Legislative committee chairmen, not the governor, controlled New York’s state purse

Evidence

Most important, the study found that the Governor possessed little real authority. Not he but the chairmen of the various committees of the reactionary and corrupt Legislature controlled the state’s purse. The document that was called a state budget was actually a collection of appropriations drawn up by these chairmen. No legislator—or any other state official—reviewed the collection, balanced one appropriation against another, cut them down to agreed-upon necessities or measured them against estimated revenue. Even after the document was formally printed, individual legislators continued to introduce their own “private” bills, generally for pork-barrel public works projects, which required public expenditures, and these, when passed, did not even appear in the “budget.” No one bothered to add them up, so that, when the Legislature adjourned, no one could be sure how much money it had appropriated. The Governor technically had the power to veto appropriations, but since state law forbade him to veto part of an appropriation item, legislators simply made sure that each debatable expenditure was lumped with one too essential to be vetoed. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 418

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how diffuse, unaccountable administrative structures enable entrenched interests — parallels the fragmented colonial bureaucracies in the along-the-archival-grain reading and the pre-reform urban orders in World of Strangers.
• SEED: The item-veto lumping trick — legislators sheltering debatable spending by attaching it to essential appropriations — is a crisp, transferable example of how formal veto powers get neutered by procedure, usable in any piece on budget reform or legislative power.