By CKR
The US Congress is in a lame duck session. That sounds unimportant, but it’s not. It finally passed the appropriations bills for half or more of the government.
The government’s fiscal year starts on October 1. To allow it to spend money while Congress contemplates what level of pork will stay below the public’s radar, Congress passes what is called a “continuing resolution.”
A continuing resolution allows government agencies to spend as much money as they spent the year before, or perhaps a little less. This creates chaos in the agencies because their projects don’t remain the same. Money is there for an environmental cleanup that has been completed, but the money for a start-up on an improved vaccine is zero, the same as last year’s budget. This results in some fancy footwork by the budget people, which Congress can criticize later as poor management.
The people who do the work should see funds in their accounts in a mere month or two, the time it takes the agencies to get the funds into their accounting systems. That’ll be about the time the agencies start to rethink and pull funds back from some projects.
Anybody out there want to run their business like this?