For the men and women who run federal government agencies, nothing is more tragic than finishing the fiscal year with money that has not been spent.

That was the clear takeaway from a little-noticed hearing Wednesday at the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee.

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Three experts testified that there is clear evidence that agencies rush to spend money during the last month of a fiscal year, spending a disproportionate share of their budgets in the closing weeks for fear that saving money will have an adverse effect on their budgets.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the panel, recounted anecdotes of government bureaucrats intentionally letting airplanes sit idle on runways to burn through fuel so as not to risk future budget cuts.

“Regardless of when it occurs, wasteful spending is simply unacceptable,” he said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the subcommittee’s chairman, pushed legislation that would offer cash bonuses to government workers who identify wasteful spending. The Bonuses for Cost-Cutters Act passed the House of Representatives in the last Congress and cleared a Senate Committee but did not pass the full Senate.

“It would seem like a simple, non-controversial bill that should sail through Congress and save the taxpayers money,” he said.

Jason Fichtner, senior research fellow at George Washington University’s Mercatus Center, testified that offering bonuses could cut waste. Another idea would be allowing agencies to keep a certain portion of their funds for the next fiscal year. He suggested Congress allow some agencies to experiment with such reforms as part of a pilot program.

“My research shows that a remarkably large percentage of executive branch contract spending occurred at the end of the fiscal year.”

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Fichtner examined publicly available government contracting data over a number of years.

“My research shows that a remarkably large percentage of executive branch contract spending occurred at the end of the fiscal year,” he said.

If contract spending were evenly spread throughout the year, each month would account for about 8.3 percent of the total.

Fichtner said most of the agencies he studied spent more than 8 percent of their contracting budgets in the last month of the fiscal year, and half spent more than 16 percent in September. The average spent in the last month averaged 16.3 percent from fiscal years 2003 through 2013.

The imbalance of some agencies is substantially higher. Fichtner explained that in the State Department, for instance, 34.9 percent of contract spending occurred in the last month of the fiscal year. For the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it was 32.6 percent.

He added that the number of individual contracts also spiked near September 30, the end of the fiscal year. In fiscal year 2015, 2.5 percent of contracts were signed in the last three days of September, and 0.9 percent were awarded on the very last day. That is nearly twice the daily average of 0.5 percent of the contracts that were evenly distributed throughout the year.

Allan Burman, who serves on a panel created to streamline defense spending, testified that he came to similar conclusions after examining the $298 billion that the Defense Department spent on goods and services in fiscal year 2016. Some 14 percent was spent in September, including 7 percent during the final week.

There are indications that much of the money produced less efficient outcomes, Burman said. He cited one study that found lower-quality information technology projects purchased at the end of fiscal years.

“The key result, though, is that people want to spend that by the end of the year or they fear that those funds will be taken or they’ll be lost.”

Burman said there are many reasons — some legitimate — for why spending gets delayed.

“The key result, though, is that people want to spend that by the end of the year or they fear that those funds will be taken or they’ll be lost,” he said.

Burman said some agencies have attempted to prevent the end-of-the-year spending rush by prohibiting the spending of more than 20 percent of the budget in the last two months.

“That appears just to push the spike back a couple of months but not necessarily deal with the problem itself,” he said.

Heather Krause, director of strategic issues for the Government Accountability Office, testified that budget uncertainty is a factor in agencies hoarding their money in the early months of a fiscal year. She noted that Congress has passed continuing resolutions in all but four of the past 40 years because lawmakers could not pass spending bills on time through the regular process.

That prompted managers to reduce spending because they did not know what their final budget would be, Krause said.

“The use-it-or-lose-it mentality, as my fellow panelists talked about, can set in among agencies,” she said. “This can create incentive to obligate funds.”

Sen. Paul acknowledged that reforming end-of-year wasteful spending might cut only 1 to 3 percent of the $700 billion budget deficit.

“But you’ve got to start somewhere,” he said.