White House Asks Citizens to Help SAVE Some Money

This morning brings news that the President's SAVE Award -- which, cleverly, stands for "Securing Americans Value and Efficiency" -- is "up for final public voting":http://www.whitehouse.gov/save-award.

For the unfamiliar, the SAVE Award is an award for the idea, submitted by a government employee, that will most effectively cut red tape, reduce government bureaucracy, and generally make government more efficient and un-waste-y. The Obama Administration has opened voting on the top suggestions to the general public, and the winning idea will be submitted in the President's FY2011 budget. The winner will also get to meet the President, which is nifty. I've just gone through the top four ideas, and they're not bad:

* An employee at a national forest in West Virginia wants to radically simplify how the government processes fees that are collected from the public.

* A HUD employee from Alaska notes that information on subsidized housing is often collected in multiple, redundant formats and instances.

* A VA employee in Colorado wants veterans who are discharged from VA hospitals to be able to take their remaining medication with them, rather than having it thrown away.

* An SSA employee in Alabama wants to enable appointment scheduling online.

These all reflect a good deal of common sense, and I think do a real service in showing the public that government employees aren't just cogs in a massive federal system; they, like the rest of us, are constantly surveying their environments, looking for new efficiencies or ways to just do a better job. And the White House is to be applauded for putting these to a public vote. The value here isn't just "transparency" for the public, but the ability for the White House to align spending decisions with actual public priorities.

That being said, the way this is being done raises some interesting questions. It's not clear how much money would be saved or bureaucracy avoided by any of these suggestions. A quick CBO score or something like it would have been a good way to help make the decision. Most of us have to make a business case when we want to alter the way something like this works, and citizens voting should have the benefit of knowing the predicted ROI before voting. That, again, is not just for the sake of "transparency" -- if an implemented idea lives up to its promised result, that's an incredibly strong case for sustaining and expanding this kind of public participation in the budgeting process. There are also some pure process questions, such as why only four out of the 38,000 ideas (or approximately 0.01%) are being presented here for voting. It's possible that only that many met "OMB's evaluation criteria":http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/save/SaveAwardHomePage/, which is its own valuable intelligence about how hard it is even for federal employees to take a global view of government's operating expenses.

THAT being said, these are all questions that should be answered in the next iteration of this, *not* reasons not to do it. It will be exciting to track how ideas make it from suggestion, to vetting, to voting, to implementation. The last of these stages is always the most difficult part of online citizen consultation, and if the White House really is able to successfully align the process owners (the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) with the substantive owners (OMB and Congress), that in itself will be a striking achievement for transparency as a gateway to real accountability.