Posted on 07/14/2013 8:38:06 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Washington Post has some interesting details of emails sent by Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) contracting and budget officers to their colleagues.
“Our available funding balances remain large in all appropriations — too large to spend” just on small supplemental funds often required by existing contracts, the June 27 e-mail said. DISA’s budget is $2 billion.
“It is critical in our efforts to [spend] 100% of our available resources this fiscal year,” said the e-mail from budget officer Sannadean Sims and procurement officer Kathleen Miller. “It is also imperative that your organization meets its projected spending goal for June. . .”
The Washington Post reports ...
In these days of sequester and downsizing and such, that policy seems a bit out of place. (Although it could be seen as a stimulus effort.)650,000 Defense Employees Furloughs Started Monday
[The emails] appears to contradict a September 2012 memo from the Pentagon’s undersecretary for acquisition Frank Kendall, and comptroller Robert Hale, who urged that “spending money primarily to avoid reductions in future budget[s]” is not the way to go.
A DISA spokesperson e-mailed to say that these e-mails are “common practice among government agencies” and that many congressional “financial and procurement timelines . . .are designed to ensure that agencies” spend 80 percent of their funds before the last two months of the fiscal year, or by August 1.
The June 27 e-mail laid out an aggressive and detailed spending timetable to achieve that goal, but acknowledged the parlous budgetary times in which we live. “Due to the furlough schedule, exceptions to our schedule will be on a case-by-case basis . . .”
Just like the busload of lawyers going over a cliff, it’s a start!
Somebody has to help pay for those IRS bonuses.
0 has made the world such a safe place now, do we really need a Defense Department? It’s peace and luv all the way baby...
Meanwhile fighter jets and billions of dollars are being sent to bearded savages so they can kill bearded savages and Christians and Jews.
Bump
The perfumed princes at the Pentagon blew it.
The military furlough rules are entirely political. Here are some likely facts, although I have no references so just pretend they are guesses.
1. Every branch of the military has enough money to cover the sequester, except the army. But Chuck Hagel agreed with the army that it was not “fair” if only army people were furloughed, so he ruled that all branches had to furlough equally.
2. During the furlough, every furloughed worker must take off on friday, so that there is no possibility that another worker might fill in for the furloughed worker.
3. During the furlough, no overtime for any worker furloughed. They must meticulously track their 32 hours, and leave when they are done, even if they are in the middle of a meeting, and would not have been paid for overtime.
4. During the furlough, NO work that would have been assigned to the furloughed worker may be done by any other worker.
The 4th point is hilarous — we could argue that there are too many workers for the work, and that by working more efficiently we might be able to afford cutting 20% of the workforce. But by this rule, even if you had another worker sitting around doing NOTHING all week, that worker would be prohibited from doing ANY of the work that might otherwise have been done by a furloughed worker.
In other words, the rules explicitly ensure the maximum pain.
5. All workers must submit weekly status about all the jobs not being accomplished. This takes time of course from their real work, so we are actually becoming LESS efficient in order to “prove” how bad the sequester is.
Frankly, we would have been better off if they had FIRED 20% of the workers (actually about 5%, the reason it’s 20% of a week now is that we are 3/4ths of the way through the fiscal year). If we had fired 5%, we would have had to assign their work to the remaining workers. Also, it would be a one-time pain, since those fired workers would be gone forever, and we would therefore save the money every year.
Furloughs are designed to make sure that nothing good is accomplished by the sequester. Furloughs are a GOOD WAY to handle a temporary money problem, when you assume things will get better. THey are a lousy way to handle a permanent one-time reduction in budget.
Note: the sequester WAS a permanent one-time deduction, equally 10% of the projected budget. Once you made that one-time cut, in every following year, the budget would grow at the same rate it did before, but because it would start from the 10% lower point, we’d save “10%” every year over the original budget.
Cutting one bloated program would have been all it took, since that would have saved money every year. Instead, they are explicitly making sure that NO permanent changes are made, so that every year we will have to go through the same painful and stupid process.
But Obama can go on a $100,000,000 vacation.
They need to furlough the Air Force One crew and save the taxpayers billions.
Just claim to be a pig farmer. Obama will give you $50,000.
In other news, El Douche announces a $100M trip w 500 of his closest friends and a$$kissers.
................
El Douche has a twofer. A win win.
1. Cuts the military
2. Blames it on the repubs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.