Scholars have long suspected the blanket description of bureaucrats as "budget maximizers" is simplistic and inaccurate. This article provides empirical grounds for questioning that description and enhances our understanding of bureaucratic fiscal preferences. Bureaucratic preferences for expansion are distributed along a continuum. A typology of agency heads' expansion preferences is developed and related to Downs's typology of bureaucrats. Data from eight surveys of state agency heads (1964-98) enable us to trace administrators' preferences for expansion over four decades. These preferences vary substantially in any single survey year and reflect trends across these years. Notably, a substantial proportion of agency heads opted for no expansion in their own agency's programs and expenditures or in the state's overall budget. This typology challenges conventional conceptions of bureaucrats' maximizing preferences, advances alternative interpretations about budget minimizing, and fills an important gap in budget and bureaucracy theory.In few arenas of public administration are the conflicts, contentions, and competition more intense, subtle, and complex than in the arena of budgeting. Kettl (2003, 171) asserts that "budgeting is the nerve center of the political universe-and it can often seem that this center is in chaos." For the better part of the last four decades, budgets, budgeting, and budget theory have been pivot points in this chaos, around which reform, responsibility, accountability, performance, evaluations, and control have revolved.In this article, we describe the variety, variations, and distributions of budgetary preferences. We contend that a better understanding of budgeting behavior is possible if we can better grasp the preferences (goals) that promote actions. Budgetary preferences are relevant and significant variables in the budget process. By describing the diverse Cynthia J. Bowling is an assistant professor of political science at Auburn University. Her research focuses on public administrators, bureaucracy, and policy within the broader state and local government context. She is currently involved in research to identify and explain patterns of female representation in state agency head positions over the last four decades.