One of the last vestiges of central planning left on Earth

Here’s a humorous story shared by SecDef Donald Rumsfeld back in 2001:

A man and a boy were walking down the street with a donkey and people looked and laughed at them and said ‘Isn’t that foolish. They have a donkey and no one rides it.’

 

So the man said to the boy, ‘Get on the donkey. We don’t want those people to think we’re foolish.’

 

So they went down the road and people looked at the boy on the donkey and the man walking alongside and they said, ‘Isn’t that terrible that young boy is riding the donkey and the man is walking.’ So they change places and go down the road.

 

People see them and said, ‘Isn’t that terrible that strong man is on the donkey and making the little boy walk.’

 

So they both get up on the donkey. The donkey became exhausted, came to a bridge, fell in the river and drowned.

 

The moral of the story is, if you try to please everybody, you’re going to lose your donkey.

Here’s some additional context from Rumsfeld discussing the PPBS — which he rephrased the PPBE process — and he’s right on point:

“It’s really a relic of the Cold War — a holdover from the days when it was possible to forecast threats for the next several years because we knew who would be threatening us for the next several decades,” Rumsfeld said. He called the PPBS one of the last vestiges of central planning left on Earth.

 

“We have combined the programming and budgeting phases to reduce duplicative work and speed decision-making,” he said.

Robert O. Work reversed this policy in the Obama administration to separate back out programming from budgeting. And thus we have the 18-24 month time lag to getting program funding available for use.