Summary: Each year, the President is required by law to submit a budget to Congress. The President's budget analyzes and compiles separate presentations for hundreds of budget accounts, covering all fiscal activities of the federal government, including "off-budget" accounts such as the Social Security trust funds and the Postal Service funds. It also includes accounts, such as the legislative and judicial branch summaries, that, by law or by practice, are not subject to presidential review. The budget contains a wealth of information in a daunting array of schedules, tables, graphs, and narrative summaries. The comprehensiveness of the President's budget is both its principal strength and its most obvious inconvenience; the President's budget for fiscal year 2000 spans five volumes totaling more than 2,600 pages. This publication gives readers a convenient way to sort through the fiscal structure of the federal government and to determine the level of budgetary resources--used, estimated, or requested by fiscal year--for individual accounts.
