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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

The American model for government funding is also a bit messed up ( at least what I remember from high school civics in the 1980s) where each department must spend what they are allocated or the department is guaranteed to get less money in the next fiscal year budget. I could be wrong but this creates a disincentive for saving money as most states and the federal government work on the same model.

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AIUI, it isn't exactly that it is enshrined into law that if you don't use it, you won't get it next year. It's just that there's never enough money to give everybody what they want, and not using all your money is a primo-grade signal that you don't need it, so of course you lose it. I believe you'll find this isn't an "American" phenomenon at all.

With some kind of award for not using all your money, it's hard to justify it for the people spending it... and "rewards for not spending all the money" are also really easy to cut out of next year's budget...

Certain patterns just naturally emerge with budgeting at scale, and if you've got some brilliant idea about how to fix it I can assure you that with just some minimum business acumen you can become a very rich person.

so.. if I don't need $100 i.e. I can do all my work with $80. Then my budget for next year becomes 80. You have given a scenario where budget of one team is decreased.

So, where did that $20 go ? To some other team, right ?

What about the reverse scenario? If I cannot do all my work with $80, I ask for more, say $100. Then my budget for next year becomes 100.

I don't see a problem with this. Budgets are fluid and change from year to year. Because I saved the company $20 in year 6, I will be rewarded with $20 in year 7 if I ask for it.

It seems reasonable at first: if you weren't able to spend all the money you've got that means you've got too much of them. But you're right, that does create the incentive to needlesly spend.

Also, it is not limited to gorvernment: a Director in a Fortune 100 company that I'm working for right now is buying 40 16" MacBook Pros for a team of .Net developers, because:

a) he had spare $100k in his budget.

b) it is easier to get VPN access approved for external contractors if they are using Macs

Current client wrote-in a stupid policy into intermediate vendor's contract that I have to use a Mac.

Nothing, absolutely nothing that is used in the company is related to the Mac. In fact, a lot of the tools we use would work better on Windows, and many people use Windows. The Macs for direct employees are used as perks.

As much as I've seen people complain about use-it-or-lose-it I've never actually seen an alternative that seems to work better for the amount of effort put into it

It's actually even less efficient than that. On top of keeping spending high, every project that involves contractors must have at least 3 bidders [0]. So for smaller projects people often spend substantially more time modifying contract details and finding contractors than the project itself takes. (By playing with project requirements, you can increase the pool of contractors). At an unnamed national lab, 6-week projects typically took 6-18 months of hunting down contractors until the start of work.

[0] not sure if this is still true, but certainly was in 80s-early 00s.

Big companies often work this way too.

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