The Bullet Budget

The summer after my first year, I was a first-hand beneficiary of bureaucratic surplus. For Naval ROTC after first year, everyone spends a month in San Diego where we get a week each with the Surface Navy, Naval Aviation, Submarines, and the Marine Corps to get a sense of what our jobs will be like after graduation. During our Marine week, we were scheduled to go to a range to shoot M240s. We were the last group to go, and we were all supposed to get 100 rounds to shoot. After everyone shot, the Marines realized there was still a lot of unused ammunition. They said that they were required to use all of the ammunition every time they went to the range, so they gave us each another turn shooting. During this, I heard some of the officers joking about how if they were given the ammo they better shoot it or they won't get it again. These Marines are bureaucrats adhering to the fifth assumption in the Agency Autonomy theory which is that the agency exhausts the entire budget. They knew that if they didn't use all the ammunition that they were given for this exercise, the next budget may be smaller to eliminate the waste. The Marine Corps and the DoD as a whole want to maintain as high a budget as possible. By maximizing the budget, the utility of the senior bureaucrat is maximized which is the foundation of the Niskanen model. They use their entire budget, including all the ammunition they are given, in order to prove to Congress that the money they received for the last year was necessary for their operations when in fact it was just used so that some college kids could have fun shooting a second time.