However, the brief emergence of surpluses in the late 1990s eroded the will to adhere to these rules of restraint. The rules were aimed specifically at promoting deficit reduction rather than at the broader goal of setting out an agreed-upon standard for determining whether the nation was living within its fiscal means.
By the end of the decade, many of the rules that helped constrain budgetary decisionmaking earlier in the 1990s--in particular, the limits on discretionary spending and the PAYGO requirements--were being violated with increasing frequency; finally, in 2002, they were allowed to expire.