The Angry White Guy

(O2I2) Obama Office of Imaginary Information savings report

Posted July 30th 2009 at 12:37 pm by AWG

The O2I2 (Obama Office of Imaginary Information) has released their saving report, what report? Well remember when Obama was going to slash $100,000,000.00 from the budget or about 1/27,000th%? Which for the mathematically challenged that is the “equivalent of cutting a foot-long submarine sandwich from the budget of a construction worker making $60,000 a year” to quote the AP and they did it they’ve made up over a $100 million in cuts just to impress you. So lets dig a little and see what we find…

But first past post about this garbage…
$100 Million is a lot of money, $8 Billion not so much.
Good News budget SLASHED by 1/27,000%

And from the APObama in a moment of sanity…
Obama delivers on pledge for $100 million in cuts

YES HE DID… so let’s have a look at some of the slashing and cutting of the budget.
APPENDIX: List of Recommended Savings (by agency)

The Agriculture Department’s agency for animal and plant inspection canceled a meeting in Australia

Why they thought they need to go to Australia for meeting we may never know.

Commerce Department scrapped $131,000 worth of unnecessary office renovations

If they were unnecessary why were they being done?

Federal Emergency Management Agency is turning over 120,000 temporary housing units called “Katrina cottages” to the General Services Administration for maintenance and disposal, saving $3.8 million in “operational savings.”

Here is an idea… sell the damn “cottages” Katrina was what, 4 years ago shouldn’t these people be back on their feet and off the government tit by now? I’m sorry they lost their homes and all but 4 years… let get a move on.

Several agencies are making greater efforts to go “paperless” whenever possible

And we weren’t doing this already, why?

The Treasury Department will shred and recycle classified materials rather than burn them, saving $40,000 this year.

Will they get carbon credits for that? Surely Al gore will be impressed.

The Justice Department will save an estimated $4 million next year making travel arrangements online, rather than using travel agents.

And all these years ignoring William Shatner… the shame. Seriously this is innovative and something as large as the government doesn’t have it’s own travel agency?

The Air Force will install 2,800 compact fluorescent light bulbs, reducing electricity costs by $36,000 a year.

Oh so you’re going to practice what you preach on the CFL and you want a cookie. How long has the government been preaching CFL’s.

HUD proposes to reduce HUD’s energy consumption by turning off lights during non-working hours

What? Turning off lights during none working hours? Oh the madness of these cuts, what ever will the mice do in the dark?

Various bureaus within Treasury will achieve savings of approximately $0.6 million due to a number of energy efficiency measures, including upgrading a lighting system, shutting off computer systems when not in use, and turning off air conditioning systems during the evenings and weekends. Treasury has also renegotiated its electrical power purchasing agreement at a lower rate.

Turning off the A/C when no one is there… OMG but they might come into a hot building. God these people are idiots.

Navy: make corporate software purchases
Where appropriate, change to corporate purchase of enterprise-wide software licenses, instead of purchasing more expensive individual licenses.

Once again these is just insane, the NAVY that has a ship called the USS Enterprise in fact they’ve had several by this name and just figured out you can get cheaper software rates by buying enterprise-wide software licenses… as a veteran I feel save in saying these are our best and brightest?

Navy: eliminate inactive internet/intranet accounts Delete inactive computer accounts, thereby reducing the number of inactive accounts and the costs to manage them.

Eliminate inactive internet/intranet accounts and delete inactive computer accounts… is your head exploding yet that this wasn’t being done already?

Army: automated vendor payments (wide area workflow) WAWF is a system that automates payments to vendors. The savings results from the fact that it costs the Defense Financial Accounting System (DFAS) less to process electronic transactions than manual transactions. The savings should be seen in a reduction of the Army’s annual bill from DFAS.

This one I don’t like at all if you go to automatic payments you get automatic fraud, computers don’t know a bogus charge or detect double billing.

As a first step in converting lighting fixtures from compact fluorescent lighting (CFL) to more energy-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs), EPA has begun a pilot project

Oh hell no… we’re being forced to switch to CFL’s on the general public now you’re coming up with LED’s? Can’t we all save money by just basking in “The One’s” glow? BUT WAIT… Here is what they aren’t telling you is how much LED BULBS cost and is that cost factored into their alleged savings? FYI LED BULBS are about $40 a piece.

The IRS will eliminate unnecessary inserts and mailings to taxpayers. Eliminating the nearly dozen inserts that are included in notices to businesses informing them that they owe additional tax will save approximately $1 million. An additional $1.3 million will be saved by eliminating informational inserts when duplicate copies of taxpayer notices are mailed to the representatives of those taxpayers.

Let’s save zillions and eliminate the IRS, there’s a plan.

Treasury will consolidate IT contract support and eliminate unnecessary telephone lines for a savings of nearly $4 million.

Eliminate unnecessary telephone lines?? How about we eliminate unnecessary government employees like Timothy Geithner.

Paper and toner conservation A large number of DOJ copiers and printers can be configured to automatically print double-sided. Increasing the frequency of double-sided printing will reduce paper consumption and lower costs.

OMG you mean the back side of the paper is blank and it can be printed on too? Who’d ever thunk it.

DOJ is streamlining its process for paying credit card bills, saving an estimated $2 million annually.

How much would we save if you took their credit cards away?

HUD proposes to remove 60 HUD kiosks that have outlived their usefulness, thereby saving maintenance costs.

Hasn’t HUD itself out lived it’s usefulness? Think of the billions we’d save getting rid of them.

ED is eliminating a contract with outside providers to conduct Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) training to education community stakeholders. Instead, the Department will be using existing staff to conduct the training. This will result in savings of $70,000 for FY09.

OH kind of like every business is the country does… using in-house employees to train other employees, genius!

It goes on identifying more of these innovative and revolutionary cost cutting ideas that are common freaking sense for 95% of the public and then people wonder why we have a $12,000,000,000,000.00 deficit. They have a total of 77 ideas listed to cut cost and save money, I’d be interested to know how many of them where implemented and not just purposed let’s see a follow up report in 6 months as to a progress report and I’m willing to bet they are still spending money to studying ways to cut cost. This is more smoke and mirrors and I’m willing to bet little to none are ever implemented or completed.

Not that Obama would lie… oh no.

Tweet Buzz DIGG Facebook Ping Reddit Stumble