How Does Georgia Make Their Budget?

Series Summary

Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in many human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions. Political science, or political studies, is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power. In this free video series on politics, a political science specialist explains how different topics on history and politics. Find out about the allies of Japan and Great Britain during the two World Wars. Get information on the United Nations and learn about how age affects voter turnout.

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Arielle Reid in Budapest, Hungary and I would like to explain to you today how the state of Georgia makes it's budget. Budget making is a continuous process that involves many levels of government. Number one it involves the departments and agencies of the state itself. Number two it involves the general assembly which is comprised of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Number three it involves the Governor, now there are four phases to making a budget and all the departments, and the agencies, the Governor, the general assembly participate in this process to give us the final results which is the state budget. So phase number one is this submission to the office of planning and budget which is directly responsible and accountable to the Governor of the budget requests. So departments, agencies make their funding requests in the first, on the first of September, sorry. For the physical year that begins the following July first. So long before the formal requests are made, the Governor his office, members of the general assembly are already beginning to talk to various departments and agencies about their projects, about their policy goals, the things they want to accomplish for the upcoming year, in preparation for this formal submission. Now number two is, the second step sorry, is the spending recommendations that are made to the general assembly by the Governor. The Governor collects these formal requests and with a team of analysts, analyzes them for cost benefit, analysis, making sure that the expenditure make sense, making sure that the budget will eventually be balanced at the end. And makes a formal recommendation to the general assembly, remember that the general assembly is comprised of the House of Representatives and the Senate, on what he sees, what he or she sees as the best budget for the upcoming year. Now the general assembly has it's own budget office, joint, it's called the legislative budget office which after the Governor makes his or her formal recommendations, goes through the recommendations and the general assembly makes it's own recommendations to various other committees that report to the Senate and that reports to the House of Representatives on the recommendations that the Governor has made. Once the general assembly has made these recommendations, the House of Representative passes what it calls an approbation bill. Now what an approbation bill does is turns the recommendations of the Governor, the recommendations that the House of Representatives has made on the Governor's recommendation into a formal bill, almost like a pre-law. Because the budget like any other law, has to go through the same stages before it becomes active and has to be ratified by the Governor. So once the general assembly, once the House of Representatives passes an approbation bill, the bill is sent to the Senate. Now the Senate goes through the same steps that the House of Representatives does. It has it's own committees that go through the recommendations of the Governor. It has it's committees go through the recommendations of the House of Representatives and the Senate, votes on it's modifications of the approbation bill. Now the goal is to get an approbation bill in the House of Representatives and the Senate that are as similar as possible. Because that way the Governor based on their recommendations has only to sign the approbation bill to make it become law. So once the Senate has accepted and votes on the House's approbation bill, if there are no modifications, the bill then goes to the Governor who signs it into law. Now the Governor has forty days to make his recommendations and send it back to the general assembly or the approbation bill becomes law by itself. And this is generally the process that the state goes through to create it's budget."