Much of the state Office of Transformation’s work is like what many Virginians forget to do: checking up on auto-renewals of subscriptions, asking if they really need the newest cellphone.
And the result has been some $105 million in savings, Chief Transformation Officer Rob Ward said.
Virginia spent $2.62 billion on supplies and materials last year, according to the legislature’s watchdog agency, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, or JLARC. The state spent billions more on a range of contracted services, including $1.94 billion for transportation and $1.46 billion for higher education.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched an effort three years ago to save on goods and services the state buys. That was well before billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency adopted a much different approach in Trump-era Washington.
Ward
Youngkin has said his goal was $200 million in savings by the end of the 2024 fiscal year.
“We’re not just going in there and saying cut costs,” Ward said. “We’re more internal consultants, collaborating with agencies — we find a lot of best practices in agencies.”
But a perch in the governor’s office offers a vantage point that those agencies don’t have, even the ones with the brightest ideas on saving money when buying goods and services for the state, Ward said.
Take, for instance, the professional services that agencies sometimes need to employ.
Often, when agencies hire consultants, they engage firms that other agencies have — and sometimes, the hourly rate they pay can differ, he said.
That’s changed. The same basic service from the same consulting firm gets the same hourly rate. “If agency X was paying $1 and [another] agency was paying $2, now everyone is paying $1,” Ward said.
That move saved $47 million, he said.
Asking about unused mobile phone lines and whether software licenses were really used yielded more savings.
“We found licenses for software that nobody used," he said. "Agencies sometimes wanted to keep it on the shelf for when they did have somebody, but why pay month after month when it’s not being used now."
Hardware, too, was an area for savings.
“If you need a phone, do you really need an iPhone 16 when a basic iPhone is going to do everything you need?” Ward said.
Many state contracts had automatic renewals. Taking a second look and opening these up for other suppliers to take a crack at state business produced more savings.
“If we were paying $50 and the new contract is for $40, that’s part of the $105 million,” Ward said. “Over the long term, we think this is going to be much larger.”
Going forward, Ward asked state agencies to rethink this — and to look ahead at contracts set to expire over the next 18 months and remind suppliers that doing business with the state is going to be competitive.
“We’re really just trying to be really careful about how we spend taxpayers’ money,” Ward said. “I’m a taxpayer, too.”
