Pentagon officials spend all allocated funds or risk losing future budgets

Evidence

These perpetual tendencies toward inertia and expansion have also meant there’s every incentive for base officials to always suggest that their base needs more money. In the Pentagon, like most other bureaucracies, those controlling budgets generally try to spend every cent allocated to them, for fear of losing funding in the next fiscal year. One former Army cost analyst described to me what he called a “pathology” of unnecessary spending. “There was never a question of saving any money,” said Bill Witherington (a pseudonym). “I had it said [explicitly], ‘If we don’t spend it … we won’t get any more next year.’” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 790

Categorization

• XREF: Wasteful end-of-year spending connects to the ‘use it or lose it’ budget problem documented widely across federal bureaucracies.