SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

As we all know, at the end of the FY each agency scrambles to spend what is left in their budgets. Most of the spending is careless and wasteful. The primary reason for this is because the departements know that if they do not exhaust their budget, they will not get those funds back in their next budget.

President Obama should recognize this wasteful spending and offer enticing incentives for agencies that do not... more »

Stop the historical waste of monies not spent during the budget year. Stop protecting our image of not being able to budget properly and allow moneies to be returned rather than spent or wasted. We are often required to budget large sums of money for a specific lease or contract that for many reasons, does not get completed. Rather than return that money, we are required to spend it. This happeded last year and we... more »

It appears that most of us agree that at the end of the fiscal year a large amount of money is wasted in order to keep the previous years budget. My suggestion is to allow the excess funds to be saved and reduce the budgets by a small amount accross the board. Allowing the funds to be saved while reducing the budgets across the board will end wasteful spending year round.

Stop the end of Fiscal Year wasteful spending on non-essential things and return the funds without detriment to the following years budget because of non-use in the previous year. It seems that one of the main reasons wasteful spending occurs is the fear of setting a precedence which might affect the next year's budget; if that fear can be eliminated and instead rewarded some honorable mention to the agency which has... more »

True savings will come from the bottom up, however those savings will be irrelevant if Agency managers are forced to make unnecessary purchases at the end of the year on a use or lose budget.

This theory isn’t new, it’s basic economics --- No manager wants to cut their own budget just to risk penalization for being over budget the following year.

Perhaps the most economical way to manage this is to put ALL savings... more »

All federal agencies I've been involved with go through the same thing at the end of every fiscal year - a huge spending spree, many times on items not needed, to spend down money before it is swept away. A big reason for this is fear that the budget requests for the following year may not be approved if the agency did not spend it's entire budget in the current year.
This is wasteful spending of money. The so called... more »