He ain't here... (for budget explanations) - Part 3

As blog readers will know, we have been following the UCLA budget issue, the firing of CFO Agostini, and all that.* One of the complaints about Agostini before he produced his budget book, was that there were no numbers being presented, just intimations about large deficits. The budget book he finally released then produced numbers for the current year (projected) and the two prior years.**

As we have also noted, numbers without definitions are not helpful. UCLA is a huge institution. When you talk about the budget, do you mean the entire enterprise including, for example, hospital revenue? Or do you mean something narrower?

When you talk about deficits, do you mean the difference between the flow of revenue and the flow of spending over a fiscal year? Or do you mean some kind of mix of years? Are you mixing past debt with current flows?

If you don't specify what you mean, providing a deficit number is not helpful.

Given that understanding of the problem, take a look at the excerpt from the Daily Bruin below:

UCLA is projected to generate a $220 million deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year, its interim chief financial officer announced in a Thursday email. The estimate comes more than a month after Stephen Agostini, the university’s former CFO, alleged to the Daily Bruin that financial mismanagement – both from current and past administrators – contributed to an annual projected deficit of $425 million. Reem Hanna-Harwell, who became UCLA’s interim chief financial officer in February, said in the email that higher deficit estimates previously reported in the media were inaccurate, as they included spending requests that had not yet been approved...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/03/26/interim-cfo-says-uclas-budget-deficit-is-markedly-lower-than-previous-estimates.

Do you see any definitions in the Bruin article? Maybe they are present in the "Thursday email." Maybe they are not. The article says Agostini's "deficit" was $425 million for the current fiscal year. He may have said that was the number (without defining it). But when you look at his budget book, his deficit number for his definition of the portion of UCLA he was covering was in fact in the ballpark of the $220 million for 2025-26 now being put out. (His deficit number for the current year was about $290 million.)

Let's make this simple. First, it is not helpful to throw out undefined numbers. Let's not have the new CFO commit the sins of the previous one. Second, missing from all the numbers that have been issued so far (by the current CFO and the previous CFO) is information on reserves. If you are in a situation in which you are spending more money than you are taking in, you must be getting the difference from somewhere. That somewhere is presumably the reserves you have built up in the past. So what do you have now? And if you are projected to spend $220 million more than your revenue, how much in reserves will be left?

And by the way, there is a buried lede in the Bruin article:

...The UC Office of the President is... reviewing UCLA’s spending projections...

Translated: Yours truly is not the only one now interested in what's going on with UCLA's numbers.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/03/he-aint-here-for-budget-explanations_0514550503.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/03/he-aint-here-for-budget-explanations.html.

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The definition of coverage by Agostini in his budget book was narrower than the entire UCLA enterprise, but bigger than the coverage supplied by his replacement that only covered "discretionary" elements of the budget.