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Floor Speech
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Mr. RICKETTS. Mr. President, I rise today to compliment my esteemed colleague from Iowa, who is the founding member of the DOGE Caucus, as well as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for their effort to be able to create the Department of Government Efficiency.
This is something that is near and dear to my heart because as Governor of Nebraska, this is what we did. We focused on how we could drive efficiency through our State operations.
Now, if you want to think about the big argument between Republicans and Democrats on a really macro scale--what it is--it comes down to what should government properly do. What should be the size and scope of government? Well, there are actually things we agree that government should do between Republicans and Democrats; and for those things, we should do them really, really well. All too often, government fails because it is not properly managed, because we don't do a good job; and when we don't do a good job, we end up wasting taxpayers' dollars.
As the Governor of Nebraska, this is one of the things I focused on to be able to do a better job on--take my private sector experiences, in coming from the business world, and applying them to the running of State government. We showed that the things you do in the private sector will work in running the public sector as well.
In the State of Nebraska, we implemented Lean Six Sigma. Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology. There are a number of them out there, and this is the one we chose. What it does is you break down an operation; you count what the steps are and what the steps, you know, should be; you get the frontline people engaged--the people actually doing the work involved in looking at those steps; and see if you can cut the waste in the number of steps and everything else so that you can make the process more efficient. That is how you can do a better job of actually providing services while reducing costs at the same time.
That is the thing. Every time you get to government, they say: Oh, we want to cut expenses, blah, blah, blah. Oh, you are going to cut services.
No. No. No.
In the private sector, you can't go to your customers and say: Well, I am going to reduce your prices, but I am going to also reduce your service, because your customers will go someplace else. It doesn't work that way. So the private sector figures out how to do a better job of providing services while reducing their expenses. We can do the same thing in government. In the private sector, you have competition that is going to drive inefficient businesses out. In the government sector, it is going to require people like Elon, Vivek, and the Senators here in this room to be able to drive that through our government Agencies to get that efficiency.
I want to talk a little bit about what we did, because it was very effective. I mentioned that you measure the steps. You count how many steps there are, and see where the overlaps are. One area we did it was in air construction permits. We had 190 steps that it took to issue that permit. We cut that down to 22 steps. By doing that--sorry. It was 110 steps that we cut down to 22. By doing that, we cut it down from 190 days to be able to issue that permit to 65 days. Now, we can't change any of the environmental regulations. That was just a better job of issuing those permits. And, when you free up your teammates' time because they are not wasting time on all those extra steps, they can do more work--they are more productive--and can focus on things that are going to be more important--for example, more difficult permits.
We used this in a variety of ways, and we showed lots of improvement. For example, in our economic assistance line in August of 2014, it was taking about 23 minutes to answer that phone call. We set a goal of setting 5 minutes or less to answer those phone calls for those people who were calling in seeking our assistance. We hit that goal all the way up until the pandemic.
It was taking us 40 days to issue SNAP applications--food stamps. Again, if you are one of those families in need and it is taking 40 days to process that application, what is that saying about how we think about it? We set a goal of getting applications done in 10 days. We hit that all the way up until we hit the pandemic. Then, even when we got out of compliance--when we started going above 10 days--we knew we were above it, and we took the steps to start getting that number back down again.
We were able to do it in a variety of other ways; like, for example, with the Department of Motor Vehicles, getting you your driver's license. In our Centers of Excellence, we were able to get that from 22 minutes down to 8 minutes in getting people in and out the door.
With our Green Sheets, which is what we used in our Department of Transportation to be able to make sure that our contractors were doing the right things with regard to the environment or antiquities or whatever--making sure they were following all the rules--we were able to cut that from 16 days down to 3 days so that those contractors could get into the field faster and get our projects moving faster.
Here is another one: We would issue reimbursement checks to families with children who have special needs. Often, these special needs children will have to have specialized care. Families will have to travel to that hospital to go get that. They would get reimbursed for those expenses, but it was taking us 13 to 15 days to reimburse those expenses. Well, what is wrong with that? That is over a 2-week pay period. Those families had to float those costs from one paycheck to the next paycheck. You know and I know that a lot of families live paycheck to paycheck, so that put a financial burden on those families with kids with special needs. We were able to cut that time down to 2 days to be able to make sure we could get those expense checks back to those families in need so that they wouldn't have to float that and experience that financial hardship from one payment to the next.
Well, what did we have to do to do that? We had to get everybody on board--our entire team. At the end of the day, in the State of Nebraska, we trained over 30,000 of our teammates in the Lean Six Sigma process. There were wipeouts kind of in the introductory one. Over 6,200 of our mid-level managers in the yellow belts, the next level up. We trained 248 executive green belts. Those are the upper level executives--again, more training. Then we trained nine black belts. Those are the folks who oversee the whole program.
By implementing all of that, we were able to save over 900,000 hours of our teammates' time. We did over 1,000 different projects. We saved $115 million in hard savings. Because of those processes, for example, we were able to reduce the square footage that we were occupying as the State of Nebraska by 60,000. It was 60,000 square feet we took off our rolls; we reduced our employment by 3\1/2\ percent; and we were able to control spending.
Before I became Governor, our budget was growing at 6\1/2\ percent a year. I would say that was not sustainable. We were able to, on average, while I was Governor, keep that growth of our budget to 2.8 percent a year--just 2.8 percent a year on average. I might just contrast that to what we are doing here in the Federal Government right now. In 2019, we spent $4.4 trillion. In 2024, that was closer to $6.8 trillion, $6.9 trillion. That is, roughly, a 55-percent increase in just 5 years. Folks, that is not sustainable.
That is why what this Department of Government Efficiency, the DOGE, and what this incoming administration are going to do is so important. We have got to be able to get our spending under control. It is a risk to our country. We have got to get this under control, and we can do it. We can do a better job of providing services and keeping our expenses down just like the private sector does by leveraging tools like Lean Six Sigma, just like the private sector does.
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