5 ms·

Go spend a few years in the military in any country, I promise this won't be that surprising of a "tax dollars at work" story. In the US military, if you want

Go spend a few years in the military in any country, I promise this won't be that surprising of a "tax dollars at work" story. In the US military, if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget. If you spend less than your budget, your budget will shrink because you don't need it. So, you have some very strong incentives to spend as much money as you possibly can without going over your budget, otherwise the next year you might actually need that money but not have the budget for it. I'll let you use your imagination on what kinds of things were purchased (because they probably were if they were available to be purchased and the unit was under budget that year).

mstade 3y ago
Many corporations work like this also. First time I experienced this was some 15 years ago or so when a client (a brand owned by Kraft Foods) reached out and said they had x amount of money and needed a project to spend it on, lest they'd lose that money in next year's budget. So we got to work for 2-3 months on a project that was never planned. Can't recall what happened to it, but it was rather fun. I've only experienced it once or twice since, but hear about it happening all the time right around this time of year.
- jsmith99 3y ago
  Fortunately Kraft were later bought by 3G, a fund notorious for zero based budgeting, meaning instead of rolling forward budgets you start from zero every year and have to defend every item.
  - stavros 3y ago
    That kind of sounds bad as well.
- julian_t 3y ago
  When I was doing freelance training a company asked me how much it would be for a week's C++ course for X people, and when I told them they said that wasn't high enough. Yep, budget spend time. So I asked them, theoretically of course, how much they were expecting to pay (and then said that I was prepared to accept that figure, but only this once ;-)
- blowski 3y ago
  My first computer was in the 1980s, bought for my Dad by Shell so he could work from home, despite not having any work that could be done remotely. His manager had a huge stationery budget.
- croisillon 3y ago
  having worked in various coporations i have seen these requests indeed: "where can we burn budget otherwise we get less next year" but i have never seen budget cuts on this basis actually happening and i wonder how much of it is an urban legend that gets passed and ends up fueling inflation
  - dmd 3y ago
    Oh, it definitely is real. The first year I was at my current job I didn't use my entire budget. I won't make that mistake again.
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      Yes I did the same and also will never do that again. ‘Look boss I saved x from budget z but we achieved target y anyway! ‘Yeah but I gave you Z for a reason, if you’d have added extra resource you may have achieved y+1’ Only empire building is rewarded. Growth is everything. Savings are overrated and for household budgets not corps or governments.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    I guess it never happens because the incentives are so strong not to let it happen. I had a boss who told me he would be in humongous trouble with his boards if he didn’t spend it all.
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago
  I have heard this many times about many places. It seems so perverse to a layman, so why is it apparently so widespread? Are there contexts in which it's the best system (ie. better than any reasonable alternative)?
  - Jensson 3y ago
    You are a manager over two departments. A has 1 million left, B has 1 million deficit. What do you do? Easy answer: Move 1 million of A's budget to B! It isn't more complicated than that, it is very hard to motivate not reducing A's budget in that case. It does create perverse incentives, but at the same time what are you supposed to do as a manager in that situation?
    - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
      Well, to meet an in-year shortfall it makes sense to move the money around. But the implication seems to be that underspending departments are "punished" with a smaller budget in subsequent years. I would naively hope a good manager would ask for a justification of the spending of both departments, and allocate the forward budget according to reasonably-evidenced projections of value for money based on the organisation's priorities or goals. Perhaps the answer is that that is just too hard, or even more prone to being gamed.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  >>Many corporations work like this also. One of those things that are widely true, but rarely admitted to. It seems to be very much a maturity thing. The older,larger and more governed an org is, the more likely such a pattern is. Habits become precedents. Precedents become rules. A pattern emerges is everyone operates within rules. Staying within the ruleset, represents known safety. Even if something is dubious.. as long as it's within the rule set you are safe. Is shaky principle tentatively applied once.. it doesn't have that kind of safety. That means it's less likely to be stretched and made absurd. There is a logic to trimming unused budgets. not perfect, but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked well enough, often enough. If a department keeps going over budget, well.. they need more budget.. or maybe less work. Where is that budget going to come from? Departments without enough budget. It's hard to get more legible, than last year's expenditure as the starting point for the next years budget. Nothing very notable about birthing this "principle." I'm sure it makes sense, often. At least in the sense that it's the easiest, good enough method. If there's a new management, using old methods is