White House contest asks federal workers for money-saving ideas

[alp227]

Source: The Washington Post

Federal workers with thoughts on how to save taxpayer dollars can start submitting their cost-conscious ideas Thursday as part of a contest backed by the White House.

The second annual SAVE Award will start accepting submissions at http://www.saveaward.gov from Thursday through July 22. Federal employees will be able to rank the submissions submitted by colleagues, and the general public will be able to vote on the top submissions later in the year. The contest winner earns a meeting with President Obama, who will include the winning idea in his fiscal 2012 budget proposal.

Last year's contest generated more than 38,000 submissions from government employees and more than 84,000 votes, the Office of Management and Budget said.

"The basic premise here is that many of the best ideas exist on the front line," said Jeffrey Zients, OMB deputy director. "Those doing the work on the front lines have the best ideas on how to make changes. We want to reach out" to get them.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/08/AR2010070800002.html

[defendandprotect]

1. End the WARS . . . brutal, evil, cruel, unjust and ILLEGAL wars ... bankrupting Treasury--!!

[Journeyman]

3. I certainly hope you're an eligible federal worker . . .

you'd get my vote for best idea.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

7. I am a federal employee, and am honored to submit that idea of ending the wars,

cutting defense spending, and oh...I'm happy to forfeit the standard percent increase that federal employees receive yearly. To be honest, many of us don't need these increases, especially those of us who earn higher salaries. Raises and grade increases should be based on merit and shouldn't be across the board. My departmental Secretary is working to improve that system, whereby work is rewarded and lazy federal employees won't automatically receive yearly raises/grade increases.

[No Elephants]

9. Would that mean no automatic raise for members of Congress? If so, you can forget forfeiting.

Isn't the automatic increase only a cost of living increase anyway? Federal employees don't need those?

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

15. No on the first question. Yes, on the other. But that percent increase is so small.

It doesn't really add that much. And trust me, I live in D.C. where the cost of living is very high. Still, the increase doesn't do that much for the check. We could save a lot of money that way.

Let me put it this way: the Department of Defense, Treasury, Justice, State...the salaries are so incredibly high that the increase doesn't make an incredibly amount of difference anyway.

Congress controls its own salary increases. They vote on that shit, and they do it generally at the beginning of a session or quietly before recess while many Americans aren't paying attention.

Reduce congress's salary, but not the salary of their aids and workers, who are under appreciated yet do most of the work.

Cut Congress's benefits, too, since they seem to hate government so much.

[Ghost of Tom Joad]

13. Suggest that members of congress work for minimum wage

take away their perks and retirement benefits. See what its like to live in the real world

[Hardrada]

2. Stop the endless wars. Stop occupying countries all around the world.

Stop subsidizing ANY Mideastern countries. HEAR THAT, you dickheads!

[laconicsax]

4. Here's a fun idea.

Amend the Paperwork Reduction Act to eliminate the notice on forms. This will cut costs in two ways:

1) Less ink needed for printed documents and forms.
2) Less paper needed in instances where the inclusion of the Paperwork Reduction Act notice adds a page to the form.

While workin for the Census this past year, I noticed that a 1-page front and back administrative form changed at some point to a three-page accordion fold. The only change in the form was an inserted page containing the Paperwork Reduction Act notice and nothing else. Seems trivial, but when you consider that thousands of old forms had to be tossed and thousands of new forms printed on this one form alone, the waste becomes apparent (especially if you make the reasonable assumption that this wasn't an isolated case).

Oh...and end the wars. That'll probably save a few dollars here and there. Maybe enough for the House and Senate to have a joint-session ice cream social.

[Politicalboi]

5. Make Alvin Greene dolls

http://www.jabberwonk.com/flinker.cfm?cliid=k0ve8

LOL!

[No Elephants]

8. Yayyy. Greene jobs!

[Sherman A1]

6. I have a few ideas

1) Bring home the troops from not only the wars, but elsewhere in such places as Germany, the UK, Japan, Korea and alike. Overall cut defense spending by 50% or more.

2). Take the tax rates back to those of the Eisenhower era.

3). Raise the income cap on Social Security withholding. If you earn a dollar you have some of it go into the system.

4). Take the savings from the Defense cuts to retro fit Federal buildings with green energy technologies as they can be to create more savings.

5). Switch to single payer Medicare for all, which will require a huge change in our current system but will provide everyone and businesses with lower costs in the long term.

6). Build better mass transit and high speed rail which will save money on highway expansion, pollution related expenses (healthcare, etc) over the long term. Raise CAFE standards in the mix as well.

[Dr.Phool]

10. They can earn extra credit by clipping coupons from the Sunday paper!

[No Elephants]

11. Rep. Frank (with whom I've been unhappy for other reasons) suggests: The U.S. should not assist

in defending any nation that spends a lower percentage of its GDP on its "defense" than the percentage of our own GDP we spend on our own "defense."

He claims nations have been lowering their own military budgets on the assumption that the U.S. will defend them. (Can't imagine where they got that PNAC idea).

[obxhead]

12. End the wars and slash the defense budget.

There's the end to ALL of our federal financial problems.

It's also the ONLY thing that can be seriously effective on reducing the deficit, besides fairly taxing the ultra rich and corporations.

[nicky187]

14. Give them a real incentive.

Give the winner or winners some percentage of the money saved, compared with the previous year's spending. How does 5% sound, just for starters? Open it up to the general population, and get some other suggestions. Shoot, get the contractors in there, too. Make it a sliding scale so that the more money is saved (or as a percent of previous year spending), the more you get of the savings.