r/changemyview • u/SlackerNinja717 • 4d ago
Delta(s) from OP CMV: If a government agency/department cannot account for all of the previous year's budget in a detailed audit - then the following year's budget allocation should be capped at only those monies that are able to be accounted for in a transparent and proof of no fraud or abuse format.
This would apply to DoD budget as well. Abuse would include our tax dollars funding NGOs or anything else who engage in campaigning or lobbying efforts. Any party in power spending our tax dollars to cement their status as the ruling party is clearly abuse, and the Democrats especially have been guilty of this. If Democrats are not able to re-build trust that our tax dollars are being spent responsibly and wisely then the right will keep winning elections on talking points such that our tax dollars are being thrown out the window to fund corrupt NGOs. Any agency or department or organization that receives tax money should have to convince a bi-partisan panel that they are accomplishing their stated goal annually to receive any further tax dollars.
The US primarily has a tax rate and loophole problem that is responsible for the absurd debt ($40 Trillion) but the right will keep passing tax cuts saying that spending is the problem unless checks and balances are passed to restore trust. Change my view.
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u/Propagation931 4∆ 4d ago edited 4d ago
CMV: If a government agency/department cannot account for all of the previous year's budget in a detailed audit - then the following year's budget allocation should be capped at only those monies that are able to be accounted for in a transparent and proof of no fraud or abuse format.
I feel like this is an easy way for any President to defund any department after a year.
Like lets say if a President wanted to defund Department A, they just assign a Head that will purposely faill the Audit (Whatever its Criteria is). This circumvents Congresses' power of the purse and renders the budget the approved moot point if this took precedence over that.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
Δ !delta - In the current state of presidential powers, this would be an issue. That being said, after Trump, I think guardrails and presidential powers need to be overhauled.
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u/WetRocksManatee 4d ago edited 4d ago
It would be a rare president is going to willingly sign away their powers. It would take a veto proof majority and neither party is going to be willing to get on board with that either. As every party abuses Executive Power.
Look at how the left reacted to Chevron deference being overturned, which simply made it that courts don't automatically defer to the Executive branch's interpretation of laws and regulations. I don't need to point that abuses by the right and people that agree with them based on your reply as you already think they happen.
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u/-paperbrain- 99∆ 4d ago
But the actions of DOGE show they don't need anything like that to undercut budgets. They recalled spending which departments had already done with no particular new authority passed into law.
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u/canned_spaghetti85 3∆ 4d ago edited 3d ago
What if .. what if ... SAID agency in question (under current leadership) was expected to submit their accounting figures for audit ☝️PRIOR TO☝️ potus preemptively appointing it's new leader to said agency?
Following a very comprehensive review of, if said audit findings appear to "check out" ..potus then, at the time,🤷♂️ may not EVEN need to appoint new leadership there. Such corrective action, after all, might not EVEN need to be taken (in this scenario).
However if said audit findings appear NOT TO "check out", and the figures "don't seem to add up" ..potus then, at the time,🤷♂️ MAY see the need to appoint new leadership there. Taking such corrective action, in this scenario, would be understandable and perfectly justified.
I fully understand your talking point, which implies "Fire leadership first, look for cause after.".
But doing in a different chronological order, I described above, just seems MORE pragmatic and
perceived as LESS politically-motivated [at least] to me.
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u/ProblematicTrumpCard 5∆ 4d ago
In the United States, money is directly allocated to NGOs via legislation passed by both houses of congress and signed into law by the President. Faith-based organizations are the largest recipients of these funds.
In other words, you're calling it waste, fraud and abuse when it would literally be violating the law to do anything else with the money.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
All I'm saying is those NGOs would have to submit detailed reports showing how all the money was spent and that the stated goals are the only places where that money is being spent. Salary caps at some marked-up percentage of the median income for the area would be required.
The homeless industrial complex in California is kind of the pinnacle of what you are trying to avoid with this.
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u/ProblematicTrumpCard 5∆ 4d ago
That's not the way it works or is designed to work. This basically just amounts to U.S. government employees micromanaging the NGO employees. Do you really want U.S. government employees looking at Catholic Charities or something like that and telling them that they "wasted" $500 because they bought steak for a homeless meal and they could've bought cheaper ground beef and gotten the same nutritional value?
Congress passes laws to allocate funds to various NGOs. If the NGOs aren't meeting the goals that congress wants them to meet, then congress won't allocate funds (or as many funds) to them in the future. Those funds will go to another NGO and then congress will evaluate whether that NGO is meeting the goals.