helpful. They don't know enough.. and this just gets the job done. If budgets become contentious, sticking to "principles" helps smooth things. That is the point though.. whether it's a big-hype management method like agile.. or some unofficial budgetary principle that happened to work before these are principles. We like to be principled, especially when we don't really know what to do. There's a literary trope of a bone casting seer. It takes a wise person to cast bones. It's an art and science. Sure, you have to know what all the bones mean. But, you also have to figure out it's a good idea to fight to fight this particular battle, build a town in that particular place... And also to understand the role bone casting plays in this particular case. Bones must be cast, because we like external validation. It helps to bring everyone together, and calms underconfident, overwhelmed, or underunited leadership. Knowing when to cast them, why, all the different implications.. how to define the question, how to approach the answer.. those are jobs for the seer, not the bones themselves. Things are better when soldiers watch the stones, and chieftains watch the seer. If and when that flips, the paradigm is not at its best.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>In the US military, if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget. This applies to any part of the US government, not just the military.
- midasuni 3y ago
  This applies to any large organisation, not just government. https://teambuilding.com/blog/end-of-year-budget https://teambuilding.com/blog/end-of-year-budget However that doesn’t fit into the “government=bad” narrative the US likes.
  - agbrrw 3y ago
    The difference is that when this happens to a private organisation, it's not the taxpayer footing the bill.
    - djur 3y ago
      Why does that matter? The process of budgeting is the same in public and private organizations, including the unpredictable elements that result in overestimation and padding. The source of funding doesn't affect that. Federal government expenditures are only indirectly related to tax revenues in any case.
      - agbrrw 3y ago
        It matters because if it happens to a private organisation that does not affect the average Joe. It's when it happens to governmental organisations that it matters because it means increased taxes and/or decreased useful public services.
        pm215 3y ago
        It does affect the average Joe, because Joe is buying the products or services the private organisation creates. If Walmart, to pick a random example, has this phenomenon and spends extra money wastefully at the end of their financial cycle, that would mean that every product Walmart sells has to cost a bit more to pay for that, and Joe's monthly grocery bill goes up.
halgir 3y ago
Next year I'll be six. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/dWfrMMNeK2k https://youtu.be/dWfrMMNeK2k
- mcny 3y ago
  For us readers https://vimeo.com/27060669 https://vimeo.com/27060669
mcmoor 3y ago
I found this budget model so often I'm curious about the justification. And since it's used by everyone it has to be justified right??
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The justification is spending money more efficiently, which becomes even more important if you're a government entity and thus "your" money is actually other people's money gathered by taxation. Put more bluntly, you cannot convince your bean counters to give you money you didn't spend, because if you didn't spend the money you didn't need it regardless your arguments for wanting/needing a seemingly extraneous budget. Of course, this leads to the incentive of spending your entire budget no matter heaven or hell so you maintain your budget next year which can lead to actually wasting money rather than saving it.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  There is no justification except fear of not having enough money. The issue is whether you can meet your peak budget. If you can get by with $x * 0.80 most of the time, but every once in a while you really, really need the full $x then you spend $x/year. Because, if you don't, that extra $x * 0.20 will be cut (possibly even more). This leads to an increasingly tight budget (or it's feared at least) so it's "better" to be wasteful.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    It's also useful to request a budget 25% -more- than you need, so some manager can "slash your budget" and feel like he won. And also ask for stuff you don't need, which you can "give up" during the budget allocation process. Corporate Budgeting is a game. If you need to play, best you first learn the rules.
  - account42 3y ago
    The filing out your buget so it doesn't get cut part is understandable. What makes less sense is cutting the max budget based on use wihout leaving any overhead to account for unexpected expenses. Why does that seem so common when it makes the incentives so obviously misaligned?
m463 3y ago
"Waste not, get your budget cut."
cm2187 3y ago
Heard the same in France, with the army making some trucks drive around in circle to use some gas to make sure their gas budget doesn't get cut.
- Foobar8568 3y ago
  Switzerland army is famous for that, conscript army with yearly class for like 10years.
  - 4ggr0 3y ago
    Yeah, I can confirm this. The people I know who are in the army told me that they just use all of their ammo and petrol at the end, to ensure that they get the same amounts and budget next time. Pretty idiotic, but it's the army after all.
bambax 3y ago
There was this legend in the French army that starting mid-November they would have lines and lines of trucks running around every base to burn the petrol before the next year. Not sure if it was true but it could be.
- stdbrouw 3y ago
