Regular reference to the topic of efficiency of public spending is due to both a short financial cycle - the surge occurs at the beginning of the year, and a longer one - the beginning of the electoral period. A characteristic feature of publications in this direction is criticism of existing methods for evaluating the effectiveness of public spending, whereas it has not been possible to significantly change the situation over the past more than thirty years of the modern structure of the budget system, and the problem, according to the authors, is not legal, but mainly theoretical and methodological reasons. The article reveals the authors' opinion on the importance of developing methodological approaches and developing new criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of budget expenditures. As a justification for this position, the dynamics and forecast of the main macroeconomic parameters of the Russian economy in relation to the state of the state budget are presented, which illustrates the vulnerability of the latter to external market challenges. Actually, the authors have shown that methods focused solely on the budget process do not solve problems associated with both filling and using budget resources. It is important to understand that the federal structure of the state involves complex mechanisms for the redistribution of funds between budgets of different levels within the framework of inter-budgetary federalism. As a research result and contribution to the development of methodological approaches to assessing the effectiveness of budget expenditures, the authors proposed original principles and a logical scheme for this assessment.