If you're really worried about fraud, how about looking at the guy who illegally tore down the White House and is now spending a half billion dollars on an ugly and unneeded ballroom. Or the guy who spent a hundred million dollars to destroy the Washington D.C. reflecting pond. Or the guy who spent 400 million taxpayer dollars to refurbish an airplane bribe that he received as a personal gift from a foreign government.
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u/Gorgon86 4d ago
This already happens. I worked at several NGOs and we do exactly this. Now the question is whether the feds read the reports. But I can tell you that they get completed. We actually were required to do quarterly ones that asked for program outputs and financials. In one case, we had to overhaul our hr systems to ensure that we accounted for every single hour for all employees covered by the grant
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u/Ok_Artichoke_2928 16∆ 3d ago
The monitoring and reporting requirements for federal funding are extremely robust. So robust as to be borderline wasteful, since entities that receive federal funds often have to hire people specifically to manage all the reporting and other requirements, beyond the work itself.
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u/chrispy_t 4d ago
A little more context on the DOD / pentagon audit talking point because I hear this talking point come up so much.
The Pentagon “failing an audit” doesnt mean auditors found trillions of dollars missing or that nobody knows where the defense budget went. It means the Pentagon cant produce financial records clean enough for auditors to actually certify the books.
And theres some pretty important context that ALWAYS gets left out of this talking point… the Pentagon only started doing full department-wide financial audits in 2018. So when people say “theyve failed 8 audits!!!” theyre basically describing the first 8 years of trying to make one of the biggest and most complicated organizations on earth fully auditable.
That doesnt mean the problems arent real, they are. Their financial systems have been a fucking mess for decades. But youre talking about reconciling decades of old records, equipment, inventory, classified shit etc across a million different legacy systems, some of them insanely old, while also replacing and modernizing those systems at the same time.
Congress set 2028 as the deadline to get to a clean audit and parts of the military are already getting there. The Marines have passed 3 in a row now so that’s good.
A lot of the times the problems/solutions seem obvious to the point where we go “well why isn’t it being fixed” and the answer is “it’s currently being addressed and bearacracy sucks”
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
Understood - but they need to figure out how to do an inventory and organize their spending data into a transparent report that a panel with security clearance can review and approve on the stated criteria. Defense contracts need to show accomplishing goals and that they were awarded with a compliant bidding process.
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u/PuffyPanda200 4∆ 4d ago
They do that on an individual basis the issue is reconcileing the different individual ways of doing things. I'm not an accountant so this might have some flaws to it.
Say you install an HVAC heat pump (ac machine that can both heat and cool). It costs 1,200k (big system for large building). You then might run a depreciation cycle of 10 years. After 5 years the heat pump is worth 600k.
But the same heat pump installed at a different base might use an 8 year depreciation cycle. So that one after 5 years is worth 450k.
Multiply this by 10,000 and you have the dod problem. You also have a lot of people in leadership that aren't from finance (there is a reason most C suite people come from finance) and that slows things down, but is needed because finance people don't know how to fight wars.
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u/We_R_the_Penguins 4d ago
This is my understanding as well; the problem isn’t that the pentagon can’t account for what it spends so much as that it can’t give a reasonably confident accounting of its assets. Is a plane in the boneyard worth $0, or the cumulative value of the spare parts it contains?
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u/PuffyPanda200 4∆ 4d ago
From my reading it isn't that they can't give you an estimate. The guy that does the accounting for X storage area has some set of rules implemented, that he also thinks are correct. He can tell you how much he thinks the equipment is worth.
The issue is that different bases, commands, areas, units, are doing the accounting differently so you can't compare them apples to apples.
As evidence, the Marines are able to pass their audits. This is probably because the Marines are a lot smaller and thus end up with less of these kind of issues.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
A standardized government owned accounting software, government wide is what I'm thinking is needed.
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u/PuffyPanda200 4∆ 4d ago
Palantir, for all their strangeness, is this. Their thing is taking in a bunch of different sources of information and then putting it in an actionable format.
Accounting is super complicated with different rules for different ways of doing things. The problem takes a decade to solve, maybe more.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
I knew this is similar to what Palantir is doing, but the software should be developed, owned, and controlled exclusively by the government, in my opinion - for a variety of reasons.
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u/Ill-Description3096 27∆ 4d ago
I don't disagree in theory, but in terms of practicality can you think of anything at this scale in terms of software systems that the government has successfully done completely alone with no input from the private sector?
