GUEST COLUMN.

Here are a few questions to consider for local governments.

·        Does your budget process start by identifying the highest-value investments, instead of just carrying forward last year's line items?

·        Are your agencies asked to solve shared problems for residents, instead of just defending or requesting department budgets?

·        Do your leaders have proven program models in hand, instead of funding vague concepts under tight deadlines?

If you answered all three with a yes, then no need to read on.

But if not, then consider these questions as a starting point for what’s broken in the traditional approach to local budgeting, and they point toward something better. For decades, budget season has followed a familiar script: departments submit requests based on what they received last year, finance and budget teams look for places to trim, and elected officials debate the margins. 

It's a process built for stability, not for adapting to fast-moving community needs. The good news is that a different approach is possible, one that brings resident priorities together with a focus on solutions that work. Getting to this place requires overcoming common challenges that pull us towards the status quo. 

Challenge 1: Budgets on Autopilot.

Most budgets are built on last year's allocations, focusing on incremental changes rather than overall service performance. As a result, underperforming services persist while high-impact solutions struggle to scale. Because funding is rarely revisited from the ground up, programs and services that no longer serve residents well can continue for years, simply because no one has built a process for asking whether they should.

Challenge 2: Breaking down Silos

Traditional processes often prioritize departmental expenditure targets over cross-organizational outcomes. Agencies are asked to cut or request funding rather than solve specific problems. Performance measures focus on what can be easily counted but miss the mark on whether anyone is better off. This structure discourages collaboration: a housing issue that touches planning, public health, and social services ends up split across three separate budget conversations that never talk to each other. 

Challenge 3: Funding Concepts Over What Works

Tight timelines often force decisions based on broad concepts rather than well-defined, evidence-based programs. Initiatives like job training or violence prevention may receive funding without clear implementation plans or expected outcomes, accumulating over time without proven impact. Without a shared library of what's worked in peer jurisdictions, communities end up reinventing the wheel, often without the evidence needed to know whether it's the right wheel at all.

The Roadmap for Results

These challenges are fixable. Local governments can build budgets that reflect community priorities while directing resources toward evidence-grounded strategies. A results-based approach defines desired resident outcomes first and builds the budget backward from those goals. Here are the early steps that will get an entity toward that goal:

1.     Service/Program Inventory. Effective decision-making requires understanding the specific services delivered. Developing a service-level inventory is a critical first step, ideally paired with financial alignment (e.g., organizing the chart of accounts to track spending at the service level). Dallas, for example, developed the city's first program-level inventory, identifying programs, costs, and intended outcomes giving leaders a single place to see what the city actually funds and begin conversations on how these programs can help move bigger goals.

2.     Community Plan. Results-based budgeting should be grounded in long-term goals defined through inclusive planning. Aligning the budget to these priorities ensures accountability. In Memphis and Shelby County, leaders created a joint office to coordinate violence-prevention investments, focusing resources on strategies most likely to improve safety and aligning them with the More for Memphis plan. That shared structure turned a fragmented set of department-level efforts into one coordinated strategy with common goals and common metrics.

3.     Defining Evidence.  Clearly defining what counts as evidence, and where that definition applies in the budget process, gives leaders a consistent standard for prioritizing investments and identifying savings. Once that definition is in place, it can be embedded directly into budget proposals, guidance, and decision-making. Defining evidence is just the first step from there, communities can build internal capacity to evaluate what's working. In Washington, D.C., for example, the Lab @ DC sits within the Office of Budget and Performance Management, where it conducts program evaluations throughout the year and uses those findings to help review how budget proposals put evidence into practice.

Shifting long-standing processes requires strong leadership and sustained effort. Building a team of committed staff, paired with executive support, is essential to overcoming organizational inertia. Even the best framework will stall without champions who protect the effort through turnover, competing priorities, and the inevitable friction of doing things differently.

Get Involved

Results for America helps government leaders find, fund, and implement solutions that work to accelerate upward mobility and improve lives. Our teams have decades of government leadership experience working closely with elected officials, budget teams, and agencies to help governments invest in the strategies most likely to improve outcomes for residents.

Learn more about our offerings and support by contacting localgov@results4america.gov.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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