The Mint aggressively
and successfully wooed public input to the new coin's initial design,
and then turned to the public again for input on the final choice. The
agency used electronic events and surveys, focus groups, televised hearings,
public exhibits, and media requests.
Thanks to public interest and participation, the Mint received 130,000 comments from Americans of all walks of life. And, on May 4, 1999, the Mint unveiled the selected design at a White House ceremony: a Golden Dollar coin (now in circulation), depicting a portrayal of Sacagewea, the 15-year old Native American girl who participated in Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the Pacific Northwest.
Running the U. S. Mint like a World-Class Business
FAST COMPANY magazine doesn't often feature Federal agencies in its success stories. But, in December 1999, the magazine highlighted the business achievements of the U. S. Mint.
"We were given the freedom to run our organization like a real
business"
The biggest challenge to the status quo came in 1995, shortly after Diehl took over as Director. The Mint persuaded Congress to unshackle it from annual government appropriations and transform it into a Public Enterprise Fund, which would be financed not from Congress, but from its own profits. The reason?…The less money you take from Congress, the more flexibility you have to compete in the marketplace. (FAST COMPANY, December 1999)
"We were given the freedom to run our organization like a real business. And like a real business, we were held accountable for our failures as well as our successes," Deputy Director John Mitchell told FAST COMPANY.
Now, the agency is no longer bound by bureaucratic restrictions that hamstring many other Federal agencies. Given broad exemptions from Federal procurement regulations, for example, Coleen Vogel, the Mint's Assistant Director for Procurement, has found creative ways to purchase the $700 million in goods and services that the Mint needs every year. She's also turned the 1,500 page Federal procurement guidelines into a sleek, five-page guide for the Mint. And, the Mint has applied its new way of doing business to negotiating, purchasing, and constructing a new Headquarters in downtown Washington, DC - a process that took only three years, record time for such an undertaking. "A few years ago," said Vogel "…we never would have dreamt that we could do something like this."
For more information about the U. S. Mint and its services, visit the Mint's Internet site.
3/20/00
