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- New Bill Would ‘Close The Gap’ Between Salaried And Hourly Feds - December 12, 2019
- By Jessie Burr, FederalTimesFederal employees that work for an hourly wage can receive a different level of locality pay adjustment than their salaried counterparts due to the laws that determine the boundaries for such pay.But legislation introduced in the House and Senate Dec. 11 by Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pa., and Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., would ensure that locality pay boundaries — which determine whether a federal employee is located in a sufficiently expensive area of the country to need a pay bump — are the same for both salaried and hourly workers.
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- Lawmakers Reach Year-Long Funding Deal 'In Principle - December 13, 2019
- By Eric Katz, Government ExecutiveCongressional leaders said on Thursday they reached an agreement with the White House to fund all federal agencies through September, giving them a week to draft and pass bills before a government shutdown at the end of next week.Top appropriators and party leaders huddled with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin this week to iron out line-by-line spending levels across government and resolve outstanding policy issues. The apparent deal comes after two stopgap continuing resolutions that have funded agencies at fiscal 2019 levels since Oct. 1.
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- Congress Approves 12 Weeks Of Paid Parental Leave For Feds - December 11, 2019
- By Jessie Bur, FederalTimesThe defense appropriations agreement reached by House and Senate appropriators will officially provide federal employees with 12 weeks of paid leave to care for a new child, whether through birth, adoption or foster care.Though original family leave efforts aimed to provide for 12 weeks for new parents and for feds to care for a sick relative, the agreement included in the National Defense Authorization Act report released Dec. 9 would only cover cases of a new child in the family.
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- Payment Glitch Hits TRICARE Beneficiaries With Four-Figure Monthly Premiums - December 9, 2019
- By Jared Serbu, Federal News NetworkBeneficiaries of the TRICARE military health system in the Eastern U.S. were surprised by eye-popping charges to their credit cards and bank accounts Thursday — amounts that were 100 times what their monthly premiums should have been.The problem appeared to have originated with a third-party payment processor used by Humana Military, the contractor that serves TRICARE beneficiaries in all states east of the Mississippi River, plus Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and most of Texas. In effect, the system moved premium amounts two decimal places to the right — turning, for example, what should have been a $50 monthly automatic payment into $5,000.
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- Proposed OPM-GSA Merger Continues to 'Evolve' Despite Lack of Legislation - December 4th, 2019
- By Erich Wagner, Government ExecutiveAn agency watchdog this month reported that even though Congress has widely panned the Trump administration’s plan to merge the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, officials are still examining ways to implement portions of the proposal without legislation, and they still lack documentation to justify the changes.As part of an annual report, dated Nov. 6 but published last week, outlining “top management challenges” at OPM, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General for the second year in a row listed the proposal to send most of OPM’s functions to GSA and its policy shop to the Executive Office of the President as an “environmental” challenge.
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- Most Feds Won't Reap the Benefits of Local Minimum Wage Laws - December 3, 2019
- By Erich Wagner, Government ExecutiveFederal workers on the low end of the General Schedule pay scale living in states or cities that have enacted laws to increase the minimum wage should not get their hopes up about getting more of a pay raise than Congress and the president enact in the coming years.The Office of Personnel Management last week issued guidance to agencies instructing HR directors to stick to federal compensation regulations and not to comply with the growing number of states and localities instituting minimum wage laws in excess of the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
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- Agencies Are Cracking Down on Employees' Opioid Use, Both Legal and Illegal - December 2, 2019
- By Eric Katz, Government Executive Several agencies in the Homeland Security Department are instituting new policies to oversee their employees’ use of opioids, even when it comes in the form of a legal prescription.Generally speaking, employees at Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration and Secret Service are rarely caught using opioids illegally. In more than 100,000 random drug tests of employees at those components between 2015 and 2018, just 31 returned positive results, according to a report from the DHS inspector general. The agencies took appropriate disciplinary action in each case, as most were fired or resigned before they could be.
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- Fed Performance Reviews Will Get A Revamp - November 27, 2019
- By Jessie Bur, Federal TimesThe Office of Personnel Management has made changes to the tool agencies use to evaluate their employee assessment programs, as part of an administration-wide push to improve employee management and accountability.OPM Associate Director for Employee Services Mark Reinhold wrote in a memo to agencies Nov. 26 that his agency had made changes to the Performance Appraisal Assessment Tool to better reflect the objectives of the President’s Management Agenda.
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- OPM Tells Agencies To Get Moving On Workforce Executive Order Implementation - November 26, 2019
- By Nicole Ogrysko, Federal News NetworkAgencies with collective bargaining agreements whose terms have expired or rolled over must now reopen and implement all provisions of the president’s workforce executive orders, the Office of Personnel Management said Monday.“All relevant provisions of the EOs” are fair game and should be implemented at the end of the current term of a collective bargaining agreement, OPM said, even if agencies and unions don’t opt to reopen an agreement.
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- OMB’s Data Reskilling Pilot To Train Executives As Well As Front-line Employees - November 25, 2019
- By Jory Heckman, Federal News NetworkIn a spin-off from the Trump administration’s efforts to retrain federal employees for hard-to-fill cybersecurity jobs, the Office of Management and Budget will soon launch a reskilling pilot aimed at bringing the federal workforce up to speed on data science skills.In a departure from the cyber reskilling academy, which so far has trained two cohorts of employees from across the government, the upcoming data reskilling academy will not only train front-line federal employees for data-centric jobs. It’ll also give managers and executives a primer in how data science can help them carry out their agency’s mission.
