Vic Socotra

01 October 2009

Happy New Year

It is pretty cool, having a secret holiday.

Oh, all right. It is not that secret, not like some mystical rite that is conducted in some inky basement at Langley, or below the flood-plain of the Potomac River at Bolling Air Force Base.

It is little known, though, I will grant you. We don’t have dragon costumes, like the ones the Chinese use to celebrate the changing of the year on their ancient calendar. I think it might be a good idea, though, so that the taxpayers could see evidence of our good works parading herky-jerky down Pennsylvania Avenue with fireworks.

It is New Year’s Day today, all hail the arrival of Fiscal 2010 for the United States Government.

FY-09 is dead; all those un-obligated dollars from last year disappearing “Poof!” into decimal heaven. Of course, it is much more complicated than that, and there are exceptions to everything under God’s Heaven, but for the purposes of our merriment, let us just leave it at that.

The fiscal year of the U.S. Government originally ran from July 1st to July 1st because the U.S. officially came into being on July 4, 1776. Subsequently, the U.S. Government changed its fiscal year to begin on the first of October, and I wish I could tell you the precise reason.

That would take a little research, but I don’t think it would be far wrong to assume it was some sort of accounting legerdemain worked by a Budget genius to make the books balance. In the civilian economy, the genius would go to jail, but this is the government.

There are a lot of tricks of the trade. Federal pay-days have a way of wandering from the last day of the month to the first periodically, back in the times when things like that mattered.

It is funny, if you think about it. We just got done executing a budget the Bush Administration submitted to Congress in January of 2008; the one that just opened for business was based on that, and was submitted before President Obama was sworn in. That is why things are so strange at the start of an Administration, and why it is hard for the new guys to get traction.

I considered that fact might be the reason I had a pretty good year in FY-2009, and why 2011, the President’s first chance to get his priorities in his very own, may not be.

That really doesn’t matter. What did matter last night was the fact that that the clock was running down to zero on a lot of important things in town, and it was only prudent that the contract community keep someone on alert just in case some money fell from the sky.

I volunteered for the duty, along with a member of the Contracting staff empowered to actually sign things just in case. Accordingly, I was paying fairly close attention to the clock as the digital figures clicked slowly through the larger hours to the smaller ones.

Nothing happened, except for a bit of depressing news that I had suspected for days, but which was not revealed until the big lighted ball on the top of the New Executive Office Building slowly came down and the New Year arrived with great fanfare.

On this first day of the New Year, the U.S. and five other world powers will meet to talk to the lying representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran to make pleasantries over their nuclear program. This meeting in Geneva will be the first direct talks between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

As I drafted some notes about the end of FY-09, I heard the foreign minister from Tehran running through his warm-up act about the number of centrifuges not matching the number needed for civilian power and stuff like that.

The Brits are convinced the Iranians re-started their weapons program about the time the Bush Administration said they had stopped, so this will doubtless be an interesting new year.

The Tigers won again, giving me something to celebrate before the year and my resolution flagged.

I’m kidding about the big crystal ball atop the NEOB, and there was no confetti.

I did murmur “Happy Frigging New Year,” to myself as I turned off the big screen and the little unit was plunged into darkness right at midnight.

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