Oh, yeah, maintenance. At the end of every budget period, we’d get a flurry of orders for stuff that would never be used. Why? To spend the budget so they’d get that much next year. How much of the overall was wasted? No idea. But the purchases came often enough that from what I saw, it was a pretty good percentage.
Another thing that would change the whole calculous is this. You may have a multiyear contract for, say 1000 items. But the money is allocated by the year. That means every item is hand built...no automation because you’d need the allocation for the total number of items in a multiyear contract to be certain and not at the whim of Congress every twelve months. So, no automation.
At the end of every budget period, we’d get a flurry of orders for stuff that would never be used. Why? To spend the budget so they’d get that much next year.
The object of the exercise was to get as near as possible to 100% obligation rate on the available funds without incurring a violation (spending one penny more than is authorized). For a period of about 90 days after the end of the fiscal year, government contracts could be adjusted up by about 15%, so allowance had to be made to cover this possibility. And yet, comptrollers were able to hit 99+% obligation rates without incurring violations.
The magic in them thar hills was to enter contracts for services to be performed in the next fiscal year. This obligated the funds on paper. The make-believe contract could be left standing for the first quarter of the new fiscal year, and then canceled. Those funds from the expired fiscal year were then no longer obligated and could cover adjustments of other contracts after the fiscal year ended.
Not exactly legal, but it worked and could win an award for the comptroller who achieved such a high obligation rate without incurring a violation.
A popular overseas item at the end of the fiscal year was a training course back in the States. Gotta do something with the money, use a training trip to combine with annual leave. Free round trip transport and travel time did not count as leave. It was leave in conjunction with training.
As stated, all available funds had to be obligated to defend against budget cuts in the next fiscal year.