I feel like a straight dope for even having this question, but…
… so Obama is trying to gather support for his budget, which is currently under review by Congress. But I thought he signed off on a budget a few weeks back. Am I mistaken on that, or is this a different budget?
For the federal government, a new fiscal year begins every October 1. The bill recently signed by Obama was for 2009, the year that began 10/1/08.
The budget he has submitted is for 2010, which begins on 10/1/09.
Or, to put it another way, the stimulus package is above and beyond the budget and not really part of it.
Bush did the same thing with Iraq and Afghanistan spending. That was a special appropriations package and not always included as part of “the budget.”
In 20 years, the federal budget will be $1 billion and we’ll use the “surplus” of $15 trillion on $20 trillion in “special appropriations” financed with “trust funds.” Apparently, the American people can deal with everything but intellectual honesty.
To expand, “the budget” is used casually to mean a number of different things. What President Obama recently signed was an omnibus appropriations bill that funded the federal government through the end of this fiscal year (i.e. through the end of September). This was necessary because Congress had only passsed a couple of the 12 appropriations bills that various fund federal agencies, and had been funding the rest through a “continuing resolution” that let them continue operating at last year’s funding level.
What Congress is debating now is the budget resolution, which is passed by both chambers to outline where spending will go in the next fiscal year (the one ending in September of 2010). The President makes a budget request, but the resolution is free to take or leave any of it. This resolution does NOT fund anything in and of itself – it is simply give the outline for how the big accounts will be funded, and then the aforementioned appropriations bills have to be passed to fill in the details of how the money will be allocated among subaccounts.
This bit about the stimulus package has nothing to do with what the OP asked.
Unless I read it wrong, the OP was confusing the stimulus with the budget.
I just thought it would help to clarify some of the confusion (and maybe poke a little fun at the way both parties run things). There are a lot of terms that get thrown around when we’re talking about government spending, and they often get misused or misunderstood.
I was confused, but not in that way. As Flurb explained in post #4, the thing I was referring to when I said “Obama signed off on a budget a few weeks ago” was in fact the 2009 appropriations bill, not the stimulus.