Reply #11: I think we all know exactly how this happened [View All]

[jmowreader]

Thanks to our government's wonderful fiscal policies, you have to spend every nickel of your budget allocation before the end of the year or two things happen: they take back what you didn't spend, and they cut next year's budget by that amount.

This leads to an environment where throwing away money is almost encouraged. Let's make a simple example: The budget for your agency, which has 2500 offices nationwide, includes $5 million to buy printer paper at $40 per case. (That's two reams a day for each office. If you do a lot of printing, you'll use that.) In this day and age, they don't do centralized purchasing for shit like printer paper; they give each office $2000 and tell them to buy fifty boxes of paper. That's all well and good, but if Office Depot decides to put paper on sale for $30 per case, your agency suddenly has to figure out a way to get rid of $1.25 million before the end of the year. You can't use it to buy new computers or something else you need because those are capital purchases and have to be approved. They can't buy more paper because (1) they have nowhere to put it and (2) they'd get investigated for doing that. It's simply easier to buy weasel shit coffee for the annual conference, or something.

Far better is the way the National Reconnaissance Office got its $224 million headquarters. NRO deals in satellite intelligence, and that's expensive. They have a secret budget. They also had a fantastic negotiator in charge of buying equipment. He did so well he saved the government $250 million over ten years. You can't give money back, so they buried it in the back yard until they had enough for a new building, which no one knew about until some high-level bureaucrat was driving down the road, saw the new place being built and wondered what it was. The shit hit the fan but I thought it was great that they were such good stewards of the public purse.