Ahh - govt budgeting - I've been there. What is a bit funny is after fighting for $1,000 during the year, some budget manager calls in a panic near year end -

Ahh - govt budgeting - I've been there. What is a bit funny is after fighting for $1,000 during the year, some budget manager calls in a panic near year end - how fast can you spend $150K - on anything you want. Turns out - as Amazon has noticed with cheap stuff, whoever has stuff in stock and can ship quick gets the deal - price totally irrelevant. There was a while during the stimulus spending where politicians were I guess getting heat for not spending stimulus money fast enough, so the pressure to spend got pushed down big time. Every layer was trying to push spending out as fast as they could. For those not familiar with this area and wondering why a higher level agency would push spending rather than trying to save money? A lot of govt budgets between appropriation and final vendors are based on % of allocated spending. So a state agency will take 10%, a local agency will take 10%, and then it ends up in the hands of whoever does the work. Everyone above has built their budgets on all the money being spent. They've staffed for that. So if you show up and spend 50% of your allocation, now they only get 50% of their 10% and can be in a real jam, particularly if they have already spent their entire expected amount or committed to spend it (staff have been hired). It can be hard to re-budget amounts between vendors / recipients so the pressure on whoever didn't spend all their money can be intense, because it's messing up a whole chain of other budgets.