VIDEO: Ricketts Shares Proven Solutions to Cut Waste and Make the Federal Government Work Better

January 9, 2025

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday on the Senate floor, U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts (R-NE)shared Nebraska’s successes in cutting waste and making government work better. Ricketts is a founding member of the Senate DOGE Caucus, led by Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), which aims to streamline federal services. The DOGE Caucus will work with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

“The private sector figures out how to do a better job of providing services while reducing their expenses,” Ricketts said. “We can do the same thing in government. Now in the private sector you have competition that’s going to drive inefficient businesses out. In the government sector, it’s going to require people like Elon and Vivek, the Senators here in this room, to be able to drive that through our government agencies to get that efficiency.”

When Ricketts was Governor, the State of Nebraska trained 30,000 teammates in Lean Six Sigma, a process improvement methodology. This led to Nebraskans spending less time filling out forms, waiting on hold, and standing in line.

“And by implementing all of that, we were able to save over 900,000 hours of our teammates’ time,” Ricketts continued. “We did over a thousand different projects. We saved $115 million in hard savings. And because of those processes, for example, we were able to reduce the square footage that we were occupying in the state of Nebraska by 60,000. 60,000 square feet we took off our rolls. We reduced our employment by 3.5%. And we were able to control spending.”

“And that is why this Department of Government Efficiency, the DOGE, and what this incoming administration is going to do is so important,” Ricketts closed. “We’ve got to be able to get our spending under control. It is a risk to our country. We’ve got to get this under control. And we can do it. We can do a better job of providing services and keep our expenses down, just like the private sector does, by leveraging tools like Lean Six Sigma. Just like the private sector does.”

NEBRASKA’S SUCCESSFUL PROCESS IMPROVEMENT:

TRANSCRIPT:

Senator Ricketts: “Thank you, Mr. President.

“I rise today to compliment my colleague, 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 do? What should be the size and scope of government?

“Well there are actually things we agree the 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’s not properly managed. Because we don’t do a good job. And when we don’t do a good job, we end up wasting the taxpayers’ dollars.

“As Governor of Nebraska, this is one of the things I focused on, to be able to do a better job on. [To] take my private sector experiences, coming from the business world, and applying them to run state government. And we showed that the things you do in the private sector will work in running the public sector as well.

“At the state of Nebraska, we implemented Lean Six Sigma. Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology. There’s a number of them out there. This is the one we chose. 

“What is does is you break down an operation, count what the steps are, what the steps should be, get the frontline people engaged, the people actually doing the work involved, and looking at those steps, and see if you can cut the waste, in the number of steps and everything else, so you can make the process more efficient. 

“And that’s how you can do a better job of actually providing services while reducing costs at the same time. 

“And that’s the thing. Every time you get to government and say: “oh, we want to cut expenses.” “Oh, you’re going to cut services!” No no no no. In the private sector you can’t go to your customers and say: “I’m going to reduce your prices but I’m going to also reduce your service” because your customers will go someplace else. It doesn’t work that way. 

“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. 

“Now in the private sector you have competition that’s going to drive inefficient businesses out. 

“In the government sector, it’s going to require people like Elon and Vivek, 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 would we did because it was very effective. 

“I mentioned that you measured the steps. You count how many steps there are and see where the overlaps are. 

“One area we did it was air construction permits, for example. 

“We had 190 steps that it took to issue that permit. We cut that down to 22 steps. And by doing that – or, I’m sorry, it was 110 steps and 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’re not wasting time on all those extra steps, they can do more work. They’re more productive and focus on things that are going to be more important. For example, more difficult permits. And we used this in a variety of ways and 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 five minutes or less to answer those phone calls for those people 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’re one of those families in need and it’s taking 40 days to process that application, what is that saying about how we think about you? 

“We set a goal of getting those permits, those applications done in ten days. We hit that, all the way up until we hit the pandemic. And then even when we got out of compliance, when we started going above ten days, we knew we were above it and we could take steps to get that number back down again. 

“We were able to do it in a variety of other ways, like, for example, 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. Get people in and out the door. 

“Our green sheets, which is what we use in our Department of Transportation to be able to make sure that our contractors are doing the right things with regard to the environment or antiquities or whatever, making sure they’re following all the rules. We were able to cut that from 16 days to get it down to three days so that those contractors can get into the field faster and get our projects moving faster.

“Or here’s another one. We would issue reimbursement checks to families with children who had 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 get reimbursed for those expenses. But it was taking us 13 to 15 days to reimburse those expenses. 

“What’s wrong with that? Well, that’s over a two-week pay period. Those families had to float those costs from one paycheck to the next paycheck. And you know and I know that a lot of families live paycheck to paycheck. That put a financial burden on those families with kids with special needs. 

“We were able to cut that time down to two 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.

“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. They were white belts, kind of the introductory one.

“Over 6200 of our mid-level managers in the yellow belt, the next level up. We trained 248 executive green belts. Those are the upper-level executives. Again, more training. And then we trained nine black belts. Those are the folks that oversee the whole program.

“And by implementing all of that, we were able to save over 900,000 hours of our teammates’ time. We did over a thousand different projects. We saved $115 million in hard savings.

“And because of those processes, for example, we were able to reduce the square footage that we were occupying in the state of Nebraska by 60,000. 60,000 square feet we took off our rolls.

“We reduced our employment by 3.5%. And we were able to control spending.

“Before I became Governor, our budget was growing at 6.5% 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 just 2.8% a year. Just 2.8% a year on average. 

“Now, I might just contrast with what we’re doing here with the federal government right now. In 2019, we spent $4.4 trillion dollars. In 2024 it was closer to $6.8, $6.9 trillion. That’s roughly a 55% increase in just five years. 

“Folks, that is not sustainable. And that is why this Department of Government Efficiency, the DOGE, and what this incoming administration is going to do is so important. 

“We’ve got to be able to get our spending under control. It is a risk to our country. We’ve got to get this under control. And we can do it. 

“We can do a better job of providing services and keep our expenses down, just like the private sector does, by leveraging tools like Lean Six Sigma. Just like the private sector does. 

“Thank you very much, Mr. President.”