What? How was this not happening before? What, were they making runs to Starbucks and Office Max? I guess you really don’t care how much you’re spending when you’re spending other people’s money.

Hoping to trim $600 million in the next four years, several federal agencies and departments will start pooling their purchases of office printers, copiers, and scanners, administration officials told The Washington Post. Starting this week, the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and Treasury, as well as the Social Security Administration, are slated to begin buying these items in bulk from 11 firms. The supplier list includes both larger companies like Canon and Lexmark, and some smaller, veteran- or minority-owned suppliers, The Post reports.

This plan will also force departments to closely scrutinize their equipment stocks. “One of the things we’ve discovered is that agencies don’t have a clue what they have,” Dan Gordon, the Obama administration’s top federal contracting official, told The Post. “They don’t realize how many cellphones and BlackBerrys they have.”

$600 million over four years. Nowhere near enough to have even the smallest dent on the federal deficit ($1.65 trillion), but come on. How is this the first time someone realized you could save hundreds of millions of dollars buying in bulk?

Hell, I buy in bulk. Which explains the 42-pound bag of popcorn in my pantry. Think I’m buying 42 pounds of popcorn because I like popcorn that much? No. It’s because buying in bulk saves money.

Businesses both small and large buy in bulk. Public and private schools buy in bulk. Charities buy in bulk. Families buy in bulk. But it never before occurred to the federal government to do the same?

These people are really out of touch.

All of that said, $600 million in cuts over four years won’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things. To get anywhere we need to cut about 1/3 of the budget, which — unless you’d like literally no national defense or park service or food and drug safety — means reforming entitlements.

Unless you want to start slamming the middle class with tax hikes (there aren’t enough “rich” people to make up for the deficit), you’re not taxing your way out of this one. And even if you could, you’d just suppress economic growth by sucking more money from the private sector to feed the federal behemoth.

Update: Better news! This isn’t even a new “trim”. Obama claimed he would do the same in 2009 and 2010, too. Apparently we never quite got there. But they’ll totally try again this time.