SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

In the early 1970's many mental institutions were closed and many of those patients ended up on the streets. Now many of these patients are in our Federal, State, and Municipal Jails. Our Judicial and Prison Systems are over-burdened with people that should have been treated psychologically in a hospital that specializes in mental illness. Many more are on our streets living in sub standard conditions. Most of them... more »

For 2 similar programs in different agencies, let the primary site of one program be the secondary site for the other program, and visa versa. This will reduce or avoid investment and operations & maintenace costs from 4 sites to costs for 2 sites. Each site must be a little more robust, better documented, and scalable in time of disaster to temporarily take on the work load of the other program. Each program will... more »

Federal employees should have the ability to convert unused sick leave accrual to annual leave. Employees should be mandated to carry a minimum balance of unused sick leave before they would be able to convert furture hours into annual leave. For instance: an employee must have 240 hours of accrued sick leave in order to convert future hours. Conversion could be a two hour or three hour of sick leave for one hour... more »

Staff should receive promotions in-house whenever possible. This would elimate the several thousand dollars spent on moving a promoted person to their next assignment. In-house promotions are common place in many state agencies and have negligible negative impact on their upward advancement. House hunting trips, moving costs, lodging and additional funds needed to move a person across the country are saved. It is... more »

Right now the F-22 is the most dangerous jet fighter out there. It can go up against a dozen F-15s and F-16s and shoots them all down; it has yet to fight anyone else. It could be the stealth capability of the aircraft or its advanced weapons system that give it the edge. I propose this, take two F-22s and strip all its stealth coating from them and paint them F-15E model gray(118). Fly it at the next Red Flag and... more »

All brahnches of the Federal government employ cell phone technology. The types of phones and associated costs vary based on the source contracting office. Costs could be lowered if all Federally issued cell phones were issued under the same negotiated master contractor for minutes, text, and data service. Per minute, text, or data packet as part are excluded - each vendor must offer plans of at three sizes, covering... more »

Local County Governments already use this type of program and it has saved many jobs and reductions in force. In a VTO program, you can trade the government back 1%, 2%,3%,4% 5%,10%,15% or 20% of your pay to get the equivalent days or hours off. Allows for flexible hours, more vacation, or shorter days/weeks. Program does not impact your FTE status, retirement or benefits. This program will save millions during a normal... more »

We could reduce the amount of paper we buy if we change all printers in the federal gov't to print DOUBLE SIDED vs. only printing on one side per sheet. This could be done by having IT set all printers to default to print on both sides of paper (employee could manually switch to single sided if needed). We could also implement this with copier machines. If we had complete federal employee "buy-in," we could cut our... more »

This idea applies to ALL government agencies. Eliminate all spending on promotional trinkets. The cumulative cost of the trinkets is excessive and the time spent ordering the trinkets is wasteful. The trinkets collect dust, often end up unused, and shouldn't be paid for by taxpayers.

Given the realities of the shrinking federal budget I would recommend not skipping the lower General Schedule grade levels.

Most of the federal job postings I have seen skip the even levels of GS-6, GS-8 and GS-10 and use only the odd designations of GS-5, GS-7, GS-9 and GS-11. Under the current schedule, a newly hired GS-7 employee under “The Rest of the US” locality pay scale would typically receive annual raises... more »

Recommend that White House/Agencies review ALL of the SAVE ideas for Cost Cutting measures. There are a lot of individual ideas that are worth implementing or at least receiving careful consideration. The top ones selected (by votes?) are great, but I'm looking at them and seeing some real gems out there.

And isn't that what this AWARD is about? To SAVE money within the federal government? Then let's just do it...... more »

Each year, on the anniversary date of the enlisted military member, they recieve a clothing allowance. Based upon the branch of service and sex of the member, they recieve between 388.80 - 608.40. (www.military.com)

As of 31 May 2011, the Department of Defense had 1,182,849 enlisted members worldwide from all services. (DoD Personnle and military casualty statistics)

If the U.S. would do away with this automatic... more »

My idea is to create an Government skill and/or Project database for use for internal agencey projects.

What problem are you trying to solve?
At any given moment each agency has over a hundred individual internal projects going on. To get these completed in most cases offices solely use talent within their office. I propose that we create either a talent pool database that associates skills with each divisions employee... more »

Hours of work for all federal employees inclusive of local staff at Embassies around the world should be reduced by 2hrs per day, this will result in significant cost savings; plus several other intangible benefits.

For a quick calculation of the saving:10hrs (2hrs per day x 5 days) per employee multiplied x (#of federal employees+ #of local staff) x average hourly salary/wage per hour.

This not only saves the government... more »

Scientific Integrity includes, but is not limited to, people engaged in the combination of transparency in the preparation, identification, use of scientific information in policymaking, and strict adherence to: policies; peer-review guidelines; procedures; ethics; and the concept of continuous improvement resulting from scientific assessments; audits; and evaluations.

Since 2004, the US EPA has been using contractors... more »