Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama held a meeting of the Ministerial Committee on the Formulation of the Budget of Fiscal 2010 at the Prime Minister's Office. Mr. Naoto Kan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for National Strategy; Mr. Hirofumi Hirano, Chief Cabinet Secretary; and Mr. Hirohisa Fujii, Minister of Finance, among others, also attended the meeting.

At the meeting, ministers approved the Policies for the Formulation of the Budget of Fiscal 2010. Accordingly, it was decided that the budget be formulated by the end of this year based on the following four policies: (i) to abolish the Guidelines for FY2010 Budget Requests; (ii) to make requests that take into account the Manifesto including the Agreement for a Three-Party Coalition Government (hereinafter referred to as the Manifesto) by October 15; (iii) to reformulate all the budgets and create new fiscal resources in order to implement new measures in accordance with the Manifesto, and to secure the confidence of the government bond market by maintaining fiscal discipline; and (iv) to have ministers strictly review the priority of projects underpinned by the existing budgets from a zero-based approach and proactively pursue a reduced budget when making requests, if possible. The ministers also agreed that they would implement major items in the schedule in the Manifesto by eliminating waste and unnecessary, non-urgent projects.

The Cabinet approved the Policies in its extraordinary meeting, which was held after the meeting.