Geting promoted at the individual level is often related to standing out. The way you stand out in the government is to start a new project which either increases effecency or does something new. Unfortunatly starting a new program is far less risky at the professional level becuase it's harder to fail. Saving money requres an existing process with a well known goal and cost.
EX: Saving money on toner cartigaes by changing the default faunt on a government document.
PS: I was part of the EISP program which reduces the cost to create ISP documentation by half. The contractors where not happy about this, but the government loved it.
I didn't know that Government gives promotion based on meritocracy. I have been working in US for 5 years now and even in for-profit corporations, seniority (and not meritocracy) plays a big role while deciding who gets promotion and who doesn't.
And I hope you are kidding with your toner cartridge example. I doubt if toner costs more than 0.1% of the total project costs, by reducing toner costs, you have achieved nothing. And if someone does get promoted because of this 'cost cutting' idea, it shows dilbert management and nothing else.
For some projects / groups, printing costs are ~30% of the total budget. A good example is sending out ~200,000,000 Social Security statements. At some point within the Social Security Administration it's just a few people running an automated system. This is when Toyota style continuous process improvement can make things lean.
PS: It's true that people who have been around for a long time tend to be promoted, but those who innovate and network tend to get promoted faster.
Or recommending the use of semicolons in situations where a whole colon is overkill?
The real problem, I suspect, isn't so much the waste caused by all those failproof projects. It's that, five or ten years down the line, the obvious solution to a real problem will have a side effect that diminishes the importance of some bureaucrat's carefully guarded little empire.
