Roy T. Meyers

While I have retired from teaching, I am still researching and writing on budget topics.  

To access my publications, presentations, and commentary, click here.

My full CV is available upon request.

I can be contacted at meyers@umbc.edu.

Career background:

I taught political science and public policy courses at UMBC from fall 1990 through fall 2022.  From 1981-1990, I was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).  I took graduate courses in political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1976-1980, and finished my Michigan PhD in 1988 while at CBO.  My dissertation won the 1989 L.D. White Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association.  I graduated in 1976 with a degree in government from Colby College, which is located in Waterville, Maine.  I was born and raised in New Jersey.

Courses taught at UMBC included graduate and undergraduate courses on government budgeting, a graduate course on the political and social context of the policy process, and undergraduate courses on Congress, political activism and leadership, community research, the politics of environmental policy, senior research seminars on environmental and public health policies, and introductory courses on American politics and on public administration.  I chaired and served on Public Policy dissertation committees.   I was the founding director of UMBC's Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program, which I led from 1999-2010 and for which I taught the introductory seminar.  I served as the Truman Foundation's faculty representative for UMBC, and assisted members of the Governor's Summer Internship Program prepare policy papers for the Governor and his staff for many years through 2015. 

While I am interested in a broad range of policy and political topics, my research has focused on government budgeting in the United States.  The Handbook of Government Budgeting was published by Jossey-Bass in 1999; a Chinese language version was published in 2005 by the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.  My book Strategic Budgeting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) co-won the Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration in 1996.  I have written journal articles, book chapters, and reports on normative budgeting models and on a variety of features of the Congressional budget process, federal government budgeting, state government budgeting, and local economic development policies. 

In 2018 the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management gave me the Aaron Wildavsky Award, for lifetime achievement in budgeting and financial management.  I am a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.  I served on the editorial boards of the journals Public Administration Review and Public Budgeting and Finance.  I presented papers abroad in China, Mexico, and Italy.  Consulting and lecturing activities included Congressional Quarterly/Capitol.Net seminars, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harvard University's and then Duke University's Program on Budgeting in the Public Sector, the World Bank, and the USDA Graduate School.  I served on the Baltimore County Council Spending Affordability Committee, and chaired the UMBC faculty's Academic Planning and Budgeting Committee.