  Just a priori this does not seem very likely to me. If you have budget that needs spending, it is key to spend it inconspicuously because as soon as a higher-up finds out that you are just wasting it to maintain your yearly allocation, they will still conclude that you need less next year (and that perhaps you ought to be fired.)
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    You can order a training exercise that burns up a massive amount of fuel. You just have to make it seem plausible enough to only be considered incompetent, not malicious.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      "driver training" -- "Yeah, I know it looks like they are just driving in circles, we almost had an accident from someone driving in a circle so we are practicing." Sounds about right.
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    Same things happened at a university i worked at. Year-end spend!
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Another explanation besides budget would be that fuel has an expiration date; regular petrol 3-6 months, diesel up to a year, after which it becomes gummy. It can be extended a bit with a stabilizer though. But yeah, I can imagine militaries have a huge challenge stockpiling fuel without it expiring.
have_faith 3y ago
I've seen this happen when working in digital agencies towards the end of the tax year. Clients would reach out with budgets for projects purely because they wanted to spend the money on something so they could justify the budget for next year.
praptak 3y ago
I shared an office with a workforce training company. They said their big time is the end of the year as that's when departments in big companies realize in horror that they have unspent budget. Some of the more expensive and useless courses practically didn't sell at any other time of the year.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
Is it in any way possible then and to what extent is it feasible to legislate that you must spend LESS than your budget or they'll make you cry even harder by taking away MORE money ;) Maybe make you hit yourself whilst at it
sokoloff 3y ago
One of my most frustrating wasteful experiences was being “under” on the amount of M16 blanks we’d fired in training exercises. So, we loaded up magazine after magazine and fired them off, often on full auto (though the blanks would sometimes misfire on full auto). The frustrating part wasn’t pointlessly dusting off training ammo; it was cleaning the weapon afterwards. The blank fire adapter that was needed to create the back pressure to cycle the weapon meant that none of the gunpowder residue left the barrel behind a round (as there wasn’t one), so all that residue was waiting for us at the barracks.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  Just out of curiosity, would it not have worked to throw them in an incinerator or bonfire or something?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I don’t recall if we had to turn in the spent brass or just attest that it was fired during training. (I was an 18-year-old officer candidate being told to fire them off, not in charge.)
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    Hearsay, but I think the done thing is to bury rounds somewhere still in their cans. I occasionally see people complaining about it online when one government department or another buys up a couple dozen million rounds.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    We would just ask the supply sergeant to "lose" them for someone else to "find" later (ammo would be the exception, for obvious reasons). I always loved taking over another unit in a war zone. We'd open containers and "find" all kinds of neat things no longer on the books: routers, switches, km's of networking cable, office supplies, etc.
triceratops 3y ago
> if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget I don't understand why organizations haven't cottoned on to a rollover model instead. If you have unspent budget, you not only get the same budget the following year but also 10% of the surplus, subject to approval. And in subsequent years, increase the proportion of surplus you can tap. After all, you've clearly shown you can be trusted to spend company money honestly.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kensey 3y ago
This is a big reason I became disillusioned very quickly with US federal contracting and have distanced myself firmly from anything to do with it for the past several years. To a contractor the idea of saving the taxpayer money by accomplishing the contract goals early and/or under-budget is ludicrous — I was told in so many words by my management “the contract allows for up to X option years for a total of up to Y dollars, and we intend to get as many of those years and dollars as we can up to the full value, not leave them lying on the table. And our customer wants the same thing, because they need to fully spend their allocated budget.” Basically large parts of US federal contracting run indistinguishably from a make-work program for contract firms and the COTRs and other contract-management staff working with them. It’s a major reason I’m certain that “modern IT” efforts like 18F or USDS or “groundbreaking” reforms like FITARA will never be allowed to amount to much (absent a Truman-style “integrate the military and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about it” mandate) — there’s too much money and too many staff wrapped up in the way things currently work, which is how they’ve worked longer than most of the people now in the system have been alive. None of the modernization or reforms will ever be completely terminated or repealed, because they’re too useful to point to as evidence that “see, we are aware of the problem and we are doing something about it”. Just as long as “something” never has any significant long-term impact on anybody’s budget, allocated FTEs, or revenue.

