Yetta Adams likely spent the night of Sept. 30 sleeping on a bus bench across the street from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, huddling against the night with newspapers and shopping bags. The 43-year-old homeless woman died on that bench nearly two months later, prompting HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to eulogize: "Adams' death jarred me and all of my colleagues at HUD, reminding us that our society is becoming an increasingly hostile environment for the homeless."
But on the night of Sept. 30, some HUD officials were jarred by something else: It was the last day of the government's fiscal year, and HUD's Office of Public Affairs was rushing to spend $50,000 on new television equipment. Considering that Cisneros is now being hailed for granting $250,000 in emergency aid to Washington's homeless in the wake of Adams' death, $50,000 is real money. Homelessness may be HUD's "top priority," but the $50,000 was spent on broadcast equipment - not beds or bread.This kind of curious spending should come as no surprise to Vice President Al Gore. His National Performance Review has called it the September "spending frenzy." Unspent money gets returned to the federal treasury at the end of the fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, thus there are perverse incentives to spend.
"Stories about the legendary end-of-the-year spending rush abound," states Gore's Reinventing Government report.
"Managers who don't exhaust each line item at year's end usually are told to return the excess. Typically, they get less the next time around . . . received more examples of this source of waste . . . than any other."
Officials justify the expenditures with a whiff of entitlement. "A few hours before the fiscal year was over, I discovered that we had several thousand dollars sitting there," Sharon Maeda, HUD's assistant secretary for public affairs, told our associate Ed Henry. "I said, `We're not giving it back. We're going to take something off our (wish) list that costs approximately that amount of money, and we're going to buy it."
Since Cisneros took office, the public affairs shop has also been the recipient of $23,148 in new carpeting, furniture and other renovations - with at least $6,000 more on tap for 1994.
What's at stake is more than one Cabinet member's lust for the limelight. It's also about waste and misplaced priorities, which make possible a "spending frenzy."
During an interview with us last spring, budget chief Leon Panetta talked about year-end spending, which he placed in a larger context: "The problem is you have a long history within the federal government of agencies and departments playing their own games, doing their own thing, none of it ultimately relating at times to how best to serve the people."
Yetta Adams was among those people.