I had rough plans with a friend this weekend while the husband is down at MAL, but as usual with this friend a house emergency came up (leaking roof this time) so I’m flying solo. I told the husband I looked forward to him complaining about the number of comics I’ll read this weekend (complaining because he then has to sort and file them all at once). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spent the work day on a last minute emergency that is only an emergency because a) lawyers who worked at the agency before me gave bad advice; and b) our public affairs shop can’t plan things in the normal federal budget cycle. The agency has an anniversary next year with a big number and what should have happened was that planning should’ve started 2-3 years ago so that we could’ve asked for the budget authority to do the big shindig they now want to hold, but which they didn’t start planning until last year (an agency develops their budget plan each spring for the fiscal year that starts almost two years later; so for 2025 they would’ve had to develop it internally back in the spring of 2023). When they did approach me about it, I got to tell them that no, we don’t have any authority to pay for food for a shindig, and in fact there’s a statute that affirmatively says we may not pay for food for a shindig, and by the way here’s the two Justice memos that back me up on this. The previous lawyers had told them that a certain pot of cash we have didn’t have to follow the normal rules, which is horse shit. I did tell them how to get the authority to pay for food (ask for a one-time increase in a special reception budget, or ask for permanent authority to pay for food at shindigs. Or, preferably, both), and I’ve told this to everyone in management who will listen, but the game of telephone based on the previous bad advice is still going strong and people don’t want to hear the bad news. Oh well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had rough plans with a friend this weekend while the husband is down at MAL, but as usual with this friend a house emergency came up (leaking roof this time) so I’m flying solo. I told the husband I looked forward to him complaining about the number of comics I’ll read this weekend (complaining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,9,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-law","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2008"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2008\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.countfour.org\/legalmoose\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}