THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Thank you, thank you. Everybody please have a seat. Welcome to the White House. I am pleased that you could all join us today as I sign this bill -- the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act –- which, translated into English, means cutting down on waste, fraud and abuse, and ensuring that our government serves as a responsible steward（管家，乘务员） for the tax dollars of the American people.
This is a responsibility we’ve been working to fulfill from the very beginning of this administration. Back when I first started campaigning for office, I said I wanted to change the way Washington works so that it works for the American people. I meant making government more open and more transparent and more responsive to the needs of the people. I meant getting rid of the waste and inefficiencies that squander（浪费，漂泊） the people’s hard-earned money. And I meant finally revamping（修补，翻新） the systems that undermine our efficiency and threaten our security and fail to serve the interests of the American people.
Now, there are outstanding public servants doing essential work throughout our government. But too often, their best efforts are thwarted（挫败，反对） by outdated technologies and outmoded（过时的，不流行的） ways of doing business. That needs to change. We have to challenge a status quo that accepts billions of dollars in waste as the cost of doing business and enables obsolete（废词，陈腐的人） or under-performing programs to survive year after year, simply because that’s the way things have always been done.
This isn’t just about lines on a spreadsheet（电子数据表） or numbers in a budget, because when we fail to spend people’s tax dollars wisely, that’s money that we’re not investing in better schools for our kids, or tax relief for families, or innovation to create new industries and new jobs. When government doesn’t work like it should, it has a real effect on people’s lives -– on small business owners who need loans, on young people who want to go to college, on the men and women who’ve served this country and are trying to get the benefits that they’ve earned. And when we continue to spend as if deficits don’t matter, that means our kids and our grandkids may wind up（结束，卷起） saddled with debts that they’ll never be able to repay.
And the reality is that right now, in these difficult economic times, families across this country are cutting every frill（装饰，褶边） and stretching every dollar as far as they can -– and they should expect no less from their government.
If folks can book a flight or buy a pair of shoes online with the click of a button, there’s no reason they should have to fill out duplicative forms or endure endless red tape and delays when they deal with their government. So that’s why one of the first things we did when we arrived in Washington was to undertake an Accountable Government Initiative –- an effort that spans every agency, department and office in our government.
We named our first ever Chief Performance Officer, Jeffrey Zients, and we’re bringing to bear every tool at our disposal –- a combination of 21st century technology and old-fashioned common sense –- to ensure that our government operates as efficiently as possible and provides the highest quality of service to its customers, the American people.
We began by combining -- by going through the budget line by line and proposing $20 billion worth of cuts each year by targeting programs that are wasteful, duplicative or, in some cases, just plain ridiculous, like the $35 million we’re spending for a radio navigation system for ships. Since we now have this thing called GPS, we don’t need it. Or the $3 million that was spent on consultants to create seals and logos for the Department of Homeland Security. Their logos and seals are fine. (Laughter.) Or the billions of dollars slated to be spent on a fancy new presidential helicopter fleet that I didn’t want and didn’t need because Marine One is also fine.
We’ve drafted a budget for next year that freezes all discretionary（任意的，自由决定的） government spending outside of national security for three years, a budget, by the way, that would reduce this spending -- non-defense discretionary spending（可自由支配的个人开支） -- to its lowest level as a share of the economy in 50 years. This isn’t talked about a lot so I’m going to repeat it. Our budget would take non-security defense -- or non-defense spending to its lowest level since JFK -- lowest level as a percentage of the economy since JFK.
We’ve gone after wasteful government contracting with a vengeance（猛烈地，极度地） , working to put an end to unnecessary no-bid contracts and dramatically reinforcing the way government contracts are awarded. And we’re now on track to reach our goal of saving $40 billion by the end of the next fiscal year. We’re working to sell or lease out（出租） thousands of federal buildings which we no longer need and aren’t using, saving another $8 billion. We froze salaries for senior White House staff -- hence the glum（阴沉的，忧郁的） faces. (Laughter.)
And we’ve asked Congress for additional authority so that working together, we can move quickly to cut wasteful spending proposals before the money goes out the door. We’ve streamlined those college loan forms, eliminating nearly two dozen unnecessary questions.