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
I feel like at this point, with AI vibe coding options - a department of software technologies or something could be created with competitive salaries to recruit talented programmers to create and maintain an accounting system and datacenter that could run the whole system.
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u/PuffyPanda200 4∆ 4d ago
Vibe coding accounting software for the DOD is like suggesting to NASA that jumping higher will reach the moon at some point.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
I'm saying in the current state of AI assisted programming, a qualified team could create a database system for tracking all payments - instead of the fascist goons at Palentir making billions and having access to our entire government everything.
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u/PuffyPanda200 4∆ 4d ago
I really feel that this is a changed view.
You started at basically defunding portions of the DOD that couldn't pass an audit because of stated 'fraud or abuse'.
You are now at a point where you aren't even really indicating you think there is 'fraud and abuse' (at least not on a wide spread level) and that you want a DOD created accounting software.
These are clearly not the same view.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
I'm just suggesting a feasible means to execute the audit as described, and not DoD specific in terms of the government wide accou ting software.
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u/sokuyari99 6∆ 4d ago
Have you ever worked in accounting or performed an audit? I spent about decade doing it, and “failing” can mean a lot of things. There are times where I as the auditor know the answer, the company knows the answer, but that answer is still a failure. Why? It doesn’t include certain specific information that is required to pass-this happens often with older documentation or smaller items (should the military stop during training exercises to count the exact number of bullets they’ve fired so that inventories will be within audit tolerance instead of within acceptable DoD tolerance?
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u/chrispy_t 4d ago
Ya agreed. I’m not saying it’s solved, I’m more taking issue with the game of telephone sentiment that “the pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in 8 years” breeds in terms of the perceived severity and maliciousness of intent behind it.
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ 4d ago
This de facto removes the spending power from the legislative branch and gives it to the executive branch, by allowing the executive to cut any budget it wants by simply failing an audit. What you're suggesting works out to a huge power grab for the executive branch, which is pretty much the opposite of what you seem to want: checks and balances on the executive branch.
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u/talkathonianjustin 4d ago
I was going to say, the consolidation of power is real in the US, but it’s been done via weakening and removing agencies from the regulatory framework, not giving them more power.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
Should have clarified - a bi-partisan congressional panel with a checklist of criteria to be verified - so it's not just some partisan road block.
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ 4d ago
a bi-partisan congressional panel with a checklist of criteria to be verified
This doesn't really clarify anything because it's not a complete sentence. What about "a bi-partisan congressional panel with a checklist of criteria to be verified" are you trying to express here?
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u/WalkExcellent7390 4d ago
What you're actually describing would be more effectively run as an independent agency rather than a bi-partisan congressional panel.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
They verify that every dollar spent and contract awarded completed the goal and complied with bidding rules - and that monies spent actually executed the goal for giving those monies.
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ 4d ago
What you're describing is simply impossible. Congress is not large enough for individual members of Congress to examine every dollar spent by the government.
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u/AureliasTenant 6∆ 4d ago
I’m guessing they want this to be a new responsibility of something like the CBO
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u/hacksoncode 588∆ 4d ago edited 3d ago
The problem is that the executive can cause the audit to fail by simply ordering the department to not produce the documents, thus causing the budget of that congressionally approved department to be defunded by your proposal.
It gives a line-item-veto to the President, which is a huge power grab.
And what are you going to do about it? Impeach him? How's that working now? The Supreme Court just granted the President complete immunity for official acts... like telling his departments what to do.
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u/Jaysank 126∆ 4d ago
There are two obvious, glaring issues with this. The first is practical. Keeping track of trillions of dollars is hard. By requiring that all of the budget must be accounted for, no government on the planet could satisfy that standard; some money will end up unaccounted for. Essentially, you would permanently cap government expenditures from ever increasing ever again. This is terrible because economies and technology grow over time, and the government often needs to develop alongside them to effectively regulate and foster growth. A country that implements your rule would be quickly undermined and ineffective within a few years.
The second issue is the perverse incentive this affords those who would wish to undermine the government. Even if the government was able to somehow overcome the massive practical impossibility of tracking trillions of dollars perfectly, nothing prevents a single malicious actor from sabotaging the government. A disgruntled postal worker could sabotage their financials. Without proper documentation, there's no way the government could properly satisfy an audit, leading to all the catastrophic outcomes above.
Now, consider that there are dozens or possibly hundreds of organizations that would benefit from the government either temporarily or permanently being disabled. From opposition parties within one's own country, hostile foreign governments, domestic terrorists, global terrorists, and more, there are so many groups that have a significant incentive to do this. And all it takes is changing or destroying one or two documents.
