Yes, budgets are inherently political. I'll give you the example of the gender budget in Australia. It started out in the early 1980s with the Labour government. It was enacted at that time and was the product of the hard work of Yuri Grbich and a group of tax policy experts there who were committed to bringing gender budgeting out into the open.
Gender budgeting was carried on in Australia for quite a long period of time. If you look at the 2007 Australian gender budget, with respect, it reads like a campaign speech. It contains no analytic material; it contains statements about what we are doing for women, and political slogans find their way in there. There is no data. It is not an evidence-based account. It is a document that any fiscal expert would think was perhaps written for Political Science 101.