Review of Federal Drug Budget Methodologies

Review of Federal Drug Budget Methodologies

PI: Lynn Davis

Co-PI(s): Patrick Murphy, Kathi Webb

Funded by: Office of National Drug Control Policy

The federal Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) ensures that federal agencies follow a coordinated, coherent strategy to control drug use and that they have adequate budgets to execute the strategy. However, the director of ONDCP had no way to verify that the agencies' budgets accurately reflected the resources they devoted to drug control activities. To fill this gap, RAND reviewed the methods used by ten federal agencies to estimate their drug control budgets. Three of the ten agencies had developed methods that accurately represented the portion of their resources devoted to anti-drug programs. Three other agencies used methods that were valid in concept but flawed in execution. The remaining four agencies used unreliable methods to reach their estimates; taken together, three of these four agencies overestimated their anti-drug expenditures for fiscal year 1998 by a total of $1.2 billion. The study recommended that ONDCP take steps to ensure that the agencies employ accurate and consistent methods for estimating the portion of their budgets that account for anti-drug activity. Improved estimates will help guarantee that funds targeted for national drug control strategy are spent to accomplish their goals.