It is one of the oddest spending habits in Washington: this year, the government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees for bank accounts that have nothing in them. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts, each containing zero dollars and zero cents.

These are supposed to be closed. But nobody has done the paperwork.

So even now–as the “sequester” budget cuts have begun idling workers and frustrating travelers–the government is still required to pay $65, per year, per account, to keep these empty accounts on the books.

In this time of austerity, these accounts are a reminder of something that makes austerity hard: expensive habits, built into the bureaucracy in times of plenty. The Obama administration has spent the last year trying to close these accounts, with some success.