Congress and executive branch budget reform: the house appropriations committee and zero-base pudgeting

Local police agencies are in a fiscal crisis prompted by inflation on one hand and citizen tax revolt on the other. However, there is opportunity inherent in the budget crunch. It provides local government and police administrators with unprecedent political leverage to cut budgets in a manner where highly productive programs are retained while the unproductive ones are deleted. To this end the essay discusses avenues, drawn from recent police scholarships, for using budgetary retrenchment as means for substantive police reform.