Secretary Napolitano: Increase efficiency and save taxpayer dollars

Secretary Napolitano Inaugural Visit
Originally uploaded by Imagery

Recently, the Secretary announced a department-wide program to cut waste, increase efficiency, and save money. Among many initiatives, this one caught my eye:

We will eliminate non-mission-critical travel for employees, and maximize the use of the conference calls and web-based trainings and meetings. We will reduce subscriptions to professional publications and newspapers to lower costs and avoid duplication.

Well, if this is going to work in America's smallest armed force, we're going to need better computers. How about computers with full video conference capabilities? How about greater bandwidth?

Of course, I find it amusing that in addition to eliminating all non-mission-critical travel -- and I would put a slew of training in there, and conferences, and meetings, and, well, you get the idea -- we're killing off professional publications. "Okay, you can't go to this event which is really professional development... and we're cutting off your professional journals, too... so your knowledge will be pretty much out-of-date in no time at all.

But, she is on to something... if we had full-up computer equipment that could handle it, we probably could cut out some travel... but, the question I ask is, "Would the savings in travel costs really off-set the additional expenditures necessary to get the program online... to include tens of thousands of new computers and increased bandwidth.