BFR said:
Machiavellian said:
Again, you just do not understand how budgets work and your lack of understanding is why we keep circling this topic. A budget is a budget, have you never made a budget for yourself. My wife and I do it for every month and for the entire year. We know how much money we bring in, we know all of our expenses and we budget for family events we know we need to save for. Then there is personal budget, we put money into where each of us spend that money on whatever we like. Meaning I do not care how she spends her personal budget and she doesn't care how I spend mine. All of the money is budgeted to go somewhere. For a company or federal agency its pretty much the same thing. All of the money they are budgeted for is allocated for something but there is also allocation within the budget for things like Christmas parties, trips and so forth. You call it wasteful spending because you have no clue the money allocated for these personal events which funded the tables. The thing is, if it was within budget, then they had the money to pay for it. While it may not be what YOU would spend it for, you do not work for the CDC so you have no clue if that is something the employees decided they wanted. Either way, if they did it within budget then it wasn't wasteful. And Yes, every agency just like every company usually have discretionary accounts. Funny enough, I am sure if we looked at the discretionary accounts for congress it probably would blow you mind. I hope we see how much this DODGE employees will be paid for their work since we already have an agency doing the job. That in itself could be considered wasteful money. Paying a company to do the exact same job as one we already have a budget for whose is made up of people who have no clue how the government works. |
Do you agree that budgets, at any level, can be "excessive?" ...and if they are, isn't that a bad thing? |
Of course. Anything can be excessive. The key is that without full understanding of any situation just drawing a conclusion that its wasteful on limited knowledge is just feeding your own bias. I know in a number of situations within the company I worked for we moved money around within the department I worked to do certain things. Sometimes we allocated more money than we needed because we had a number of projects lined up which included travel for a lot of people but those projects fell through. During COVID this was especially evident because instead of going on site, we did video conferences. This of course saved a lot of money so where does that money goes. It does not go back to the main company so our department spent it on high-end equipment. If you have a budget for a year, a good budget will spend all the money.
Trying to use this singular event during COVID which as I stated may have gave the department a surplus in their budget probably isn't what you would use to say the department itself waste money. You would need to show years of wasteful spending and then put that against what the budget is set for the department and make adjustment for the next budget on that.
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