"The budget evolved from a management tool into an obstacle to management"
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A budget is supposed to be the steering wheel; Carlucci is warning that it’s become the parking brake. The line lands because it flips a comfortable civics cliché on its head. We’re told budgets impose “discipline” and “accountability.” Carlucci, a Washington operator who served at the Pentagon and later as Defense Secretary, is saying the machinery of budgeting has swollen into a separate power center - one that dictates behavior rather than enabling it.
The intent is managerial, not poetic: budgets were designed to translate priorities into resources, align agencies, and measure performance. In Carlucci’s telling, the process hardens into ritual: calendar-driven fights, line-item trench warfare, compliance checklists, and political signaling. The subtext is that managers start managing the budget instead of the mission. Success becomes “protect the baseline,” “don’t get reprogramming denied,” “spend it or lose it,” and “avoid bad optics,” even when that means funding yesterday’s program while tomorrow’s problem goes hungry.
Context matters. Late Cold War defense politics was awash in procurement scandals, congressional micromanagement, and sprawling bureaucracies trying to justify ever more complex weapons systems. The budget becomes both shield and cudgel: legislators use it to control the executive; agencies use it to defend turf; contractors orbit around it as the real center of gravity. Carlucci’s critique isn’t anti-spending so much as anti-ossification. When the tool becomes the obstacle, the system is confessing that procedure has replaced judgment - and that’s how governments end up efficient at paperwork and clumsy at outcomes.
The intent is managerial, not poetic: budgets were designed to translate priorities into resources, align agencies, and measure performance. In Carlucci’s telling, the process hardens into ritual: calendar-driven fights, line-item trench warfare, compliance checklists, and political signaling. The subtext is that managers start managing the budget instead of the mission. Success becomes “protect the baseline,” “don’t get reprogramming denied,” “spend it or lose it,” and “avoid bad optics,” even when that means funding yesterday’s program while tomorrow’s problem goes hungry.
Context matters. Late Cold War defense politics was awash in procurement scandals, congressional micromanagement, and sprawling bureaucracies trying to justify ever more complex weapons systems. The budget becomes both shield and cudgel: legislators use it to control the executive; agencies use it to defend turf; contractors orbit around it as the real center of gravity. Carlucci’s critique isn’t anti-spending so much as anti-ossification. When the tool becomes the obstacle, the system is confessing that procedure has replaced judgment - and that’s how governments end up efficient at paperwork and clumsy at outcomes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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