SUMMARY
With the existent mismatch among the period of budget elaboration, its execution, and the need for adjustments in the finance programming, there may be situations which were not foreseen during the elaboration of the budget proposal, although they must be absorbed by it. Such situations are solved, according to the Brazilian laws, through additional credits; among them, the use of the extraordinary credit has been growing up. This study aims to identify and analyze the reasons and the main factors that lead the Federal Government to systematically use the extraordinary credit, as well as to survey the existent understanding about the meaning of the constitutional assumptions of unpredictability and urgency, besides assessing the adherence of the extraordinary credits to such assumptions. The following research strategies were used: bibliographic, document, and field researches consisting of application of non-structured interviews to experts on the budget area. The analyses carried out suggest that the extraordinary credits opened during the last 16 years did not obey to the constitutional assumptions and that there is an evident degradation of the budget process due to the generalized use of this type of credit.