified Budget Presentation
Since ONDCP was last authorized, there has been one very significant change to the drug budget process that has significantly enhanced ONDCP's ability to provide effective oversight of drug control programs—a restructured presentation and accounting of the drug budget. This proposal was initially communicated to Congress in the February 2002 Strategy documents. It was fully implemented in the fiscal year 2004 Budget of the President, transmitted to the Congress the following year.
Prior to this change in the budget, the drug control program consisted of close to 50 budget accounts totaling $19 billion. Independent analyses of these budgets commissioned by ONDCP1 , as well as required reviews by department Inspectors General2 identified significant weaknesses in these budget presentations. Many of these issues were associated with the drug budget methodologies used by agencies to estimate drug spending. Drug budget methodologies were imprecise and often had only a weak association with core drug control missions. The revised budget presentation provides a greater degree of accountability for federal drug control programs.
The basic shortcoming associated with the old drug budget was that much of the funding displayed did not represent real dollars in the President's Budget. Drug budget calculations were not transparent to the public, Executive Department officials, or Congress. The drug budget generally did not represent funds that could be readily found in individual agency budget documents or accounting systems. Since the drug budget was a collection of estimates based on percentages of many accounts, it was wholly an artificial construction. To correct this fundamental deficiency, the revised drug budget was restructured to display, to the extent possible, actual funds found in the President's Budget.
If possible, all drug control funding would be directly appropriated by Congress into separately identified accounts reflected throughout the Federal Budget. However, there are many practical limitations associated with implementing such an approach, and although the revised budget still includes funding for some agencies (i.e., Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs) that is based on complex methodologies and calculations, the new budget structure is a vast improvement over the old accounting system.
1 Patrick Murphy, Lynn E. Davis, Timothy Liston, David Thaler, and Kathi Webb, Improving Anti-Drug Budgeting (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000).
2 Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), FY 1999 Accounting of Drug Control Funds (Washington, DC: ONDCP, 2000). ONDCP, FY 2000 Accounting of Drug Control Funds (Washington, DC: ONDCP, 2001). These documents included reports from department Inspectors General regarding agency drug budget presentations. Both the FY 1999 and FY 2000 Accounting Reports were transmitted by ONDCP to the Congress, pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 1704(d).
