There are many concerns that the fiscal 2021 budget for government spending could end up expanding pointlessly under the pressure of skyrocketing ministry requests.

The Finance Ministry recently presented rules for initial requests to be made by government ministries and agencies for the budget, which will be worked out by the end of this year.

The government has made it a point every year to have its budget request guidelines approved at a Cabinet meeting to rein in the amounts of initial budget requests.

Last year, for example, it called on ministries and agencies to cut their initial requests for “discretionary spending,” including for public works projects, by 10 percent from the level of the initial fiscal 2019 budget.

However, this year’s rules were only presented orally by Finance Minister Taro Aso during a Cabinet meeting instead of being approved formally by the Cabinet.

In addition, they are so lax that ministries and agencies are basically allowed to request as much as was allocated in the initial fiscal 2020 budget.

Furthermore, the ministries and agencies are allowed to request separate budgets for “emergency spending,” including for addressing the COVID-19 outbreak, with no upper limit.

“It is difficult to foresee at present how much (it will cost to address the novel coronavirus crisis),” Aso said in explaining why no cap was placed on the requests.

Certainly, we are unable to tell what the level of COVID-19 infections will be like a month from now. It is therefore probably not realistic to set restrictions on coronavirus-related requests at the current stage.

The problem here is that the designation of “emergency spending” could be used to justify all sorts of project proposals.

In fact, the government’s annual Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform, more commonly known as the “big-boned policy,” this year included a plan for building roads and new Shinkansen lines in provincial areas to help “regional revitalization for realizing a ‘new normal’” under the COVID-19 pandemic.

The torrential rains earlier this month, which took an especially heavy toll on southern Kumamoto Prefecture, will also be reason enough for requesting additional budgeting for disaster management and reduction measures under the framework of “emergency spending.”

The setup could allow all sorts of budget requests to be made without limit. No mechanism is available for demanding cuts in nonessential budgets, so reviews are not expected for projects that are no longer essential.

In light of the workload of ministries and agencies that are busily dealing with the coronavirus crisis, the deadline for initial budget request submittals was pushed back by a month over past years to the end of September.

The government will have to exhibit strong political leadership to adjust the interests of different parties because it only has a short time interval from that point through the end of this year for working out a budget with distinctive priority areas.

We feel less than certain that the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is determined to take that difficult task upon itself, given that problems that are politically difficult to settle have been left untouched and put off until the end of this year.

One example is social security spending, which emerges every year as a focus of budget compilation work.

Last year’s guidelines said requests for social security spending are allowed to increase only as much as they need to due to the aging population. But no such provision was included in this year’s rules.

Among the policy measures the government has taken for addressing the coronavirus crisis, those decided on the initiative of the prime minister’s office alone, such as the universal cash payouts and the tourism campaign, drew a backlash from the public and had to be modified at the last moment.

To compile a budget that is acceptable to the public, there should be extensive discussions, with transparency ensured, on whether every policy measure being proposed is essential enough to deserve the designation of “emergency” spending. The administration should take that point to heart.

--The Asahi Shimbun, July 26