Document Type
Article
Abstract
Researchers have long studied how organizational budgets relate to performance, but how do employees themselves experience the effects of budgetary decisions? Given widespread attention to political dysfunction in US federal budgeting, conventional wisdom holds that employees are negatively affected by budgetary uncertainty (volatility, delays, and stop-gap measures). We test how budget size and uncertainty are associated with US federal employee attitudes using survey and archival data from 2005 to 2020. Results provide some evidence that employee job satisfaction improves with enhanced funds, but there is little to no support for the notion that budgetary uncertainty influences federal employees' job satisfaction.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Public Budgeting & Finance, 2026.
Rights
© 2026 The Author(s). Public Budgeting & Finance published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Public Financial Publications, Inc.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
APA Citation
Favero, N., Flink, C., & Qu, T. (2026). US Federal Budgets and Federal Employee Job Satisfaction. Public Budgeting & Finance. https://doi.org/10.1111/pbaf.70015