A week late and clouded by uncertainty in how funding for the rest of this fiscal year will shape out, thanks to Congress funding the government only through March 4, the executive branch will nonetheless release to Congress on Feb. 14 its proposed budget for fiscal 2012, which starts on Oct. 1. 

Transferring responsibility for the budget to Congress is the separation of powers between the branches of government in action, since only Congress is empowered by the Constitution to appropriate money for federal purposes.

"The president proposes, Congress disposes," is the pithy shorthand for this.

In anticipation of the official kickoff of budget season, we're offering a brief overview of the process with a special eye to how information technology gets funded.

Behind the official release of the budget request lies about nine months' worth of work as federal agencies put together their particular budget proposals, the Office of Management and Budget reviewed them, sent them back to agencies in something called a "passback," and the request assumed its final shape.

Ahead of the proposed budget lies a minimum of eight months of legislative process, as Congress attempts to pass a budget resolution, hold hearings, schedule committee votes (called "markups") and floor votes and undertake reconciliation negotiations between the House and the Senate when they disagree, as they always do over something.

Much of the important action takes place within the House and Senate Committee on Appropriations, which in both congressional chambers contain 12 subcommittees, each with jurisdiction over various parts of the government that sometimes cross departmental organizational lines. The Defense Department, for example, gets most its funding from Defense subcommittee, but some comes from the Energy & Water subcommittee and its construction budget comes from an entirely separate spending bill, which happens to also fund the Veterans Affairs Department. Subcommittee chairmen are referred to as "cardinals," and they are indeed amongst the most powerful of congressmen.

More often than not in the past couple decades, Congress has failed at some level--subcommittee, committee, the House, the Senate, or as an entire legislative branch--to approve the dozen spending bills it's supposed to send to the president for signature before the current fiscal year expires on Sept. 30.

Rather than let the federal government grind to a halt for lack of funds, Congress almost always approves a temporary spending bill called a "continuing resolution" that usually allows agencies to continue spending at last year's levels until the legislative branch gets its act together. Sometimes it puts together an "omnibus" spending bill that makes appropriations for the entire federal government rather than bothering with the ordinary course of a dozen individual spending bills each targeting a particular set of agencies. Sometimes it will simply keep the government on a continuing resolution for the rest of the fiscal year, something that federal agencies loath. (Congress this year hasn't managed to even do that, passing a series of short-term continuing resolutions until when a little bit before breaking for Christmas, it passed a resolution keeping agencies' lights on until March 4.)

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