Abstract
This memo provides a descriptive overview of public budgeting across U.S. local governments, assessing the challenge of understanding how thousands of municipalities and counties allocate hundreds of billions of dollars each year. It describes the scale, structure, and common practices of revenue collection, expenditure categories, and budget processes among city and county governments. Drawing on the 2017 Census of Governments, the only universal source of data on all 90,000 plus local governments, the study gives an overview of national patterns in local revenue streams (intergovernmental transfers versus own‑source taxes), major expenditure categories, and fiscal year timing. Key findings show that city and county governments generate over $600 billion annually, with roughly two‑thirds of revenue coming from local taxes and one‑quarter from state aid. Supplementing this analysis with an in-depth comparative study of 40 local budgets, the memo describes how a local budget is created and what it contains. The memo describes a five‑stage process that most public budgets follow: departmental requests lead to an executive proposal followed by a legislative review resulting in adoption and then transitioning into ongoing monitoring. The analysis highlights significant gaps in publicly available information across jurisdictions with critical elements like staffing levels, overtime expenditures, and contract details incomplete or missing in many budgets. The memo closes by detailing the challenges of cross-jurisdictional comparison of local budgets due to a lack of standardized fund and category definitions.