A farmer's daughter was going to market, carrying a pail of milk on her head. As she walked, she thought, "When I sell this milk, I'll have enough money to buy dozens of eggs. When the eggs hatch, I'll have plenty of chickens. When I sell them, I'll have enough money to buy a dress for the next ball. I'll be best-dressed girl there! All the young men will ask me to dance, but I'll say no. I'll just toss my head like this," and she made flick of her head, sending the pail of milk onto the ground. The girl went back home to her mother, who told her never to count chickens before they're hatched.

 -- Aesop's fable of the milkmaid and her pail.

Well, it's budget season, officially, and ancient Greek tales have a sudden resonance when it comes to examining government plans. Not that the Defense Department and the Office of Management and Budget are so careless to spill a pail of milk! No, they've got to make plans that count on unhatched chickens that run in the billions of dollars.

To wit, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundras tells us that the new policy of "cloud first" will be funded by savings from data center consolidation. OMB's federalwide data center consolidation goal aims to shutter 800 facilities by 2015 awhile the cloud first mandate requires every agency to have one cloud solution in place by December 2011 and up to three cloud-based programs by June 2012. Kundra says that cloud first won't require agencies to spend more money, and it's true that the promise of all infrastructure rationalization efforts is long-term savings.

But those long-term savings often come with short-term, maybe even medium-term increases is spending since transitions aren't cost-free. As part of the cloud first policy, Kundra encourages agencies to consider recasting existing services as a cloud-bases software-as-a-service--actions that require spending money on a new procurement that has to come from somewhere.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, is doing exactly what its own comptroller apparently once warned against. In a Feb. 10 budget briefing for reporters, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment's Todd Harrison cited a 2002 report from Robert Hale, who wrote that the DoD "should avoid using efficiency savings to fill budget shortfalls until the savings are actually realized." Hale then was a private citizen; now he's an undersecretary of defense.

Another fable, this time collected by Idris Shah, might illustrate why budget season provokes this kind of behavior:

A man was seen galloping through town on his donkey. "Where are you going to so quickly?" shouted the townspeople at the rider. "I don't know!" came the reply. "Ask my donkey!" - Dave