Enter Your Cost-Saving Idea for a SAVE Award

A Message from Steven Chu

July 26, 2011

Steven Chu

Over the past two years, through the SAVE Award, people like you have submitted more than 56,000 ideas to improve government — making it both more effective and more efficient.

Just last year, Department of Energy employees submitted 548 proposals. From improving video-conferencing to reduce how much we spend on travel (an idea which got more than 50 votes!) to looking at how we manage office space at one of our sites — you spoke and we listened.

Across the federal government, ideas like yours are saving hundreds of millions of dollars, cutting back on waste, making government more efficient, effective, and accountable to the American people. That is why I am excited to announce the launch of the third annual SAVE Award competition.

Our goal this year is simple: to give all of you a chance to submit suggestions about how our agency can save money and improve performance. To enter your idea now through Friday, July 29, click here. The winner will be invited to the White House to present the idea to the President. As in previous years, dozens of other ideas will be included in the President’s next budget submission.

Last year’s winner was Trudy Givens, a 20-year employee of the Bureau of Prisons from Wisconsin, who saw that no one was reading the hard copies of the Federal Register delivered to her office each day. She said it just didn’t make sense to print and send thousands of copies to employees when it was available online. While that may sound small, those costs add up across the Federal government, and her idea is expected to save millions of taxpayer dollars each year.

Do you have an idea? Just take a minute of your time and enter it here.

DOE employees have shown me time and again their tremendous commitment to making government work better and more efficiently for the American people. I hope you will participate and put YOUR ideas forward. Let’s show everyone that DOE is a leader in finding smart, creative ways to do more with less.

Thank you for your support in this effort.

– Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy
the.secretary@hq.doe.gov

(As part of the registration process, BNL employees should select “Department of Energy” for both “Department or Agency” and “Component” and then, where it says “Contractor,” type in “Brookhaven Science Associates.”)

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