It would therefore be a policy to be shaped by the powerful oversight of the federal executive that would serve to dominate the process.

In the years following his supposition, however, many detractors have cited that the role which the public, the executive and Congress play in shaping the priorities of a spending bill will tend to levy political implications over the process. As a result, such hard and fast rules as that informing the theory of incrementalism may suffer from an absence of historical consistency in the approach to spending. Certainly, the absence of accurate consistency may be attributed to, among other things, the ongoing tug-of-war between the President and Congress in influencing the content of spending bills.

In 1974, with the executive authority under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny following the Watergate revelations, Congress passed a resolution that would articulate with a theretofore unseen degree of control the...
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