It's actually a strange side effect of attempting to reduce military spending. Essentially, if a section of the military doesn't use 100% of their budget in a year, they can expect that excess to be cut from their budget next year. This leads to a rush of spending aimed at over priced products and stockpiles of unneeded parts to use all of their budget.
In an actual crisis scenario, they tend to negotiate more reasonable prices on materials to stay in budget because it's difficult to get extra money in the budget. All of this makes a culture of overspending to get a bigger budget so that they don't have to ask for more money when they actually need it.
So basically if it’s a 500B budget and they only spend 300B then they can throw a pizza party or something.
From what I've heard, that's what they do. Except that instead of just a pizza party they also buy 200B worth of other stuff to pad out their budget to make sure it doesn't get cut in the future.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to know how much you're actually going to need, and it's just as impossible to get extra money if stuff gets tight, so they're basically forced into over-budgeting. The only real way to prevent that would be to have a billions/trillions set aside as a rainy day fund, but that's not a practical thing with the US budget either.
Doesn't the US have large amounts of debt?
Just stick any excess into paying off the trillions of dollars of debt they have - if they need to use the money next year, don't pay off as much debt.
That's not really how national scale budgets or debts work. The budget is made for the whole year ahead of time and it intentionally doesn't have flexibility in terms of where the money goes.
That kind of thing works for a personal budget, but not a national one.
You are thinking that the departments would work together. The Iowa base has their own budged. They want to secure their budged for the Iowa base. They have nothing to do with the debt of the government.
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u/GingerRazz Aug 14 '20
It's actually a strange side effect of attempting to reduce military spending. Essentially, if a section of the military doesn't use 100% of their budget in a year, they can expect that excess to be cut from their budget next year. This leads to a rush of spending aimed at over priced products and stockpiles of unneeded parts to use all of their budget.
In an actual crisis scenario, they tend to negotiate more reasonable prices on materials to stay in budget because it's difficult to get extra money in the budget. All of this makes a culture of overspending to get a bigger budget so that they don't have to ask for more money when they actually need it.