Every governmental department head – federal, state and local – knows the bureaucrat’s golden rule: “if you don’t spend it when they give it to you, they’ll cut it out of your budget forever.” As the end of a fiscal year approaches, there is usually a bureaucratic scramble to make sure every appropriated dollar is actually spent. Governmental power and promotions are not based on profitability like the private sector. With so much of government based on “readiness,” “training,” “developing advanced technology,” and “reserve power,” measuring bureaucratic success is often elusive. Lots of what the federal government does, particularly in the realm of military technology, cannot be effectively budgeted with any precision, because lots of experimentation and testing new limits defy precision… and new advancements are added all the time.
You cannot measure bureaucratic power by salary and bonus checks, although both are present within a civil service spectrum. These tend to be highly regulated pay-grades – like the federal grades GS 1 through 18 – with zero room for negotiation and no upside. And while government pay is generally pretty good by contemporary standards, with fringe benefits that often trump (I know) even the private sector for most employees, there is this notion that somehow “public service” is its own reward. But in a world where human beings actually want a system where individual success is recognized in some ostensible form, trappings of status are very much coveted. I am a government brat. I know.
Raw power, like the ability to arrest and prosecute, inspires many. The military has the most hierarchical structure of them all. But for bureaucrats in less muscular fields, power and status are measured by a combination of title and the number of subordinates under that bureaucrat’s authority. It is that latter part of the status symbol that has helped swell the ranks of bureaucracies everywhere, combined with a reality that once a job is created, the employee charged with the relevant job description takes on his/her first priority: making sure that job is not abolished. It is a conspiracy that is aided up the food chain by senior bureaucrats who want boasting power of how many people report to them. Despite pledges to the contrary, very few bureaucrats are motivated or rewarded to reduce the number of people who work for them.
In Trumpland, where the President dislikes the scope of a federal agency, he uses a meat-axe approach that combines a department head instructed to unravel that agency with drastic overall budget cuts (such as defunding the Department of State by over a third or putting the Consumer Protection Agency on fading life support). But when Mr. Trump favors an agency, he falls completely into that trap of same-old/same-old… where money is like water poured into a seemingly bottomless pit… which is also leaking away.
And so it is with Mr Trump’s and his party’s massive new defense-spending appropriations. Although we have entered a new era where a ground-up redesign of weapons, strategies and deployment of manpower is fundamentally necessary, the shiny future systems are still in design phase so additional military appropriations have to be spent mostly on… er… well… stuff and programs that already exist, which can include necessary maintenance and upgrades in addition to more personnel and materiel, but cannot yet be spent on what we might really need… yet.
“After complaining for years that it was starved for cash, the Pentagon now says it may have more money than it can possibly spend… The windfall is the result of a budget deal between Congress and the White House last month that promises an added $80 billion for defense this fiscal year, including a requested $19.6-billion hike for ‘operations and maintenance’ — an all-purpose Pentagon account to fund troop training, ammunition, maintenance of tanks, warplanes and ships, and other daily needs.
“Defense Secretary James N. Mattis pushed for a sharp increase in the account this year, arguing that years of budget wrangling had degraded the military’s readiness to wage war… Congress is still finalizing 2018 appropriations levels for the Pentagon, a delay that has generals and admirals worried about spending all the promised cash in the five months remaining before the end of the fiscal year.
“‘We have a year’s worth of money … and five months to spend it,’ Gen. Glenn Walters, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, said at a Senate Armed Services Committee budget hearing… Critics say that giving the military more money than it can absorb invites waste and abuse, noting that the Pentagon has a long history of overpayments, cost overruns and fiscal shenanigans.
“‘They cried wolf, and now they have more than they can possibly put to use,’ said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information, a policy organization critical of Pentagon budget practices. ‘I think it’s dangerous because you are going to see a use-it-or-lose-it kind of spending.’
“Pentagon officials are worried about giving money back after claiming that mandatory spending caps since 2011, known as a sequester, had affected training, planning and maintenance. There is no guarantee Congress or the White House will prove so generous next year.
“Because of Congress’ delay in passing appropriations bills, Pentagon officials are urging lawmakers to allow them to carry over unspent funds into 2019 or shift them to other accounts if they are unable to disburse all the operations and maintenance money by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
“‘We’re going to do our best to spend it in that time frame,’ Gen. Stephen Wilson, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, told Congress at a hearing. ‘The add is so significant that we’re going to have to look at having the ability to transfer some of that money from account to account.’
“By long-standing tradition, the House and Senate appropriations committees require the Pentagon to spend operations and maintenance funds the same year they are provided — or give the money back to the Treasury.” Los Angeles Times, March 4th.
For those who remember that old “guns or butter” paradigm in Econ 101, where you can spend on the military cause and wage war but something has got to give in the meantime, here we go again. After Bill Clinton generated a federal surplus, George W Bush waged a “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq without raising the taxes to pay for it. Result: a massive increase to the federal deficit. The Donald orchestrated a massive unneeded stimulus to an overheating economy with a huge cut in corporate taxes while increasing military expenditures. Result a massive increase to the federal deficit. Sigh. We know who will pay the carried interest and charged with repayment.
All of the above is an example of the “swamp-draining” and “cut Washington back” motivations that got Donald Trump elected in the first place. It does seem, however, that all Donald Trump really wants is his own swamp to play with… one that does not actually have a drain function. Reality has join Elvis and left the building.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it does seem that those who are elected to government for their limited terms in office generally cannot look past the next election to set policies that are good for us all in the long-term.
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