Thank you for this.

Bessent speaks of focusing on outcomes. However, Outcome Based Budgeting has some notorious pitfalls. Basically, if one picks a wishy-washy outcome, such as 'community wellbeing' - a favorite amongst the brainwashed; or the other favorite is 'pride awareness'. One can chalk up any number of expenses to it, and then claim success when one does not spend the entire budget. So, the expense becomes muddled into one line, and the council prints its glorious success, because they achieved what they aimed for.

Bessent can provide more clarity on how to link expenses to outcomes with measurable indicators - because 'community wellbeing' tends to be volatile, and affected by all sorts of things, for example, the price of fuel, which a local council can do not much about. In such cases, they can use such a condition as a crutch, and claim that 'it was out of their hands'. Sort of like a global excuse for a budget blowout.

Furthermore, council budgets have cycles, so one will see bizarre spending just before year's end. google 'March Madness'. When suddenly, all employees get new fobs, or something. This one is a myth - whereby one should spend all one's budget, or more, even, so that one can claim that money from Federal handouts the next year. If one does not spend all of the budget then one will receive less the next year, or something.

In principle I agree with adding qualitative columns to budget spreadsheets (Output budgeting - so the output part is actually a measurement - documenting X miles of roads fixed) - it is a bit like leaving file-notes for other programmers, or readers. However, once one insists on outcome-based budgeting, and those outcomes actually improving, one should be able to measure those.

And how to do that, has been the big question, apart from a council inducing survey-fatigue. I suppose one can check AI and social media, because that gives one an 'average' (in social media this is extremely tricky as communities form enclaves of opinion). But even then, such endeavors become complicated, because an average of everything on the hinternetz may not be the outcome one wants to measure. And, if new studies come out disproving stuff (check the many doctors advising us NOT to get jabbed, for example), the AVERAGE opinion is not properly calibrated into the algos. And so one gets nonsense.

So, I think Bessent is beginning to demonstrate what the philosophy should be behind outcomes choices. The key is to focus on manufacturing and education, not consumerism. So for example, building and repairing real infrastructure, not participating in 'community awareness' campaigns to brainwash the sheep into accepting rainbow-colored sidewalks. In short: we want Real results, not Fake ones, and outputs might be more suitable, because at least they measure stuff.

But if one changes the parameters: The outcome being increasing manufacturing capacity (and one CAN measure that), then he is giving a direction for councils to focus on. So I am watching this with great interest.