SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

Reform the Combined Federal Campaign: eliminate paper waste and tremendous cost of personnel oversight by conducting the campaign across the federal government using solely the e-giving system. Donors could search charities online and complete electronic pledge forms, thereby eliminating the costs associated with printing thousands of each. This would also drastically reduce time and costs associated with preparing... more »

The government spends thousands to millions of dollars making plastic IDs for their government employees each year. When these IDs expire or their beholder leaves his/her position, they are then tossed into the trashed and disposed as waste; waste destined to sit in a landfill. Why not recycle them? By making IDs out of recycled plastic and then recycling the IDs themselves after use, the government could not only increase... more »

We could save a lot of paper if our printers defaulted to two-sided (duplex) printing, with the option to print one-sided, across all government agencies.

Stop printing the government budget report. There is no reason every member of Congress and the White House needs a bound copy of the budget. Let them print it off their own printers if they want a hard copy, otherwise just .pdf it.

ISDS team sheet are often 12 pages or more. We are required print one for the inmate and one for the file (that is over 24 pages of paper at a time) and with a case load of at least 130 inmates or more and team twice a year that is over 6200 sheets of paper per case manager per year. That is only if you have a small case load. We need to start printing these teams multi page per sheet, where there are at least 2 pages... more »

When an inmate enters a new institution in the Bureau of Prisons (often more than twice a year) he is made sure to be given an Admission and Orientation handbook which is 57 pages long. We could save a lot of money and paper by at least printing these 2 to a page or more. We could also give the inmates a way to look these up in an online application such as TRU lincs. Much the same way staff member look up program statements... more »

Double sided printing and copying can save 50% of paper used for informal printing. By instructing employees to use doubled sided printing and copying or changing the default status of printers and copiers to double sided, a huge amount of paper can be saved! Files will also, as a result, become smaller and will save space in file cabinets.

Here at Social Security, we print a 3-4 page summary of every application for benefits that is filed. My agency is a leader in the use of the internet as a way of doing business. As such, we should be asking every applicant if they have a personal email address, and if so, rather than print them a summary of their application, produce a pdf file of it, then send it encrypted to their email address, in a password protected... more »

For court proceedings we are CONSTANTLY printing 145 page Mexico packets to submit to the court. We also do this for other country packets that are even larger! My propsal is to digitize country profiles and reports and have a set copy already at the courts. We go through boxes and boxes of paper at our office and i'm positive that we would be able to reduce paper costs dramatically if the courts had a disk with country... more »

Eliminate Newspapers Delivery to Federal Offices Each morning all throughout the federal government, offices are receiving thousands of copies of multiple newspapers and magazines. The vast majority of these subscriptions can be eliminated; only the agency public affairs office might possibly require these publications. These public affairs offices in many case already employ the best practice of compiling relevant... more »

If the Government really wants to cut down on wasteful spending, they need to limit color printing.

Our office, of less than 200 employees, spends over $7K/month on color printing costs. We use two Xerox machines with each requiring one black and three color drums ($771/ea), five color and black toners ($280 - $300+/ea), a fuser (over $800), etc. We change color drums about twice a month.

Many people in our office... more »

It's too easy to hit the print button, when you don't really need to/want to print. A pop-up button asking "are you sure you want to print xxx number of pages to xxx printer, at a cost of $xx.xx to taxpayers?" could help folks think twice about whether printing is necessary. If so, click YES, and the print job would proceed. If not, click NO to cancel.

Every time an action is printed in FPPS a job seperator sheet is printed at the beginning and end of that job. This means that a stack of 100 processed actions will print out as 100 print job cover pages, 100 sf-50's, and 100 print job final pages. This creates two sheets of waste for every one printed sheet of useble documentation.
Print jobs of actions that are released to print jointly should process through FPPS as... more »

It seems as though every time I go to a training class, I get a large plastic binder full of paper that is destined to sit in my filing cabinet unused after the class is over. In the worst case scenario, it's just a printout of the Powerpoint slides with some space on the side for notes. This seems ridiculous when it would be much easier to e-mail students the .ppt file. In any case, the binders seem outdated, and I think... more »

If the GPO was required to print government documents only in the English language their budget would shrink to manageable levels. This is a hot button political question right now, but it's a win-win-win. 1.) GPO budget shrinks 2.) interpreters / translators get work 3.) New arrivals are compelled to learn the english language and better integrate into the United States.