The Trump administration, intent on cutting costs on government contracts, is offering to pay federal employees as much as $10,000 for ideas that lead to verified savings.
The Treasury Department is asking frontline employees to submit proposals to cut or eliminate contracts in their program areas. If those cancellations are approved and verified by the Treasury and the General Services Administration, the employees can receive as much as $10,000 per contract action. As first announced on Wednesday, employees would get 1% of the savings, but the GSA later increased the award to 5%.
While the program is currently limited to Treasury employees, Secretary Scott Bessent said the model could be scaled across government.
“We look forward to working with our partners across the Trump administration to ensure that every taxpayer dollar is spent wisely and efficiently,” he said in a statement.
The idea of tapping federal workers’ ideas to save money isn’t new. Former President Barack Obama also had a SAVE program — his acronym stood for Securing Americans’ Value and Efficiency — that encouraged federal employees to submit cost-saving proposals.
There was no cash reward — the only prize was a meeting with the president — but the initiative still yielded more than 38,000 ideas. One winner: ending the automatic mailing of hard copies of the Federal Register to 8,000 employees.
The new program is more focused, building on GSA’s Defend the Spend initiative that called on agencies to justify spending on consulting contracts. Earlier this year, the government’s central contracting agency moved to terminate “non-essential” contracts that only produced reports or coaching. It also sent letters to firms including McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group demanding they show that their federal engagements deliver “genuine value” to taxpayers.
The savings push is a remnant of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, whose efforts became decentralized after Tesla CEO Elon Musk left the White House initiative in May. President Donald Trump signed an order in February requiring agencies to review contract and grant payments, provide more contracting transparency and freeze employee credit cards unless specifically authorized.
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