The bureaucracy is flat? SAVE Award finalists blog for the White House
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, December 21 2009
The four rank-and-file federal workers who reached the final round of the White House's SAVE Award are getting a chance to do something that the vast majority of the people who rank in the federal bureaucracy somewhere between them and President Obama will probably never get to do: share their vision of better government with the world on the White House's official blog. The SAVE Award was an online contest designed to extract from the vast sea of federal workers the very best ideas about saving taxpayer dollars -- ideas borne of years of government experience and generally pretty roundly ignored.
Today's blogging finalist is one Julie Fosbender. Fosbender serves as the "North Zone Recreation Manager" in eastern West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest. She, it seems, has for some long portion of her career been harboring an idea for fixing the convoluted process by which National Park Service entrance fees are collected and aggregated. Her idea for banking locally was untapped, until the Obama White House decided to hold a contest:
While there is no question in my mind about the importance of proper handling and accounting of the money collected, I have complained for years about the process the Forest Service uses to deal with this money. In a nut shell, we have to turn the cash into a money order, complete paperwork, and then mail everything (certified) to a bank in California every week no matter how much money is collected. It boggles my mind to think about how much money the Forest Service must spend to collect money. Salary time, money order fees, postage – it all adds up.
(Photo credit: J. Stephen Conn)