mstade 3y ago

Many corporations work like this also. First time I experienced this was some 15 years ago or so when a client (a brand owned by Kraft Foods) reached out and said they had x amount of money and needed a project to spend it on, lest they'd lose that money in next year's budget. So we got to work for 2-3 months on a project that was never planned. Can't recall what happened to it, but it was rather fun. I've only experienced it once or twice since, but hear about it happening all the time right around this time of year.

jsmith99 3y ago
Fortunately Kraft were later bought by 3G, a fund notorious for zero based budgeting, meaning instead of rolling forward budgets you start from zero every year and have to defend every item.
- stavros 3y ago
  That kind of sounds bad as well.
julian_t 3y ago
When I was doing freelance training a company asked me how much it would be for a week's C++ course for X people, and when I told them they said that wasn't high enough. Yep, budget spend time. So I asked them, theoretically of course, how much they were expecting to pay (and then said that I was prepared to accept that figure, but only this once ;-)
blowski 3y ago
My first computer was in the 1980s, bought for my Dad by Shell so he could work from home, despite not having any work that could be done remotely. His manager had a huge stationery budget.
croisillon 3y ago
having worked in various coporations i have seen these requests indeed: "where can we burn budget otherwise we get less next year" but i have never seen budget cuts on this basis actually happening and i wonder how much of it is an urban legend that gets passed and ends up fueling inflation
- dmd 3y ago
  Oh, it definitely is real. The first year I was at my current job I didn't use my entire budget. I won't make that mistake again.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Yes I did the same and also will never do that again. ‘Look boss I saved x from budget z but we achieved target y anyway! ‘Yeah but I gave you Z for a reason, if you’d have added extra resource you may have achieved y+1’ Only empire building is rewarded. Growth is everything. Savings are overrated and for household budgets not corps or governments.
- lukas099 3y ago
  I guess it never happens because the incentives are so strong not to let it happen. I had a boss who told me he would be in humongous trouble with his boards if he didn’t spend it all.
anonymous_sorry 3y ago
I have heard this many times about many places. It seems so perverse to a layman, so why is it apparently so widespread? Are there contexts in which it's the best system (ie. better than any reasonable alternative)?
- Jensson 3y ago
  You are a manager over two departments. A has 1 million left, B has 1 million deficit. What do you do? Easy answer: Move 1 million of A's budget to B! It isn't more complicated than that, it is very hard to motivate not reducing A's budget in that case. It does create perverse incentives, but at the same time what are you supposed to do as a manager in that situation?
  - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
    Well, to meet an in-year shortfall it makes sense to move the money around. But the implication seems to be that underspending departments are "punished" with a smaller budget in subsequent years. I would naively hope a good manager would ask for a justification of the spending of both departments, and allocate the forward budget according to reasonably-evidenced projections of value for money based on the organisation's priorities or goals. Perhaps the answer is that that is just too hard, or even more prone to being gamed.
dalbasal 3y ago
>>Many corporations work like this also. One of those things that are widely true, but rarely admitted to. It seems to be very much a maturity thing. The older,larger and more governed an org is, the more likely such a pattern is. Habits become precedents. Precedents become rules. A pattern emerges is everyone operates within rules. Staying within the ruleset, represents known safety. Even if something is dubious.. as long as it's within the rule set you are safe. Is shaky principle tentatively applied once.. it doesn't have that kind of safety. That means it's less likely to be stretched and made absurd. There is a logic to trimming unused budgets. not perfect, but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked well enough, often enough. If a department keeps going over budget, well.. they need more budget.. or maybe less work. Where is that budget going to come from? Departments without enough budget. It's hard to get more legible, than last year's expenditure as the starting point for the next years budget. Nothing very notable about birthing this "principle." I'm sure it makes sense, often. At least in the sense that it's the easiest, good enough method. If there's a new management, using old methods is helpful. They don't know enough.. and this just gets the job done. If budgets become contentious, sticking to "principles" helps smooth things. That is the point though.. whether it's a big-hype management method like agile.. or some unofficial budgetary principle that happened to work before these are principles. We like to be principled, especially when we don't really know what to do. There's a literary trope of a bone casting seer. It takes a wise person to cast bones. It's an art and science. Sure, you have to know what all the bones mean. But, you also have to figure out it's a good idea to fight to fight this particular battle, build a town in that particular place... And also to understand the role bone casting plays in this particular case. Bones must be cast, because we like external validation. It helps to bring everyone together, and calms underconfident, overwhelmed, or underunited leadership. Knowing when to cast them, why, all the different implications.. how to define the question, how to approach the answer.. those are jobs for the seer, not the bones themselves. Things are better when soldiers watch the stones, and chieftains watch the seer. If and when that flips, the paradigm is not at its best.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>In the US military, if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget. This applies to any part of the US government, not just the military.

