You can also just wind up increasing overall waste - i.e. the defense procurement classic is "we ordered 200, but we want to save money so we're cutting the order to 100". In practice of course, this does not halve the price of the contract, you'd be lucky if it's even 25% less because you weren't ordering "200 of already built thing" you were ordering "200 of thing with it's own production line, tooling, compliance costs and staff and workforce".
So ramming through a bunch of budget cuts might necessarily involve cutting a whole bunch of programs like that...but the effect is you've just ensured you pay proportionally more, to get less, despite the fact you had more then enough cash on hand for the original order.
Which is the problem with a year over year budget: the upfront price of the massive order of whatever it is might be that over time it's going to be far cheaper once delivered (or that it's delivery for the next 20 years of supply)...but the budget for it is only approved year by year.
So ramming through a bunch of budget cuts might necessarily involve cutting a whole bunch of programs like that...but the effect is you've just ensured you pay proportionally more, to get less, despite the fact you had more then enough cash on hand for the original order.
Which is the problem with a year over year budget: the upfront price of the massive order of whatever it is might be that over time it's going to be far cheaper once delivered (or that it's delivery for the next 20 years of supply)...but the budget for it is only approved year by year.