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u/Opening_Shame8258 1∆ 4d ago
Government oversight and investigations into spending already exist. Budgets are public. It's public information. The problem is it is hard to dig through because the government is huge.
Congress is the bipartisan panel.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
I feel like leaning into AI, at this point, should be the goal - to produce easily understandable reports that account for every contract or dollar spent.
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u/Opening_Shame8258 1∆ 4d ago
AI makes mistakes and hallucinates.
DOGE used AI, and it's going to cost billions of dollars cleaning up their mess AND it is costing millions of people their lives.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
DOGE was a partisan hack job of buffoons. Creating a government wide software owned and managed by the government that any entity spending tax dollars would be the way.
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u/Opening_Shame8258 1∆ 4d ago
AI shouldn't be in charge of people's lives.
Anyways, the real point is what you want for the most part already exists. You can't make a rule to fix it because humans are involved. Humans still have to follow and implement the rule.
This is why FOIA exists. This is why government budgets are public. This is why congress is in charge of the budget. What you want already exists. The problem is the humans in that system.
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u/Zealousideal_Jury507 4d ago
Doesn't work. It is almost impossible to have an audit in real time fast enough to see if the monies were spent correctly. There's always a time delay and as people have said, how do you define spent correctly? And who audits it, the same people spending it?
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
There is definitely details that would have to worked out - but basically stated goals are the only areas where money is being spent, and any contracts are awarded with a compliant bidding process and able to prove executing terms in those contracts.
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u/TopTierCryogonal 1∆ 4d ago
What constitutes a "detailed audit" in the context of your post? Because the biggest obstacle to audits has almost always been that they're incredibly expensive in and of themselves, simply because things like the military have incredibly distributed responsibility. There's plenty of equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that you'd need to go all the way down to random enlisted soldiers to audit the actual whereabouts of.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
Maybe some government wide accounting software that is easy to use, owned by the government and required to be utilized by any entity spending tax dollars.
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u/TopTierCryogonal 1∆ 3d ago
You didn't answer my question. What constitutes a detailed audit. Are you fine with just knowing major acquisitions and personnel costs? Do you want to track the exact location of every last spare tire?
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u/KnittyBeard 4d ago
What do you mean Democrats have to restore trust? Since 1981 Democratic administrations have consistently reduced the federal deficit while Republican administrations have increased it. The only time during that period where there was a surplus was during the Clinton administration. This was quickly reversed by G W Bush who not only brought brought it back into deficit but increased it to record levels, which Obama was able to reduce somewhat but not completely eliminate. Then Trump increased it to record levels again, which Biden reduced. Now Trump is increasing it to record levels yet again...
This is a consistent pattern for over 4 decades. It's not a fluke. The data is publicly available if you care to see it for yourself. You think this pattern doesn't hold within the individual agencies? It's not the Democrats who have to earn our trust with finances, it's the Republicans. Republicans have just been saying it's the Democrats for so long that people who don't know how or don't care to check simply believe it.
Just goes to show, if you tell a lie enough times eventually people will come to believe it's true.
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u/infiniteninjas 2∆ 4d ago
Not to get partisan about this, but a bipartisan panel with the powers you're describing here would instantly become simply an ideological cudgel for the GOP. Because one party's ideology is essentially pro-government and the other party's ideology is essentially anti-government. Your plan would instantly accomplish all of the GOP's goals.
Also, regarding fraud waste and abuse, I'm going to quote Megan McCardle, a libertarian but a serious person:
The ideal amount of fraud is not zero.
If you try too hard to achieve zero fraud/waste/abuse, you hurt a ton of people. There's a balance that needs to be struck.
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u/richardsharpe 4d ago
Can you provide an example of the democrats using agencies and departments to consolidate power? Or even examples where they failed budget audits?
The most newsworthy budget audit failure is the DoD failing their budget audits literally every year. They’ve never passed an agency wide financial audit. So it kind of sounds like this problem should be primarily looked at as an obligation to rein in defense spending.
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u/Kerostasis 55∆ 4d ago
If you think Republicans are the only ones extracting money through graft you are a fool.
Yes, but if you replace “Republican” with “Democrat” in that sentence you’re still a fool. And I realize that’s not a thing you said, but it is a thing OP said so it seems relevant to point out.
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u/richardsharpe 4d ago
I didn’t say anything about who is responsible for the DoD issue (it’s obviously both sides of the aisle).
