Federal bureaucracies go on end-of-year spending sprees to avoid budget cuts

Agencies across the federal government with unspent on the books during the final weeks of the fiscal year often go into “use it now or lose it” mode in a concerted effort to spend as much as they can before Sept. 30.

The practice was highlighted in a recent inspector general report that faulted the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal grant-writing agency focused on economic development, for awarding a flurry of end-of-the-fiscal-year grants in 2014 in an apparent attempt to spend its leftover funds before Congress examined its budget again.