midasuni 3y ago
This applies to any large organisation, not just government. https://teambuilding.com/blog/end-of-year-budget https://teambuilding.com/blog/end-of-year-budget However that doesn’t fit into the “government=bad” narrative the US likes.
- agbrrw 3y ago
  The difference is that when this happens to a private organisation, it's not the taxpayer footing the bill.
  - djur 3y ago
    Why does that matter? The process of budgeting is the same in public and private organizations, including the unpredictable elements that result in overestimation and padding. The source of funding doesn't affect that. Federal government expenditures are only indirectly related to tax revenues in any case.
    - agbrrw 3y ago
      It matters because if it happens to a private organisation that does not affect the average Joe. It's when it happens to governmental organisations that it matters because it means increased taxes and/or decreased useful public services.
      - pm215 3y ago
        It does affect the average Joe, because Joe is buying the products or services the private organisation creates. If Walmart, to pick a random example, has this phenomenon and spends extra money wastefully at the end of their financial cycle, that would mean that every product Walmart sells has to cost a bit more to pay for that, and Joe's monthly grocery bill goes up.

halgir 3y ago

Next year I'll be six. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/dWfrMMNeK2k https://youtu.be/dWfrMMNeK2k

mcny 3y ago
For us readers https://vimeo.com/27060669 https://vimeo.com/27060669

mcmoor 3y ago

I found this budget model so often I'm curious about the justification. And since it's used by everyone it has to be justified right??

Dalewyn 3y ago
The justification is spending money more efficiently, which becomes even more important if you're a government entity and thus "your" money is actually other people's money gathered by taxation. Put more bluntly, you cannot convince your bean counters to give you money you didn't spend, because if you didn't spend the money you didn't need it regardless your arguments for wanting/needing a seemingly extraneous budget. Of course, this leads to the incentive of spending your entire budget no matter heaven or hell so you maintain your budget next year which can lead to actually wasting money rather than saving it.
Jtsummers 3y ago
There is no justification except fear of not having enough money. The issue is whether you can meet your peak budget. If you can get by with $x * 0.80 most of the time, but every once in a while you really, really need the full $x then you spend $x/year. Because, if you don't, that extra $x * 0.20 will be cut (possibly even more). This leads to an increasingly tight budget (or it's feared at least) so it's "better" to be wasteful.
- bruce511 3y ago
  It's also useful to request a budget 25% -more- than you need, so some manager can "slash your budget" and feel like he won. And also ask for stuff you don't need, which you can "give up" during the budget allocation process. Corporate Budgeting is a game. If you need to play, best you first learn the rules.
- account42 3y ago
  The filing out your buget so it doesn't get cut part is understandable. What makes less sense is cutting the max budget based on use wihout leaving any overhead to account for unexpected expenses. Why does that seem so common when it makes the incentives so obviously misaligned?

m463 3y ago

"Waste not, get your budget cut."

cm2187 3y ago

Heard the same in France, with the army making some trucks drive around in circle to use some gas to make sure their gas budget doesn't get cut.

