The Politics of Foreign Policy and National Security BudgetingSpring 2012Papers and BriefingsBudget DocumentsThe President’s budget request for FY 2013 will be sent to the Congress the first week in February. It is an essential tool for this class. You will be asked to download portions of that budget request, including agency budget justifications documen...Keeping CurrentIn addition to the assigned readings for the course, students should be regular consumers of The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, and defense and foreign policy publications such as Defense News, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Nationa...January 19 & 26: The Federal Budget ProcessFebruary 2: Foreign Policy Agenda and Overview of Budgeting PoliticsReadings:National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, Washington, DC, November 2008. At: http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf or http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.htmlFebruary 9 & 16: Budgeting for International Affairs: Function 150February 23 & March 1: Budgeting for Defense: Function 050April 5 and 12: The Congressional Budget Process1 SIS 419.004/653.004 (USFP) The Politics of Foreign Policy and National Security Budgeting Spring 2012 Thursday 2:35-5:15 Prof. Gordon Adams Location: 205 WARD Office hrs: W 3-5; Th 10-12 Office: 310 SIS e-mail: [email protected] Premises of the course The premise of this course is: “no budget; no policy!” Government policy can only be implemented if there are resources to pay for the people and programs implementing the policy. The budget process recognizes this reality: the principal context for policy and program planning in the federal government is the budget process. This is as true for foreign and national security policies and programs as it is for any other areas of public policy. Reversing global warming, building and supporting military forces, training Afghani soldiers and police, gathering intelligence on and combating terrorist organizations, preventing and treating the global spread of HIV/AIDS, negotiating an arms control agreement, stopping ships carrying materials for nuclear weapons, helping countries recover from a tsunami, protecting airline passengers, recovering from Hurricane Katrina, implementing arms control inspections, supporting the outcomes of the Arab Spring, containing China, all require funding. The budget process is at the heart of foreign and national security policy. The second premise of the course is that the US has a broad set of tools in its foreign and national security policy toolkit: diplomacy, foreign assistance, international economic policy, intelligence, homeland security, and the military. Discussions of US foreign policy and national security focus too often on the roles and missions of the armed forces, but the military is only one tool of policy. This course deliberately broadens that discussion to cover the budget processes for all the tools in the foreign policy toolkit A third premise is that budgeting is a responsibility of both the executive branch and the Congress, as Article 1, Sections eight and nine of the constitution make clear: Congress has the authority to “provide for the common defense…, regulate…foreign commerce,..raise and support armies, [and] provide and maintain a navy” (Art.1, Sec.8)." Equally important for students of the budget: "No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law," (Art.1,Sec.9) appropriations being acts of the Congress. The authority to provide resources for the operations of government and the tools of statecraft is explicitly shared between the executive branch and in the Congress; the class will cover the budget processes of both the executive and the congressional branches. The fourth premise is that although the federal budget process, language, and details are sometimes technical and arcane, at its core, budget-making is a political process. As the subtitle of the Schick text says, federal budgeting is about “politics, policy, and process.” We will spend time on process and technical issues and terms, examine how policy is reflected in budgeting, and dig deeply into the politics of the process, from the agency, interagency, White House, and congressional perspectives.2 Learning Objectives 1. Acquire a familiarity with the planning and budgeting concepts, categories, terms, and processes used to prepare foreign policy and national security budgets in the executive branch. 2. Learn to research executive branch agency structure, programs, budgets, and stakeholders. 3. Learn to write a summary briefing on complex agency programmatic and budgetary information for a policy official 4. Learn to research and analyze federal budget data using multiple sources and documentation. 5. Become familiar with the congressional budget process 6. Experience, through simulation, the work of an OMB budget examiner, developing an understanding of agency and inter-agency planning and budgeting and the process of analyzing and briefing that understanding. Learning Outcomes 1) Demonstrate the capacity to use federal budget concepts and terms; 2) Demonstrate the capacity to research an executive branch agency’s structure, programs, budgets, and stakeholders and provide a written background briefing on these topics for a senior agency official; 3) Demonstrate the ability to access and understand federal budget data, using multiple sources; 4) Demonstrate knowledge of the congressional budget process; 5) Demonstrate the ability to analyze the politics of foreign policy/national security budgeting; 6) Display the ability to work in a team process and provide a written and oral briefing of a policy official on agency and inter-agency programs and budgets, and craft a budgetary option for that program area. Papers and Briefings In the first part of the semester, each of you will research, in detail, the structure, budget and programs of some part of the foreign policy/national security establishment in the executive branch and will prepare an individual agency/sub-agency “briefing book” on that agency or sub-agency, its programs and its budget. Later in the semester, as a member of a team, you will create and present in class a Power Point briefing and write a “briefing book” on a policy issue that cuts across agencies, covering