The GSA (General Services Administration), the agency that takes care of the day-to-day office needs of other government agencies, has finally gotten on the warpath about dealing with federal office printing expenses, which total well over a billion dollars per year.

According to an article in the Federal Times, the GSA has targeted initial savings of $300 million over the next few years. This being the government, they are moving slowly: They aren’t getting into the program until 2011.

The biggest part of the strategy is what GSA calls “strategic sourcing.” The idea is simple enough — to consolidate buying within an agency and between agencies in order to use the purchasing muscle of the government to get better deals for machines and consumables, negotiated by professionals.

This all sounds pretty obvious, but even corporations that pride themselves on cost cutting often lack strategic buying plans for printing in place. The GSA plans to negotiate on total cost of ownership rather than the cost of hardware alone, as has been the custom in many government departments.

Meanwhile, the GSA is conducting an audit of current printing assets — with an emphasis on reducing the number of personal printers on user desktops. The aim is to move to fewer, more economical printers, with more modest energy consumption and a common set of consumables, in order to simplify inventory.

Finally, the agency is setting up training to reinforce such issues as duplex printing, printing drafts of color documents in black-and-white and other paper- and consumables-saving tricks.

The GSA has already rationalized other areas of related office expenses, using its strategic sourcing program on purchases of cell phones, office supplies and delivery services, while saving the government hundreds of millions of dollars already.

These are steps that any company should be taking.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set aside $19 billion in incentives to roll out electronic health record systems. The plan is to improve the health system by making facilities more efficient at administering care so they can pass the savings along to patients.

But a new Harvard study says computerization isn’t helping anything.

The new study (which you can read here) evaluated data on 4,000 U.S. hospitals over a four-year period. It found that the enormous price tag for setting up and operating hospital IT systems outpaces any expected cost savings.

The problem “is mainly that computer systems are built for the accountants and managers and not built to help doctors, nurses and patients,” the report’s lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, said in an interview with Computerworld.

The push for electronic health records is unlikely to stop, though, and it remains to be seen if the feds’ efforts will be effective.

But the message of the study contains a valuable lesson: Businesses  need to research the advantages to going paperless, and computerization in areas where it will make the biggest impact.

That issue came to light after President Obama recently asked his cabinet secretaries to trim $100 million from their departments’ budgets, as a sign of solidarity with citizens and businesses who are doing their own belt-tightening.

And where are the cuts coming from? One big area is in buying toner, paper, and other office supplies. More than ever, it seems, the government is looking to take advantage of its massive purchasing power to get better discounts. For example:

• The Department of Homeland Security estimates that they can save up to $52 million over five years just by purchasing office supplies in bulk
• The State Department plans to save up to 7 percent on office supplies through the same strategy
• The Homeland Security Department will save up to $52 million a year over the next five years through bulk purchasing of office supplies. It currently buys more than $100 million a year  in supplies.

The savings may seem trivial in light of the trillions of dollars flying out of Washington these days, but even a few million here or there can’t hurt. The sad implication was that these departments haven’t leveraged bulk purchasing before, even after years of administrations claiming they’d run “mean and lean” operations.

Political analysts and purchasing managers alike laughed at the idea that the feds don’t already buy supplies in bulk. “What does the government do? Send a guy down to the store every time it needs a ream of copier paper?” asked Roger Simon of Politico.