Line-by-line itemized budgets were invented to expose municipal corruption and let voters judge departments.

Evidence

The young men developed techniques that were to reform every aspect of municipal government and create “a new literature on the science of public administration.” They devised the first budget used by any municipal governmental unit, a “primitive model employed by the New York City Health Department in 1908. They invented line-by-line itemization to eliminate lump-sum budget requests, and organization charts similar to those coming into use in business to make responsibility easier for voters to pinpoint. When enthusiastic press support forced the Board of Estimate to adopt the Bureau’s innovations, city departments, for the first time, had to show what they had spent money for in the past year and which items they wanted increases for—and, for the first time, citizens could understand and could judge a department’s record. Tammany Hall called it the “Bureau of Municipal Besmirch”—but its exposés led to the election in 1909 of anti-Tammany reformer William J. Gaynor as mayor. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 262

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the New Deal bureaucratic-reform literature and how transparency tools were products of specific progressive-Era actors, not natural developments. — connects to: Privately-funded citizens proved municipal corruption by auditing publicly mandated records. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 259
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did the Budget Exhibit of 1908 or the NYC Bureau of Municipal Research give rise to the modern line-item budget used across American governments? The diffusion path from this one bureau would matter.