Did You Know...

**Written by Doug Powers

The SAVE Award winner was feted at the White House recently.

From the White House website:

“If you want ideas on how to save money, ask the people who spend it. That’s what President Obama did when he began the SAVE Awards two years ago.” That’s the opening of Joe Davidson’s Washington Post write-up of the SAVE Award, the collaborative process in which all federal employees were invited to submitted their ideas on how to save taxpayer dollars and strwamline government, as well as vote and comment on others’. After a tough-but-fair crack about government acronyms, Trudy Givens gets her due recognition:

Trudy Givens, a Bureau of Prisons employee from Portage, Wis., submitted the winning suggestion. Like many of the other ideas, Givens’s suggestion is so simple, yet so effective, you wonder why [Uncle] Sam didn’t think of it earlier.

Her idea: Send the Federal Register — a daily compendium of government regulations and notices — to federal employees online, rather than by snail mail, with an estimated savings of $16 million through 2015.

As the SAVE Award winner, she got to meet the President and her agency head the Attorney General in the Oval Office

For my own SAVE Award submission, I was going to suggest that the White House lay off their website proofreader in order to save taxpayers some money, but I see they already must have done that.

President Obama is quoted as saying, “A million here, a million there. It adds up.” Yes it does. Unless we’re talking about PBS and NPR, then those millions are insignificant:

President Obama defended public broadcasting from cuts on Friday, emphasizing that defunding networks like NPR and PBS would do little to rein in spending.
[...]
“That’s not where the money is,” he added.

The SAVE Award winner’s idea is said to save $4 million or so per year and she got a party (nobody from the US Postal Service was in attendance, no doubt). Taxpayers subsidize NPR and PBS to the tune of hundreds of millions per year and that’s “insignificant.” Go figure.

Is there a federal employee out there willing to suggest defunding NPR and PBS for next year’s SAVE Awards competition? If you do, please make sure you’ve got enough money put away for a comfortable (and abrupt) retirement before submitting the entry.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe