Summary: The President is required by law to submit a budget to Congress each year. This budget not only presents the President's policy proposals for the "budget year," in this case fiscal year 2001, but also budgetary totals enacted by Congress for the current fiscal year and reported actual totals for the previous year. In effect, the President's submission analyzes and compiles separate presentations for hundreds of budget accounts spanning the activities of the entire federal government, including such "off-budget" programs as Social Security and the Postal Service. The President's budget contains a wealth of information in a daunting assemblage of schedules, tables, graphs, and narrative summaries. The comprehensiveness of the President's budget--its sheer size and complexity--is both its principal strength and its most obvious inconvenience. This budget compendium was compiled to help GAO staff and others cope with the breadth of the federal budget. It gives readers a convenient way to sort through the fiscal structure of the federal government and to understand the level of budgetary resources--used, estimated, or requested by fiscal year--for individual accounts.