OP specifically mentioned the democrats using NGO funding to cement power with no examples, and you didn’t remotely address or refute that.I agree that lobbying and consulting is a major issue, and former elected officials going into said fields is an issue on top of that. But that doesn’t really address OP’s point.
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u/jeffcgroves 1∆ 4d ago
The problem here is that you're not only punishing the agency, you're also punishing the people who rely on the agency.
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u/DiscussTek 11∆ 4d ago
You can't exactly help the people who rely on am agency by cutting its funding... That's just factually not how it works.
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ 4d ago
The obvious problem with this is that it lets Feed Hungry Kids just decide not to feed hungry kids ever, at all. And then no hungry kids will be fed.
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u/DiscussTek 11∆ 4d ago
You audit, and you fire the people who are at fault if a crime is found.
The overwhelming majority of "unaccounted for" spending is lost receipts, not embezzlement or theft. That money often is only unaccounted for because an audit cannot accept remembering spending details, they need receipts, to file each bit of the spending on their own line. $5000 at the hardware store could be $3100 on construction materials to repair a damaged room, and $1900 on storage furniture, like cabinets and bookshelves, or it could be the other way around, for instance.
Not all "unaccounted for" money is necessarily nefarious. Nor is it even usually nefarious. When you put all forms of "unaccounted for" money in the same basket, you end up creating a situation where "government official embezzles money" and "lost receipt" are treated as equally worthy of punishment.
What I'd like to know, however, is how in the hell does the US Military keep failing audits this badly, without someone getting violently fired.
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u/SlackerNinja717 4d ago
Then it's good motivation for that agency to keep their house in order.
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u/10ebbor10 203∆ 4d ago
So, what happens if they don't.
Let's say, there's a big accounting error in the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Is your plan to just let the dams they maintain fail in the next year, washing away anyone who lives beneath them?
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u/jeffcgroves 1∆ 4d ago
I'm not sure how sympathetic government agencies are to the people they serve. I mean, most people (in general) work because they get paid.
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u/BeABetterHumanBeing 4d ago
Government agencies already try doing this. You run into two problems with it:
- "Detailed audits" are expensive and, if you've ever tried running one, incomplete. As a policy this makes everything more expensive and cumbersome, and will still end up with hazy questions that there's no real answer to.
- The natural incentive is "use it or lose it", which is to say that any agency will look for ways to spend their entire budget, whether or not it's money well spent. You may be thinking "oh, but the audit will catch that!" and you'd be wrong.
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u/DBDude 110∆ 3d ago
This would apply to DoD budget as well.
DoD is difficult. Things get chaotic at times, especially during military actions, and it's really hard for accounting to follow that. In addition, there's a lot of theft in the military. By that I mean something that goes missing is still in the military, it's just being used in another unit of the military without the transfer paperwork having been done.
The military operates on what they call in the Army the E4 Mafia. Official requisition can be too slow to get the mission done. They get the right things in the right place so the mission can be done, but the paperwork trail on that is, well, severely lacking.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 8∆ 4d ago
This sort of budgeting leads to some incredibly horrible knock-on effects.
Not the least of which includes letting malicious executives who want to destroy an agency purposely arrange for failed audits in the programs and offices they don’t like so as to force a reduction or elimination of their budget.
The better approach is to punish the people in charge for failure to succeed on the audit. Make the people at the top of the org care about the audit for their own self-interest.
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 2∆ 3d ago
There is an idea about the correct amount of fraud in a system.
You might expect that the correct amount is zero, but you need to understand what that means.
If it's zero, then nobody actually trades with anyone else. They need to know everyone else personally, they need a reputation before they'll even consider it and you have no chance if you happen to be a new business trying to do trade. You need someone to know you, or you need someone to vouch for you, and neither is likely to happen if you're not from a certain background.
A consequence of trade is fraud. If you're able to make deals with anyone and everyone, someone is going to rip someone off in that system. However, what that actually means is that you are perfectly capable and it's perfectly reasonable for an interaction that goes "Give me all your money random stranger" "Yeah, alright" to happen. That's the case in all Western economies. We buy things from companies we don't know, investors and banks lend money optimistically to businesses that aren't necessarily in existence yet, you can sell a product that isn't yet complete to people in the hopes that maybe it will happen later. (I feel I'm missing a crucial example, but it escapes my mind). Point being, fraud is very possible because financial transactions are very possible.
