Public budget blindness: deciding priorities without seeing what things cost

In plain words

Public budget blindness is the gap between what people believe government spends money on and what it actually spends money on, and the difficulty of weighing priorities without seeing their costs. In a February 2025 KFF poll, U.S. adults guessed on average that 26 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid; KFF reports the actual share is about 1 percent.

Most people never see a government budget. They hear about a few programs in the news and guess the rest. That makes it hard to judge whether to spend more on schools or roads, or whether a tax cut is affordable. People tend to want more for most things and do not want to pay more. That is not foolish; it is what happens when the price tags are hidden. The question is whether showing the price tags would change what people want, and whether officials would listen.

The problem, stated precisely

The problem has three parts:

1. Misperception. People hold inaccurate beliefs about how budgets are divided.
2. Unpriced preferences. People state preferences for spending without seeing the tradeoffs those preferences imply.
3. Limited discretion. Much of any budget is committed by law in advance, so the share open to public choice is smaller than people assume.

This page is about public understanding of budgets and how public input enters budget decisions. It is not an argument for larger or smaller government. Funding for election offices is on election administration funding, and long-term fiscal tradeoffs are on short-term thinking.

Defined terms

• Mandatory spending. Spending set by existing law rather than annual appropriations, such as Social Security and Medicare. The U.S. Treasury describes it as representing “nearly two-thirds of annual federal spending”.⁠¹
• Discretionary spending. Spending set through annual appropriations. The Treasury states that “Congress allocates over half of the discretionary budget towards national defense”.⁠¹
• Balanced budget requirement. A legal rule requiring a state’s budget to balance. According to the Tax Foundation, “Every state but Vermont has a balanced budget requirement”.⁠²
• Participatory budgeting. “A democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget”.⁠³
• Budget transparency. Public availability of timely, comprehensive budget information, as scored by the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Survey.⁠⁴

Evidence

Misperception: the foreign aid example

KFF’s Health Tracking Poll, fielded February 18 to 25, 2025, with 1,322 adults, found the average guess for foreign aid’s share of the federal budget was 26 percent, with Republicans averaging 31 percent, independents 24 percent, and Democrats 23 percent.⁠⁵ Only 11 percent estimated about 1 percent or less, and 54 percent said more than 10 percent.⁠⁵ When respondents were told the actual share, the percentage saying the United States spends “too much” on foreign aid fell from 58 percent to 34 percent, while “too little” rose from 11 to 28 percent.⁠⁵ The misperception crossed party lines, and so did the shift after correction, though the size of the shift varied.

Unpriced preferences

Pew Research Center’s March 2019 survey of 1,503 adults found majorities favoring increased federal spending on veterans’ benefits (72 percent), education (72 percent), and roads and bridges (62 percent), with 55 percent favoring more for Medicare and for environmental protection.⁠⁶ Pew reported that no more than about a quarter favored cuts in most areas, and even for foreign aid, the least popular area, 35 percent favored increases and 28 percent cuts.⁠⁶ Partisan differences were large on some programs: 73 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of Republicans favored more health care spending, while 56 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of Democrats favored more military spending.⁠⁶ Asked separately, 47 percent preferred a smaller government and 47 percent a bigger one.⁠⁶ Taken together, these answers show preferences that are not organized by a budget constraint, which is what one would expect when the constraint is invisible.

Transparency and participation

The International Budget Partnership’s 2023 Open Budget Survey scored the United States 69 out of 100 for transparency, against a global average of 45 and an OECD average of 67, and 22 out of 100 for public participation, against a global average of 15 and an OECD average of 24.⁠⁴ The pattern, comparatively open budget documents with limited formal channels for public input, matches the problem described here.

Many budgets, not one

Federal spending is only part of the picture. The Census Bureau counted 90,837 local governments in 2022 and 91,438 in 2025, each with its own budget, the increase driven largely by special districts.⁠⁷ Most people live under several overlapping budgets, which makes it hard to know which one pays for what; see jurisdictions.

Hypothetical example: why a ranking is not a budget

Hypothetical example. A county’s residents rank public safety first and parks fifth. The county’s budget already sends most of its general fund to public safety, because of staffing contracts and state mandates, while parks receive a small share. A resident who reads the ranking as “spend more on public safety and less on parks” may be asking for a change at the margin that is tiny for public safety and large for parks. Another resident who ranks parks fifth may still believe parks are underfunded relative to their modest importance. Both readings are reasonable, and neither can be checked without knowing the current allocation, what is legally committed, and what an additional dollar would buy in each area. This is the gap that budget blindness creates: a priority with no price attached can be read as support for almost any budget.

