Suvir Mirchandani had a science project. He wanted to find ways to reduce waste of resources at his school. And what he found was a very effective, very simple way to save the school some money. A simple change in font.
Suvir is 14 now. But he was a mere sixth grader when he worked this out. He would be able to save his district $21,000 a year. But then he had a bigger target in mind, as CNN reports:
With an annual printing expenditure of $1.8 billion, the government was a much more challenging task than his school science project.
Suvir repeated his tests on five sample pages from documents on the Government Printing Office website and got similar results –change the font, save money.
Using the Government Services Administration’s estimated annual cost of ink — $467 million — Suvir concluded that if the federal government used Garamond exclusively it could save nearly 30% — or $136 million per year. An additional $234 million could be saved annually if state governments also jumped on board, he reported.
Simply switching to Garamond would save the government $467 million a year in wasted ink and paper. But as Reason notes, the government is not interested. They called the work “remarkable” but expressed no interest in pursuing the savings.
Sounds like Mirchandani may end up learning two lessons: With a little thought, a smart person can find simple ways for the government to save money—and the government doesn’t seem terribly interested in pursuing them.
Jake Walker at RedState suggests that perhaps it’s not a terrible thing the government would give this a pass.
Suvir’s idea would face to practical issues in implementation. First, there’s a good chance that, if they used a lighter font, government employees would likely end up using larger point sizes, thus using a similar if not greater amount of ink and more paper. Second, documents intended for senior citizens and those with bad eyesight would probably have a harder time reading lighter fonts.
Jake adds that $400 million is little more than a rounding error in a budget that exceeds a staggering $4 trillion, though he concludes it is still worth doing.
However, the $400 million is objectively not chump change. Nor is it a rounding error. It is waste, in true form. Waste that can be corrected through a simple change. It’s a presumption that the font would be any less readable, and therefore a presumption that anyone would begin using larger point sizes. Plus I’ve worked in government. It’s a generous assumption that government workers would know how to change the font back anyway.
It is also worth pointing out that, while internally one might find a small change like this to be not worth doing, this is no longer internal. It is out there. CNN has reported it. So now we have that moment where we can all decide together that spending $400 million dollars needlessly is something we are just going to publicly declare as fine and acceptable, or if waste on that scale is something we as citizens are going to say “fix this!”
In other words, I don’t want to encourage the culture of frivolous or wanton spending, just because eliminating that spending doesn’t wipe out the debt. Do you? But blowing this off as not good enough is exactly that. It’s a collective shrug.
Well count me out of that shrug. I say make the change, and lets start fostering a culture of prudence, not passivity.