Or at least ONE of the problems with government is that it is always seeking to expand itself.
Take budgets for example: If you use all of your previous years funds (aka: Your Monetary Quota), even if it is a last day of the fiscal calendar purchase of a pallet of ball point pens, then you are seen as “successful” and are granted a slightly larger amount of money to spend the next year.
But if you go over budget, you are seen as “not as successful” and are punished by having a great quantity of funding shoved your way to make sure that it doesn’t happen the following year.
If you want your department and management to be graded as “Poor”, do what Darpa did: Hold your contractors accountable for their work and save the taxpayer $130 Million.
Congress just cut $130 million from Darpa’s budget for next year, citing “poor execution” of previous funded projects. Some in charge of the purse strings say the Pentagon’s premiere research agency wasn’t spending the cash it was given.
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Earlier in the week, House and Senate negotiators agreed to a defense budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on October 1st. As usual, they agreed to the vast majority of spending proposed by the Defense Department. And the programs they tweaked, cut or increase funding for were altered without much comment. For the most part.
But in the case of Darpa — the Defense Department’s cutting-edge science and technology division — Congress proclaimed “poor execution” a half-dozen times, as it trimmed more than $130 million from Darpa’s approximately $3 billion budget.
The Democrat run Congress will point to this and say they’ve cut the Defense Budget.
McCain needs to point out why Darpa didn’t meet their budget “quota”.
Around here in .gov land there is the time honored tradition known as the end of the fiscal year shuffle. That’s where all the department/division heads and FMO(financial management offices)that have been squeezing everybody’s dollars and redlining requests for supplies from their employees(to make themselves look good by not going over budget) start calling everybody and asking them to spend their remaining budgeted dollars.
I know one year our office suddenly had $133,000 that had to be spent in three weeks. $80,000 was supposed to have been spent during the year buying replacement furniture for several apartments assigned to the employees. (This is overseas and normal for State.)