Causes and competing explanations

• Invisibility. Budget documents are long and technical, and news coverage focuses on controversies rather than the composition of spending.
• Salience bias. Programs that attract attention, such as foreign aid, are overestimated relative to large, routine programs.
• Commitment. Mandatory spending makes up nearly two-thirds of federal outlays,⁠¹ and states face balanced budget rules,⁠² so annual debate concentrates on a small share of the total.
• Political incentives. Officials gain little from explaining tradeoffs and may gain from promising benefits without costs.
• Competing explanation: rational inattention. Some argue that it is reasonable for citizens not to study budgets, since one person’s knowledge rarely changes outcomes, and that people delegate to representatives precisely to avoid this work; see representation.

Who is harmed

Taxpayers and beneficiaries are harmed when budget debates rest on false premises, such as cutting a small program in the belief that it is large. Programs that are misperceived can be cut or expanded for the wrong reasons. Officials who try to explain tradeoffs may be punished by voters who see only the cost. And future residents bear the cost of decisions made without understanding of long-term obligations.

What has been tried elsewhere

Participatory budgeting. It began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 and, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project, has since reached more than 7,000 cities.⁠³ A study by Sónia Gonçalves of Brazilian municipalities from 1990 to 2004 found that municipalities using it directed a larger share of budgets to sanitation and health, a shift accompanied by lower infant mortality.⁠⁸ But in Brazil, the number of municipalities using participatory budgeting peaked at 137 in 2004 and then declined; Bezerra and Junqueira attribute the decline partly to fiscal rules that cut local investment budgets, earmarked revenues that left little discretion, and frustration when approved projects were delayed.⁠⁹ The lesson is that participation over a small discretionary slice can work, and can also disappoint when that slice shrinks. Case pages in comparative cases cover specific cities.

Correcting misperceptions with facts. The KFF experiment shows that telling people the actual foreign aid share changed stated views for many respondents.⁠⁵ Limits: a one-question correction in a survey may not persist or carry over to other programs.

Budget simulators. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Debt Fixer lets users choose policies across defense, domestic programs, health care, Social Security, and taxes, and see their effect on projected debt.⁠¹⁰ Such tools make constraints visible. Limits: the simulator embeds its publisher’s goal of stabilizing debt, which users may or may not share.

Transparency standards. Open Budget Survey scores give governments a benchmark.⁠⁴ The U.S. scores show that transparent documents do not, by themselves, create public participation.

Competing interpretations

The fiscal-responsibility view holds that budget blindness drives deficits: people demand more spending without accepting costs, so elected officials face pressure to borrow. Supporters favor tools that put constraints in front of the public, such as the Debt Fixer’s framing,⁠¹⁰ and rules such as balanced budget requirements.⁠²

The public-investment view holds that misperceptions also produce underinvestment, as when people overestimate foreign aid and support cuts that would not matter to the budget,⁠⁵ and that participatory budgeting shows people allocate money to basic needs when given the chance.⁠⁸

The representative-democracy view holds that citizens should set broad priorities and leave allocation to elected officials and their staff, because detailed budgeting requires expertise and accountability that participants lack.

The skeptical-participation view holds that participatory budgeting can become symbolic when the money at stake is small, and that the Brazilian decline shows participation fails when it cannot deliver.⁠⁹

All four views agree that the public’s picture of the budget is inaccurate. They disagree on whether the fix is information, rules, participation, or delegation.

Application to this framework

My Vote Forward’s tradeoffs chapter makes a distinction this problem needs: ranking a subject as important is not the same as deciding how much money it should get, and legal commitments limit what can change. The priorities chapter treats a priority as a statement of relative importance, not a budget instruction. The proposals chapter requires that a proposal state its cost, funding source, and authority before it becomes a ballot item. The subjects section is intended to show which level of government decides and funds each area.

Unresolved questions

• Do corrections like KFF’s last beyond the survey, and do they change votes⁠⁵?
• How large must the discretionary share be for participatory budgeting to stay credible⁠⁹?
• Can a public tool show budget constraints without embedding a policy goal, such as a debt target⁠¹⁰?
• How should overlapping budgets across tens of thousands of local governments be presented to residents⁠⁷?