Every government agency is required to go broke on the last day of the fiscal year.
There is a government agency called the National Reconnaissance Office. They run our spy satellites. Satellites are very expensive and so is all the equipment that supports them. In the 1980s they got a director who decided to run NRO like a business. He got Congress to fund him at levels proper for his agency, and then he hired the best negotiators he could to deal with suppliers and the like. Over five years this asshole saved up enough to build a new $220 million headquarters without an additional nickel of tax funds.
When Congress found out they shit bricks and went into "we must make sure this never happens again!" mode. I thought they should have figured out a system of controls to prevent fraud then allowed every government agency to do the same thing. Requiring them to spend it all does not motivate a sense of thrift in our bureaucrats.
My thinking is, we allow agencies to retain the funds they don't use in a safe investment vehicle they can get out of quick. They report their interest earnings to a Congressional office. They can use the money as rainy-day funding or to buy capital equipment. And in the event their interest earnings reach one percent of what Congress gives them, Congress can have the option to reduce their funding by half their interest income.
I can see some government agencies being run exactly like businesses. Take the Army and Air Force Exchange Service - the PX system. Right now, it's only open to the military. There is no reason why AAFES could not change to a two-tier price structure - 10% off for military ID card holders - and open their stores to the public. The additional profits would go to the government to reduce the deficit. The added volume would allow AAFES to negotiate better prices from suppliers. And the "troop profit" (those guys sell to soldiers at a profit now; the profit earned up to the price soldiers pay will be called troop profit) will go toward supporting soldiers. Only allow them to build next to military bases, so we don't have another Walmart on our hands, and only let PXs on the edges of installations, or new ones built outside the gate, do it for security reasons.
We also have two manufacturers in our government: Skilcraft (National Institutes for the Blind) and Unicor (Federal Prison Industries). Why can't these two sell to the public? Most of their competitors manufacture in China, and people want to buy American.
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