45. Editorial Note

At a breakfast meeting with Cabinet members and agency heads on August 25, 1965, President Johnson directed each agency to introduce an integrated Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS). Once in operation, he stated, the system would enable each agency to identify its goals with precision, “choose among those goals the ones that are most urgent,” and “search for alternative means of reaching those goals most effectively at the least cost.” For text, see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, Book II, pages 916–917. On October 12, in Bulletin No. 66–3, the Bureau of the Budget issued instructions and set deadlines for establishing PPBS. (National Defense University, Taylor Papers, Advisory Group on Foreign Affairs Planning, Programming & Budgeting, Box 70 Folder A)

Unlike the Department of State’s Comprehensive Country Programming System, which was a country-based system administered by State, PPBS was an agency-based system directed by the Bureau of [Page 99] the Budget. Each overseas agency, including the Department of State, United States Information Agency, Agency for International Development, Peace Corps, and Central Intelligence Agency, was instructed to prepare its own Planning-Programming-Budgeting System and submit the results to the Bureau of the Budget for review. The differences in the two approaches and the implications and consequences of those differences, which directly affected Documents 49 and 62, are discussed in Frederick Mosher and John Harr, Programming Systems and Foreign Affairs Leadership, pages 90–200.