Tag Archives: budget

Down to the wire…

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Today being the single most non-productive work day in my professional life, I had time to ponder the ineptitude with witch our elected officials are managing the country’s business. As we march on towards midnight on the east coast, a few words come to mind. Among them are pathetic, inexcusable, farcical, shameful, and just plain disgusting. Watching these “representatives” of the people allow the government to slip minute by minute towards shutdown, insolvency, and deadlock should be disheartening to anyone who goes to work every day and is actually expected to get their job done.

A friend posted something on my Facebook wall this morning, that I think sums it up better than I can at the moment: “Other countries may have coups, revolutions, and collapses, but a government so deadlocked it simply ceases to function seems to be an exclusively American phenomenon.” The quote is attributed to Foreign Policy, and it should be plastered on all of our minds the next time we head to the polls. That the government of our republic can be thrown into this kind of turmoil by congressional inability to accomplish one of the few tasks specifically assigned to it by the Constitution would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

I’m embarrassed for them… and for us.

Essential…

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In light of what seems to be an impending shutdown of the United States Government (yeah, Congress, I’m looking at you), there has been much discussion about what makes one an “essential” part of the workforce. Air traffic controllers? Yeah, makes sense. Nuclear submariner? Yep, you make the cut. But where the line of essential stops, there is a vast gray area of things that seem important, but no one can say for certain that they are technically speaking, essential to public safety.

That being said, there’s something profoundly disheartening about getting the official email that not only are you nonessential, but so is your entire office and everyone else in your building for that matter. In fact, you’re so nonessential that when the funds run out, you’re going to turn the lights out, lock the doors, and just walk away. It does give someone given to a somewhat cynical outlook reason to ponder what that could really mean in the teeth of exploding deficits and a Tea Party that seems to want a federal government that operates under the Article of Confederation.

It’s fair to say that my PowerPoints aren’t going to put an end to the war(s) or inspire an economic rally, but I have a secret, unredeemed belief that with the right (or any actual) leadership, both here locally and at the highest levels things do not have to be as they now are. If not essential, we can certainly be productive… but only when we have leaders worthy of good and faithful followers.

It’s still friggin’ freezing in here…

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The thirty-day hiring freeze and 30-day extension are now something on the order of 65 days old. Now of course there’s some logic to waiting to see if the jackrabbits in Congress can actually manage to pass a budget before sending us all home on Friday, but maybe a word of “hey, standby. We’ll let you know after Friday” would be better than the overpowering silence coming from the civilian personnel office. It’s the 10-ton elephant in the room that they refuse to address other than referring back to a memo put out over two months ago.

If you’re going to extend it, just announce that already so we can get busy retooling our resumes for jobs outside DOD. If it’s going to be dropped, how about a scientific guesstimate of when they machinery of civilian hiring might start moving again. Even with the cynicism that I usually bring to the table when discussing issues of competent leadership at pay grades above reality, I can’t believe that the decision hasn’t already been made somewhere about whether it’s time to fish or cut bait. Of course I could be completely wrong about that and the denizens of that five-sided concrete cobweb could be even more jacked up than I thought possible.

The total tonnage of backlog that’s going to exist after continuing to make announcements and conduct interviews, but not make selections is certainly going to be enough to stun a mule team in its tracks… Especially considering that mules are a damned sight easier to work with than the personnel office. Let it run another month or two and I’ll be dropping retirement papers before they manage to get it cleared up. Pay freeze, hiring freeze, and no budget in sight… It’s getting very hard to love working for Uncle.

I’ll take “Conversations I never thought I’d be a part of for $1000, Alex”…

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As they get older, some people develop this Normal Rockwell idealized version of childhood where they think of themselves as “growing up poor” and spinning endless yarns about how tough they had it. I’m not one of those people. Though a far cry from wealthy, we were comfortable. Despite this, I managed to learn a healthy respect for money, which I even try to remember from time to time now that I’m in charge of my own.

