This is so accurate. I have been a gov employee for 15 years and the “use it or lose it” always fills the supply areas with the dumbest shit possible

As someone who has worked in the public sector for nearly two decades, this is spot on. The real fix would be to modify government accounting laws so that appropriated funding doesn’t just expire at the end of any given fiscal year, or at a bare minimum make fiscal years longer than 12 months and have them overlap each other to some extent.

I think it’s easy to misunderstand the difference between appropriated money (money someone is allowed to spend) and spent money (money that’s used, adds to the debt, etc). If you do something like allow a large portion of unspent allocation to roll over to future years (like… 95%) then some departments/agencies/etc will save up huge stockpiles of allocation - like places that will need to replace a satellite or renovate a large office building, or buy a new piece of land, or… Etc. This doesn’t add anything to the national debt, but makes for a scary headline - which is practically the worst thing for Congress.

The likely outcome would be lower spending, but there’s the faintest possibility that every civil servant in the whole government simultaneously decides that this is the year to renovate their office building, buy new computers, upgrade the coffee machine, and stock up on printer ink… And that would be very expensive, that year.

You’re right, I didn’t consider that viewpoint. However, I think this problem might not always be the case, especially in a nation with few problems related to corruption or general lack of checks and balances. If you have functioning oversight and annual presentation of projected expenditures, frivolous spending shouldn’t be a major issue.