Reason has a short piece lamenting that OMB’s report on the impact of the sequester included information about an agency that does not exist:
The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
They go on to ask what other errors are contained in the report.
I suspect that the only error here is that Reason seems to not understand the federal budget process. The NDIC may have closed in June, but the fiscal year didn’t end until September, which meant it was still funded. But, congress did not pass a new budget at that time. Rather, they passed a continuing resolution, which continues to fund all of the various agencies that were previously funded. Cuts can be made indiscriminately, ie you can say the CR will fund the government at 2% below current levels, but you can’t zero out line items in a CR. That’s what a budget is for.
So even though the NDIC does not exist, it exists. It’s money is appropriated. Presumably the next budget will zero it out and its unused funds will be returned to the treasury, but until that time it exists, at least on paper. And as such, OMB was correct to include it in the report.
This is, incidentally, one of the many reasons why governing via short term CR is bad.
520 Chestnut 
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