For people who cover the US federal government and its sprawling bureaucracy for a living, the roll-out of the president's annual budget request can be a bit like Christmas and a bit like an Easter-egg hunt. Trawling through the thousands of pages of budget documents and sitting through budget briefing can yield charming revelations--and sometimes horrors--large and small.
This year, among the surprises was learning that even though the US Department of Energy has managed multi-billion dollar budgets for decades, and has funded 112 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, it has just recently figured out that it could save money by setting its printers to print on both sides of the paper.
"We've actually done some of the simple things, whether it is something as straightforward as setting the default on the printers to double-sided copying...to moving toward a non-refundable ticket policy, which generates real savings every time an employee or contractor travels," said Owen Barwell, the acting chief financial officer at DOE, during a budget briefing earlier this week.
On Monday DOE and the rest of the executive branch released their fiscal 2013 budget requests, and amid ever-tightening federal budgets, the agency touted how it was cleaning up spending in its own house.
Agency bean-counters have also taken a hard look at the department's operations budget, and decided that refundable plane tickets are more expensive than non-refundable plane tickets. Such is the learning curve for a big government bureaucracy. "The previous policy in the department was to use fully refundable airline tickets, and in most cases, you could save a lot of money by purchasing non-refundable tickets," Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has a Nobel Prize himself in physics, told reporters.
Chu is a self-described obsessive when it comes to saving energy and money. After moving to Washington to become a Cabinet secretary in 2009, he bragged about insulating the mailbox slot on his front door, and one can only imagine how he has dealt with single-sided printing at DOE headquarters over the last three years.
Chu didn't say how much the plane tickets or printer adjustments would save the department, which requested $27.2 billion for fiscal 2013. Budget documents shows the agency's office-supply budget at $3.8 million, almost all of which is spent at Paper Clips, an office supply store run by the National Industries for the Blind.
But the agency has also figured out ways to save huge amounts of money by streamlining its operations. Through an initiative dubbed the "Strategic Sourcing Program," DOE has been consolidating purchasing across the contractors that operate its national laboratories and other facilities around the US, which has saved the federal government a respectable $330 million per year, according to Chu.
It has also reduced the size of its vehicle fleet in the Washington, DC, area by 44%, and reduced the time needed to hire new federal employees nearly by half.
DOE has also made some more fundamental changes, looking for savings by coordinating research and development across agency programs, so that battery basic research in the Office of Science works closely with battery development in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, for example.
While no one in Washington expects the budget to make it past Republican opposition on Capital Hill before the November presidential and congressional elections, the process of rolling out the request also serves as a way for the administration to market itself. And this year, that marketing message is all about saving money.
But not everyone agrees that all the savings are improvements. In a blog post last week, the nuclear policy journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists eviscerated the site as almost unusable for finding information, and described the elimination of mountains of data previously available.
A response on--where else--the DOE blog, said the new web design would require "some time" to allow access to all of the information previously available.
The DOE site has received failing reviews from users. "Whenever I go to that web site, I do it with a heavy heart and a heavy sigh," one employee of a DOE contractor said. The employee asked not to be identified, lest their printer settings come under scrutiny. "Generally people just don't like it." However, DOE points out, the new site saves $10 million per year.
To subscribe or visit go to: http://www.platts.com