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The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. The inaugural medal winner, the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), is an innovative not-for-profit organization that promotes \"participatory budgeting,\" an inclusive process that empowers community members to make informed decisions about public spending. More than 46,000 people in communities across the United States have decided how to spend $45 million through programs that PBP helped spark over the last five years. InEveryone Counts, PBP co-founder and executive director Josh Lerner provides a concise history of the organization's origins and its vision, highlighting its real-world successes in fostering grassroots budgeting campaigns in such cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago. As more and more communities turn to participatory budgeting as a means of engaging citizens, prioritizing civic projects, and allocating local, state, and federal funding, this cogent volume will offer guidance and inspiration to others who want to transform democracy in the United States and elsewhere. \"The Participatory Budgeting Project exemplifies the essential features the award committee was looking for in its inaugural recipient. Political and economic inequality is part of the American national discussion, and participatory budgeting helps empower marginalized groups that do not normally take part in a process that is so critical for democratic life.\"- John Gastil, Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world.The inaugural medal winner, the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), is an innovative not-for-profit organization that promotes \"participatory budgeting,\" an inclusive process that empowers community members to make informed decisions about public spending. More than 46,000 people in communities across the United States have decided how to spend $45 million through programs that PBP helped spark over the last five years. InEveryone Counts, PBP co-founder and executive director Josh Lerner provides a concise history of the organization's origins and its vision, highlighting its real-world successes in fostering grassroots budgeting campaigns in such cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago. As more and more communities turn to participatory budgeting as a means of engaging citizens, prioritizing civic projects, and allocating local, state, and federal funding, this cogent volume will offer guidance and inspiration to others who want to transform democracy in the United States and elsewhere.\"The Participatory Budgeting Project exemplifies the essential features the award committee was looking for in its inaugural recipient. Political and economic inequality is part of the American national discussion, and participatory budgeting helps empower marginalized groups that do not normally take part in a process that is so critical for democratic life.\"- John Gastil, Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy

The authors examine the track record of applying performance-based budgeting (PBB) across three time periods within a sample of U.S. state governments: (1) throughout the 1990s, (2) in the early 2000s, and (3) during the Great Recession. State-level PBB is analyzed according to four elements: (1) the development of performance measures, (2) its applicability to budgeting and management processes, (3) its utility across the business cycle, and (4) its usefulness for budget players. An analytical framework is devised that highlights the \"publicness\" of American government, draws on the principal—agent model, and considers incentive mechanisms theory. Findings confirm that a good performance measurement system takes time to develop and operate well and that PBB functions more effectively for executive management than legislative purposes. PBB is used more by the states during strong economic times as opposed to during economic downturns. More importantly, PBB is only selectively applied by legislators in most states, whereas top executive policy makers, middle managers, and staff embrace and utilize PBB systems more extensively.

Governments often use multiple policy instruments for pursuing policy goals with mutually reinforcing effects. These effects include supplementation and substitution. This article examines both effects by studying two instruments of state budget stabilization policy: general fund balances and budget stabilization funds. States normally maintain budget surpluses in the general fund. In recent decades, many also created separate budget stabilization funds to guard against economic downturns. Empirical results show that substitution occurs between these instruments. In other words, the influence of the first instrument is partially offset by the second. The second instrument also produces some independent impacts—called supplementation—that increase the overall influence of both instruments. Such selfreinforcement decreases over time, suggesting that multiple policy instruments are most effective in the initial stage of application.

Despite academic findings that performance information seldom is used in appropriations decisions, many professional organizations and governments continue to press for integrating performance information into local public management, planning, and budgeting processes. Is it possible to reconcile such inconsistencies? Looking beyond the executive— legislative relationship and departmental appropriations, the author examines the budget implications of applying performance information at the subdepartmental program level. Case analysis of Indianapolis's IndyStat initiative underscores that performance measurement application is positively related to intradepartmental program budget changes. Hence, performance-based budgeting (PBB) can improve local budgeting despite severe political constraints. Still, successful use of PBB requires strong executive leadership, and its effects remain less visible at the departmental level or within the wider political arena of legislative bargaining. The author concludes by recommending some rethinking of the current analytical focus of PBB both in future research as well as recommended practice.

The Great Recession heightened a growing conflict in the United States between expanding enrollments in postsecondary education and contracting public budget support. Weak labor market conditions during the Great Recession encouraged college enrollments, with much of the increase in enrollment occurring outside the most selective institutions. While federal aid policies, including the Pell grant, became more generous, dramatic reductions in state budget allocations made it difficult for colleges and universities to maintain programming and accommodate student demand. As a result, the Great Recession has accelerated the cost-shifting from public subsidies to individual payments in higher education.

The importance of the study of the united territorial communities functioning and the identification of the main problems of organizational support of local budget management are substantiated. It has been studied that the issues related to the development of organizational support of local budget management are insufficiently researched in the domestic scientific literature. The paper clarifies that the decentralization of government should ensure the democratization of society, combine administrative, political, fiscal decentralization and involves the transformation of the interaction between governmental agencies and citizens, NGOs and businesses. The regulatory framework for the reform process is provided. Problems of united territorial communities development are identified. One of the first of them is the problem of proper implementation of the territorial community functions, which is intertwined with the filling of the UTC budget, the formation of financial resources sufficient to adequately finance the urgent social needs of communities based on the principle of subsidiarity, implementation of their economic and technological development. Conditions for the formation of able-bodied territorial communities are provided. The own and delegated powers of the united territorial communities in Ukraine are studied. The factors and subjects of ensuring the financial capacity of territorial communities are singled out and generalized. As a result, the well-established interaction of the subjects of financial relations under the influence of both external and internal factors will help meet the legitimate needs and interests of local communities. The basic legislative bases of the mechanism of voluntary association of territorial communities are generalized. It is determined that the current state of local budgets does not seem to be the best, which hinders the complex tasks assigned to local authorities: scarcity of their own sources of income, almost complete dependence on the state budget, lack of transparency of budgetary relations in providing financial assistance from the center, additional assistance revenues and economic expenditure of budget funds. According to the analysis conducted by the authors, a set of problems of organizational support of local budgets is proposed.

In his State of the Union Address on February 5, 2019, President Donald J. Trump announced his administration’s goal to end the domestic HIV epidemic. Following the announcement of the Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America initiative, the president proposed $291 million in new funding for the fiscal year 2020 Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) budget to implement a new initiative to reduce the number of new HIV infections by 75% in the next five years (2025) and by 90% in the next 10 years (2030). This is in addition to the $20 billion the US government already spends each year, domestically, for HIV prevention and care. With this initiative, HHS recognizes that the time to end the HIV epidemic is now: we have the right data, the right biomedical and behavioral tools, and the right leadership. With the new resources, the goal is achievable. This article outlines how this initiative will be accomplished through the implementation of four fundamental strategies that will be tailored by local communities on the basis of their own needs and strengths.