Ice Cream Galore

When comparing and discussing the theories of congressional dominance and agency autonomy, I thought of the housing program I am in at UVA. I live in a house with 12 girls, and we are part of a program with 7 guys. In this program, we receive funding for Thursday night dinners. We rotate the cook team that must buy groceries and make dinner for everyone, and the cook team gets reimbursed for the groceries. We have a budget of $175 from the stud to spend per dinner. The stud staff attempts to keep us under budget, explaining that the money we don’t use can go to other uses. However, when we haven’t used the money, it seems to just disappear… I’m sure it’s used for something, but it’s not used directly for us. In other words, we don’t get the direct benefit. AND after maxing out our $125 budget for every meal one semester, our budget got upped. So there are large incentives to use the whole budget: we get the direct benefit of the food bought, and using all of it could lead to increased budgeted money. So, we have a collective agreement. When the grocery shoppers are under budget, what do they do? Buy ice cream. Our freezers are overflowing with ice cream, and we get the benefit of all the money budgeted to our program. Plus, there’s the chance we’ll get more money the next semester, and thus, more ice cream. This is the same problem we have with bureaucracies budget maximizing! Like bureaucracies push past providing the optimal amount of their service, we push past the optimal point of ice cream in order to maximize our budget.