Foobar8568 3y ago
Switzerland army is famous for that, conscript army with yearly class for like 10years.
- 4ggr0 3y ago
  Yeah, I can confirm this. The people I know who are in the army told me that they just use all of their ammo and petrol at the end, to ensure that they get the same amounts and budget next time. Pretty idiotic, but it's the army after all.

bambax 3y ago

There was this legend in the French army that starting mid-November they would have lines and lines of trucks running around every base to burn the petrol before the next year. Not sure if it was true but it could be.

stdbrouw 3y ago
Just a priori this does not seem very likely to me. If you have budget that needs spending, it is key to spend it inconspicuously because as soon as a higher-up finds out that you are just wasting it to maintain your yearly allocation, they will still conclude that you need less next year (and that perhaps you ought to be fired.)
- Aeolun 3y ago
  You can order a training exercise that burns up a massive amount of fuel. You just have to make it seem plausible enough to only be considered incompetent, not malicious.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    "driver training" -- "Yeah, I know it looks like they are just driving in circles, we almost had an accident from someone driving in a circle so we are practicing." Sounds about right.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  Same things happened at a university i worked at. Year-end spend!
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Another explanation besides budget would be that fuel has an expiration date; regular petrol 3-6 months, diesel up to a year, after which it becomes gummy. It can be extended a bit with a stabilizer though. But yeah, I can imagine militaries have a huge challenge stockpiling fuel without it expiring.

have_faith 3y ago

I've seen this happen when working in digital agencies towards the end of the tax year. Clients would reach out with budgets for projects purely because they wanted to spend the money on something so they could justify the budget for next year.

praptak 3y ago

I shared an office with a workforce training company. They said their big time is the end of the year as that's when departments in big companies realize in horror that they have unspent budget. Some of the more expensive and useless courses practically didn't sell at any other time of the year.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

Is it in any way possible then and to what extent is it feasible to legislate that you must spend LESS than your budget or they'll make you cry even harder by taking away MORE money ;) Maybe make you hit yourself whilst at it

sokoloff 3y ago

One of my most frustrating wasteful experiences was being “under” on the amount of M16 blanks we’d fired in training exercises. So, we loaded up magazine after magazine and fired them off, often on full auto (though the blanks would sometimes misfire on full auto). The frustrating part wasn’t pointlessly dusting off training ammo; it was cleaning the weapon afterwards. The blank fire adapter that was needed to create the back pressure to cycle the weapon meant that none of the gunpowder residue left the barrel behind a round (as there wasn’t one), so all that residue was waiting for us at the barracks.

fluoridation 3y ago
Just out of curiosity, would it not have worked to throw them in an incinerator or bonfire or something?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I don’t recall if we had to turn in the spent brass or just attest that it was fired during training. (I was an 18-year-old officer candidate being told to fire them off, not in charge.)
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  Hearsay, but I think the done thing is to bury rounds somewhere still in their cans. I occasionally see people complaining about it online when one government department or another buys up a couple dozen million rounds.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  We would just ask the supply sergeant to "lose" them for someone else to "find" later (ammo would be the exception, for obvious reasons). I always loved taking over another unit in a war zone. We'd open containers and "find" all kinds of neat things no longer on the books: routers, switches, km's of networking cable, office supplies, etc.

triceratops 3y ago

> if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget I don't understand why organizations haven't cottoned on to a rollover model instead. If you have unspent budget, you not only get the same budget the following year but also 10% of the surplus, subject to approval. And in subsequent years, increase the proportion of surplus you can tap. After all, you've clearly shown you can be trusted to spend company money honestly.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kensey 3y ago

This is a big reason I became disillusioned very quickly with US federal contracting and have distanced myself firmly from anything to do with it for the past several years. To a contractor the idea of saving the taxpayer money by accomplishing the contract goals early and/or under-budget is ludicrous — I was told in so many words by my management “the contract allows for up to X option years for a total of up to Y dollars, and we intend to get as many of those years and dollars as we can up to the full value, not leave them lying on the table. And our customer wants the same thing, because they need to fully spend their allocated budget.” Basically large parts of US federal contracting run indistinguishably from a make-work program for contract firms and the COTRs and other contract-management staff working with them. It’s a major reason I’m certain that “modern IT” efforts like 18F or USDS or “groundbreaking” reforms like FITARA will never be allowed to amount to much (absent a Truman-style “integrate the military and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about it” mandate) — there’s too much money and too many staff wrapped up in the way things currently work, which is how they’ve worked longer than most of the people now in the system have been alive. None of the modernization or reforms will ever be completely terminated or repealed, because they’re too useful to point to as evidence that “see, we are aware of the problem and we are doing something about it”. Just as long as “something” never has any significant long-term impact on anybody’s budget, allocated FTEs, or revenue.