Never has the United States faced greater economic and environmental crisis. Lessening government waste offers clues how we can best remedy our situation. If government can not clean up their own house how can they ask so of the American citizens?

We have the opportunity to conserve as a society. We as a nation can no longer afford to waste. Never has an American generation used so much and invested so little for future generations. We have incentives to spend however not to save that wastes instead of conserves.

Our political process now must create a new form of saving based decision making. Lessening government waste requires close examination as to what exactly what, how, why and where America loses, discards or throws away numerous forms of its resources. Preventing further market failure will only happen when we embrace both full cost accounting and integrate environmental management thinking into all aspects of public decision making. If we as nation wish to maintain our precarious world leader status role we must readdress investing in our country in a less wasteful manner.

Just one example of mismanagement is our nation's capital. The Washington DC area not only produces more carbon dioxide than Sweden, Denmark and Finland but our government stimulates the most significant global loss of resources. For example, the District of Columbia and other government's budgets are based on the principle of "use it or loose it." Government must shift from this behavior of consuming more to understanding performance is measured by output over input.

American can explore new management techniques that are effectively developed offering various regulatory approaches preventing market failure that drastically cost taxpayers more in the future dollars. How can private markets be stimulated while trustworthy performance systems mandated to make the market- and federalism-based systems work effectively? Critical to this national policy shift is how everyone-governments, companies, and citizens, in the United States and around the world-must come into partnership profiting from government waste reduction. How will these partnerships be created and sustained?

Today we face a new policy arena of massive financial experimentation, uncertain results, complex relationships, and an inescapable mandate for improvement. It is clear that neither the public nor the private sector can stay where they are. Both sectors have created ways that do not fully optimize their executive of goods and services since wasteful practices of this process are self-serving. Increasing productivity can result when a new equation is reached. Our output and inputs must balance with increased environmental and social considerations on how the general welfare is impacted on the way we do business. We can no longer dump on our environment and human resources. Simply we must venture where we have never gone before. Yes our hardest task to be held fully accountable to national policy of new performance measurements. These measures must balance flexible environmental partnerships offer, integrated management system and ingenious paperwork processes. Preventing pollution, improving environmental performance, and integrating approaches across media have lagged behind. The performance-based process must evolve through trials and tribulations into proven practices.

Our money will never reside fully in our bank account. Our saving resides in how we better invest in how the American government works. We are all shareholders in the United States government. First are countless ways to vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in our political system. There are diverse ways we drain resources that could otherwise go to Americans as the beneficiaries.

All Americans are resource managers. We can learn to be more skillful and ingenious or the opposite. Both we and the Feds must better educate to ways to improve the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of federal functions, programs, and policies. Remember how we tax is a core reason why we revolted from the English. To become more competitive in the international marketplace we must explore opportunities exist to streamline, target, and consolidate programs to improve their delivery. We have the opportunity to better weed out programs that are outdated, ineffective, unsustainable, or simply a lower priority than they used to be.

A national dialogue is required of our federal mission to prioritize our national goals. By deploying a variety of tools and, stimulating participation of many organizations, such a reprioritization of what the federal government does, how it does it, and in some cases, which does the government's business, is required to better budget on our fiscal future.

Important as safeguarding funds from fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement is to pursue widespread opportunities to improve the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of existing federal goals and program commitments. The basic goals of many federal programs-both mandatory and discretionary-enjoy broad support. That support only makes it more important for us to pay attention to the substantial opportunities to improve cost effectiveness and the delivery of services and activities.

In conclusion good oversight is critical to lessening government waste. Does one Fed program duplicate or even work at cross purposes with other related programs? Is the program financially sustainable and are there opportunities for instituting appropriate cost sharing and recovery from nonfederal parties including private entities that benefit from federal activities? Can the program be made more efficient through reengineering or streamlining processes or restructuring organizational roles and responsibilities? We will prosper once our nation agrees upon, government waste reduction measures that keep its expenses down and benefits up.