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Good afternoon,
Knocking the way government works makes for an easy political talking
point. What’s hard is actually changing the way it works, and we want
your help to do just that. Launched last year, the President’s SAVE
Award is about fostering a culture of accountability among all Federal
employees, as well as tapping their first-hand knowledge of how to
streamline and modernize government, and you choose the winner.
The President invited all Federal employees from every agency and
department to submit their ideas for saving taxpayer dollars, and to
evaluate and discuss the ideas submitted by others for how to make
government more efficient and effective. Our budget gurus then went
through every single idea with a fine-tooth comb to see what we were
already doing, what needed a closer look, and which qualified as our
four finalists.
Now, you get to decide which idea will be the winner of this year’s
SAVE Award -- and which finalist will get to meet the President. We
want public input on this final stage of the process, so have your say:
I’ve been in public service a long time, but the ideas that made the
final cut are all new to me. That’s because it’s the people on the
ground who know the nitty-gritty of how the government really works, and
how to make it work better.
- Paul Behe, a Paralegal Specialist for the Department of Homeland
Security out of Cleveland, Ohio, pointed out how advertising seized
property online could not only tighten up advertising budgets, but also
move these goods out of storage more quickly.
- Marjorie Cook of Gobles, Michigan, is a food inspector. She pointed
out that while important samples need to be shipped express to be
analyzed quickly for public safety, the containers they’re sent in can
be sent back much less expensively.
- Trudy Givens of Portage, Wisconsin is with the Bureau of Prisons and
noted that the Federal Register gets printed and mailed to nearly
10,000 recipients in the Federal workforce every workday, yet the
Register is available online.
- Thomas Koenning of Littleton, Colorado works on mine safety, and
gave a prime example of how streamlining government can not only
eliminate waste, but allow government to do its job better and
ultimately keep people safer by simply having mine operators and
contractors report quarterly coal production and worker hours online.
As I said, these ideas are all common sense, but the only people who
could have known that these things needed to be fixed were the people on
the front lines who deal with them every day. And beyond these four
ideas, the thousands that were submitted all helped us – and other
federal workers – think in new ways about how to serve you better.
Sincerely,
Vice President Biden
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