ATFM episode 36: Reflections on the current budget environment

In this episode of the "All Things Financial Management" podcast, presented by the Society of Defense Financial Management and Guidehouse, Russ Rumbaugh, Former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Financial Management and Comptroller, sat down with host Tom Rhoads to discuss the latest ongoings in the financial management space. Tune in for conversations about the current budget environment, challenges in the financial management workforce, career advice and more.  

Russ's Story

Russ Rumbaugh: My overarching story is, as I like to tell it, is that I've done defense budgets from every perspective. My time at DON FM was my third time in the Pentagon. I previously also worked in the Congress, both in the Senate and the House, and I've studied it, think tanks and taught it at universities. So that's how it became a career. For your point about the story, it might be better to do it as just a couple vignettes that I look back and realize were really important. One, I knew at the time and one I didn't. 

My first one, when I first had left the service and was back in Chicago and needed to feed myself, I had gotten a temp job at a mutual fund company where I sat on a small team that used Microsoft Access database to lump together the different corporate databases. Needless to say, at the time, that felt like such a placeholder. But one, it created this sense of rigorous thinking and as you know, anytime you do database work, you have to understand the relations between all of the different databases and how each field relates to the other one. I really do credit that unexpected experience giving me a way of thinking that introduced me to financial management. 

Read the full transcript