There is a term being heard all across the Federal Government these days, and it happens every year at this time.
"Spend it of you won't get it next year". The Feds say it with pride.
This is the term I heard at the NSF and the NIH over and over, year after year.
The end of summer sees a spending spree across the HHS, EPA, pick one. They run around and buy anything they can think of, just so they spent all of their budget. Thus ensuring they will get the same level of funding, or more, the following year.
The waste I saw made me sick. Giant printers that sat dormant in a corner, hundreds of large flat screen monitors (that replaced fairly new CRT monitors), wallpaper (this seems to be replaced every 3 or 4 years), projectors for conference rooms, big screen TVs and software that no one will ever use (like Acrobat Pro for a bunch of people who never create PDF files!).
I was fired for complaining about the last one, ok "technically" I was laid off. I asked the question: "Why not give it back"? I was told it was "very complicated". So complicated that you hear "Spend it of you won't get it next year" all over the place. Right...