One of the things that anyone who has every worked a big emergency event will tell you is that the day tends to stretch on in an unending series of telephone conferences and meetings where people say mostly the same thing again and again. Occasionally, though, you’ll hear something that either makes you shake your head in disbelief or shoot lukewarm coffee out your nose at something approaching the speed of sound.

This afternoon, I was lounging in my standard government issue office chair, leaning perilously back and swilling cup after cup of what passes for “official” coffee. The meeting I was part of was dealing with an impending budget request and since it wasn’t my budget, I’ll admit that my attention was wandering. The question that caught me not only by surprise, but completely unaware in this case was a simply worded affair: Do you think we should request the full $…illion? Now remember, a couple of million is no big deal between agencies, so I didn’t think much of the words that ending in “…illion,” until, of course, the answer came back, “no, I think we can get by on the $950 million for this one.”

That’s right, you just found the point in the day where the institutional coffee I had been drinking filled my sinus cavity. This room full of mid-level bureaucrats was tossing around a billion dollar budget request like people toss a $5 bill on the counter to pay for their daily Starbucks fix. Now that I’ve had the chance to think about it, in the grand scheme of the federal budget, a billion isn’t really that big a chuck of change to request… and that realization really got me thinking.

Growing up in Nowhere, Maryland, I never once would have imagined the places I’ve been, the things I’ve done, and the opportunities I have had. But today, there I was, the youngest person in the room easily by a decade, when we decided that we could “get by” on $995 million next year. There’s enough Western Maryland left in me to still think of that as real money, Everett Dirksen to the contrary.

The lies we tell ourselves…

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I’m a bit of an oddity in the ranks of the civil service; a fiscal conservative who rails against high taxation and the increased growth of government. This isn’t the first time I have realized the disconnect between thought and action that I live on a weekly basis. I’ve often thought about jumping ship to seek out greener pastures in the private sector, but the reality is even with new pay scales and pay-for-performance initiatives, the federal government is a gravy train for employees. Although similar work in the private sector comes with higher pay, companies that provide a comparable insurance, leave, and retirement package are few and far between. As an employee with nearly 5 years under my belt, I have nearly 4 weeks of annual leave each year (not including time earned by traveling during non-business hours), 10 paid holidays each year, 2 ½ weeks of sick leave per year (that rolls over each year). My health insurance runs around $100/month and the government matches the first 5% of the salary I roll into my retirement plan. Add to that the simple fact that federal employees are nearly impossible to fire as long as they are meeting very minimal standards. Why on earth would anyone leave that kind of benefits package to work for a company that can terminate them at will due to a downturn in the economy or for nearly any other reason (or for no reason at all)?

The federal budget process forces government employees to spend their entire budget by the time the books close in September. There is no reward for an office or an organization that saves money or executes its mission more cost-effectively. In fact, we must spend our entire budget or risk not receiving as much money the following year. We justify the mad dash to spend the “leftover” budget at the end of the fiscal year under the mantra “use it or lose it.” The bureaucracy couches its purchases in terms of being able to meet mission requirements and suddenly the entire office receives new 19-inch flat screen monitors. I’m no less guilty than others. I’ve enjoyed the fruits of this misguided process and cheerfully submit my end-of-year wish list each Fall. From flash drives to cell phones, laptops to desk chairs, anything is fair game in the frenzy of last minute binging.

I’ll confess that I want my new computer every three years. I want the newest cell phone. I want to knock down walls and increase the size of our inner-office empire. The question “do we need these things” never really comes up at the end of the year. The only question on the lips of employees, is “How can we spend it?”

I believe in small, but responsive government. I believe that the bureaucracy is bloated and wasteful. I also believe that the budget process used by the United States government is utterly broken. In the end, the Congress calls the tune when it appropriates the dollars. And the lie I tell myself to make it acceptable is that if I don’t spend it, someone else will.