For those of us who refuse to give up the celebration, there was a huddle last night out on the Balcony at Big Pink. We got to the bottom of one of the bottles of beneficial Spirits procured over on Fort Myer yesterday. It is the 5th Day of Christmas for the diehards, and provision of five little rings of precious metal would have been appropriate. If we could afford it. But we are no longer direct employees of the Socotra Publishing Franchise. We are proud to be “independent contractors.”

That status is a reflection of how things have changed. It is a benefit to the larger enterprise in which taxes are minimized by putting us outside the corporate tent and claiming we are responsible for all those overhead costs. But it also transfers some former benefits to our own outgoing expense. That is not how things “balanced” back in an earlier time. They are clearly not in balance now, either.

We normally follow the money on these things. We recall things starting to change back in the Clinton Administration. We all adapted to that, in the same way everything here in DC did. Remember the TEA Party? They made a shake in their moment on stage but the system ground them up pretty effectively. Part of that process involved creating the means to fund the vast outflow of Government money that looks relatively legal.

We completely support our government, so let’s get that footnote out of the way. But we look on with amazement at how things are working now. As a means of contrast, we went into the files to sample some of the ways things used to be at this time of the year. We will get to that in a minute, since there is something else that is already heating up. That would be the end of the Lame Duck session in Congress, and the start of some other limping one with dramatically opposed views and an even smaller majority than the one that limps to a close.

In the House, the current majority will expire shortly. The reorganization will begin after the tumult of the Omni-Bus funding bill is resolved, which it isn’t at the moment. But no one has explained how that is going to happen. As a simple aside, we are till organizing a budget for a year fully 25% in the past.

The following words turned up from 2002, budget year 2003, and reflects a Government budget guy marveling at what was happening then. We now refer to that as “the Good Ole Days.” Let’s run parts of it again this morning just to get a feeling for how profound the difference has become in the two decades since:

“I have not much enthusiasm for this day. Most of the government started looking sideways at the clock last week. Today, at some point the word is going to come down that the Government will close. The President gave everyone Friday off, too, Orange Alert not withstanding.

So I will be working through the day, at least long enough to get to an abbreviated 80 hour schedule. I have it figured. Of course, that is predicated on no external attacks like last year. That will screw up everybody’s plans.

But there are also some Government people who are working, and they can’t stop. I bet some will even be in the office tomorrow afternoon, and use the day-off Friday to catch up on the reclamas to the Program Budget Decisions. The Budget had to be completed. If we didn’t get it finalized and to the printer then we couldn’t give it to Congress on time. That is very, very bad. On the naughty and nice scale, it is pretty close to going to the slammer.

So as of late yesterday, the vast office complexes were empty and the time-cards purely fictional. But here and there are little knots of people in the Pentagon and at Langley with their ties pulled down and blouses wrinkled. The Policy people have gone to the mall. After all, policy can always be generated sometime in January. No one will die if a policy memorandum is a month late. But it is a different matter for the budget staffs. The issue of the wrap-up Program Budget Decision is still hanging.

You know the drill. It is just like in the handout in civics class, the one after “How a bill becomes law.” Only the PBD in question is classified. We can’t take it home and work on it near the fireplace, or hang it with care anywhere.

“Following a thorough review of the Budget Estimate Submission (BES), which is about as close to balancing the budget as humans can get, the DoD Comptroller prepares one or a series of Program Budget Decisions (PBDs) for the appropriations and/or programs under his/her oversight…These are used to adjust the BESs and address the Current Year, the Budget Years and an estimate of the resource impact on the four succeeding Future Years (the
Out Years)…”

But Jeeze, we don’t have to explain the Planning, Programming and Budget System (PPBS) to you. Everybody knows how that works. When there are real problems, big ones with some major issues, the decisions are hard. This second year of an Administration the grownups are pretty bold about jamming a bunch of unrelated items into an Omni-Bus (“all buses, all at once!”) which wasn’t ready and is a quarter gone before the calendar shifts.

It is still Christmas, after all, and we don’t mean to “Take the 5th” on the issue even if it is the Golden Rings moment in the Twelve Days. No one wants to be at the office. Most sane people have been gone for days already. And the PBDs are a forgotten process for Old Timers. The President’s people at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) are tapping their toes and drinking from their wassail bowls at the office.

Since only some of us are at work, it is hard to answer technical questions. Like, suppose we send several dozen billions of dollars to protect someone’s border that isn’t actually ours? Push it a month or so to the right, into the new fiscal year. Will that save Ukraine? Are there still weapons in the arsenal to give away? Is there anything left in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or was that another emergency?

Rest assured, there are those working this week and working hard. They are just keeping it quiet because the House is going to change, all the way through. So, decisions will be made and done and when the people come back to the office on the 3rd of January. The members, at least the new ones, will come into town determined to make things echo “all through the House.”

The Press will say: “What idiot wrote that language! That is crazy.” They have already screwed up their faces and uttered the most dreaded words in the budget lexicon: “That is not executable!”

It must have been the Mice that wrote the language. They were the only ones stirring, all through the House. We remember when things seemed to work a little bit differently. And add the House transition to the mix and we may have some mild excitement coming up, you know?

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com