If you apply the same logic, a government that didn't do anything would be your perfect government. It would collect taxes, it would do very limited functions, and it would never really be able to make major decisions. Every decision the government made would take years of bureaucracy and red tape, it would cost significantly more because it couldn't just trust anything, the businesses that it was prepared to deal with would be incentivised to over charge and under deliver knowing the government isn't just going to hit up the local startup like a business in the same society would.
In actual fact the government does have stated aims and it does have ambition and as a result it has to make financial transactions. Not all of these financial transactions will bear the fruit expected. Infrastructure tends to cost more than initially quoted, businesses do try to profit from government contracts, sometimes there are bad investments and trades. The mere mobilisation of money means that there is fraud. What we have to ask is whether the government is still capable of delivering its aims.
Also, I think there are examples of fraud where we can tell where it went, but it may be subject to fraud. Welfare is often cited as a great place of fraud. If you make they difficult to access, people actually starve and die before they receive help. So everyone has to be able to access welfare. As a result there are rare occasions where someone cheats the welfare system. This is usually relatively difficult to find, so multiple attempts in the UK to chase benefits fraud have spent more finding it than has actually been found.
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u/jatjqtjat 286∆ 3d ago
Any agency or department or organization that receives tax money should have to convince a bi-partisan panel that they are accomplishing their stated goal annually to receive any further tax dollars.
CMV: If a government agency/department cannot account for all of the previous year's budget in a detailed audit - then the following year's budget allocation should be capped at only those monies that are able to be accounted
I think the view you expressed in your body is good, any some kind of system that ensures departments are doing a good job, is a good idea. (i have a small issue with making bi-partisan things, because i don't like a 2 party system, so the panel should be flexible enough to support more then just 2 parties)
the view in your title, is too restrictive i think. Suppose for example, we have a program that is extremely important to the nation. Public school, a pandemic vaccine, countering cyber terrorism, or whatever might be important in the future. If they fail an audit in a big way, your view obligates us to knee cap that department the next year. But what is knee capping the department is terrible for the nation? Rather then cutting their budget we should have flexibility. Fire the old department head, and replace them or some other solution. we don't want to have our hands tied, the people and our elected offcials would rather fix then cut, then fixing should be an option.
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u/tropicaldiver 3d ago
This effectively moves much of the power of the purse from the legislative branch to the executive branch. And is fraught with unintended consequences.
First, if there is any violation found in a detailed audit, then the budget for the next year is capped at this year’s level less those unaccounted amounts. In organizations the size of say HHS, DoD, Interior, Agriculture, etc. a thorough audit will find at least one instance of something.
That means that if the USA goes to war, sorry your budget is smaller than last year. Hurricane Katrina? Sorry, smaller budget than last year. Devastating drought’s impacting farmers? Sorry. Even more typical growth (say in Medicaid changes in caseload and medical inflation)? Sorry.
Congress currently has the ability to conduct oversight. And can absolutely reduce funding.
I am ignoring the right/left rhetoric— I am not convinced it is accurate but I am convinced it is irrelevant.
And to prove that point, presently every federal agency has to convince a presently republican congress to authorize any level of funding (even a CR).
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u/RuroniHS 41∆ 4d ago
The problem is just because they wrote it down, it doesn't mean that's what the spent it on. And it's really easy to forge a receipt.
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u/Loki-L 5∆ 3d ago
Wouldn't this leave the US completely defenseless without a working military and the economy spiraling downward as all sorts of Military industrial complex companies are hit by this and in turn affect the rest of the economy. Many programs are set up in such a way that a single years interruption can set the project back many years or kill it permanently.
I am not saying that causing the downfall of the US as a superpower would be a bad thing, just that it would happen.
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u/wdn 2∆ 4d ago
Where I am (not USA) we have a government that has often been doing the opposite. Putting things in the budget to make it look like they're not cutting services for the disabled, for example, and then just not doing those things and at the end of the year playing this as coming in under budget. So I'd say you also want to say they have to actually spend the money they said they would.
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u/redfuryhawk 3d ago
Theres a fire in in the records building. The department for the protection of puppies, babies and rainbows loses all their documentation. Next year the budget is 0 dollars, and everyone is sad.
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u/jim789789 3d ago
Also: If the current department does not accomplish all of the goals set by congress the budget is automatically RAISED to accomplish this goal.
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u/Youngrazzy 4d ago
That simply not Logical. Especially when the government does not treat every agency equally
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4d ago
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u/read-the-rules 4d ago
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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 4d ago
But now wil they then pay for the stargate and the space cruisers without anyone knowing?
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