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- House Passes CR To Keep Govt Open Until Dec. 20, Guarantee Military Pay Raise - November 20, 2019
- By Scott Maucione, Federal News NetworkA continuing resolution introduced by Democrats in the House would keep the government open until Dec. 20, and ensure a 3.1% pay raise for active-duty military in 2020.The resolution also makes sure the Census Bureau receives full funding for a fair and accurate 2020 Census, and pays for mobile questionnaire assistance centers.
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- Trump Administration Aims To Up Federal Diversity, Cut Poor Performers - November 19, 2019
- By: Jessie Bur, FederalTimesAgency chief human capital officers are charting a course to increase diversity within the federal workforce by leaning on programs and hiring authorities that would bring traditionally underemployed demographics — such as military spouses and previously incarcerated individuals — into the job application process.At the same time, top administration officials are doubling down on efforts to expedite the response to and removal of federal employees that fail to meet job standards.
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- Unions On Deadline To Pay Rent Or Leave VA Office Space, Department Says - November 18, 2019
- By Nicole Ogrysko, Federal News NetworkFederal employee unions at the Department of Veterans Affairs have a deadline now to leave currently-occupied, government-owned office space, the agency announced Friday.The new deadlines are part of VA’s efforts to implement the president’s May 2018 workforce executive orders after an injunction on the EOs lifted in early October.
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- More Agencies Need AI Strategies, Says Deloitte Report - November 15, 2019
- By Dave Nyczepir, Fed ScoopAgencies should look to early artificial intelligence adopters in government and industry when crafting strategies for adopting such technologies, according to a new report.Deloitte surveyed about 1,100 executives from U.S. organizations using AI in the third quarter of 2018 — 10% of them from the public sector — and found 74% of respondents felt the technologies would be “very” or “critically” important within two years.
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- With Winter Approaching, OPM Reminds Agencies of Closure and Leave Policies - November 13, 2019
- By Erich Wagner, Government Executive The Office of Personnel Management last week sent a reminder to federal agencies of policies for dealing with major weather events, as winter approaches.In a memo to agency heads, OPM Director Dale Cabaniss said that although there are not any new changes to how agencies should handle weather-related office closures, she wanted to reiterate the policy as it is still relatively new. OPM first issued the current procedures in 2018 as part of its implementation of the 2016 Administrative Leave Act.
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- Federal Retirement Applications, Processing Both Down in October - November 12, 2019
- By Erich Wagner, Government Executive,The Office of Personnel Management announced last week that the backlog of pending federal retirement claims nearly reached 18,000 last month. Although the number of requests has decreased in recent months, so too has the pace by which the federal government’s HR agency has processed them.According to agency statistics, only 7,044 federal employees filed for retirement in October. That represents about 400 fewer claims than OPM received in September, and a decrease of nearly 2,000 requests compared with the 9,012 that were filed in October 2018.
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- Report: Cyber Workforce Must Grow 145% to Meet Global Demand - November 11, 2019
- By Jack Corrigan, NextGovDemand for cyber expertise is skyrocketing across the U.S. as more organizations start prioritizing their digital security, but today there are only enough cybersecurity pros to fill about 60 percent of those jobs, according to a recent survey. And if you look beyond the U.S., the talent gap is even more stark.Today, there are about 2.8 million cybersecurity professionals around the world, but that workforce would need to grow by roughly 145% to meet the global demand for digital security expertise, according to a report from cybersecurity nonprofit (ISC)2. In other words, that means there are nearly five cybersecurity jobs available for every two people who work in the industry today.
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- Employee Engagement In 2019 FEVS Remains Stable After Tumultuous Year, OPM Says - November 8, 2019
- By Nicole Ogrysko, Federal News NetworkEmployee engagement in the federal workforce held steady in 2019, ending a five-year trend of 1% increases across government, according to the results of this year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS).The results, which the Office of Personnel Management published Thursday, show overall employee engagement stayed flat at 68% across government in 2019. That stability, OPM said, was a nice surprise, especially given the partial government shutdown, budget constraints and other events that could have put a dent in employee engagement in 2019.
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- Feds Are Satisfied With Their Jobs, But Problems Persist - November 7, 2019
- By: Jessie Bur, FederaltimesOver two-thirds of federal employees are satisfied with their overall experience in government work, but issues like performance recognition, telework policies and the impacts of the most recent partial government shutdown are still having a negative effect of the workforce, according to the results of the 2019 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.The survey, released Nov. 7, found that employees are equally engaged in their work as they were the year before, at 68 percent, and overall job satisfaction is at 69 percent. Response rates for the survey also went up, with 42.6 percent of eligible employees submitting responses.
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- Will A New Strike Force Stop Collusion On Government Contracts? - November 6, 2019
- By Jessie Bur, Federal TimesThe Department of Justice launched an initiative Nov. 5 that aims to prevent trillions of dollars in government spending from being wasted on purchases where contractors rigged their bidding prices or participated in other fraudulent schemes.The Procurement Collusion Strike Force — an interagency partnership between the DOJ Antitrust Division, prosecutors from 13 U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, as well as investigators from the FBI, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General and other partner federal Offices of Inspector General — will both investigate potential government contracting fraud and teach agency contracting officers to detect such behavior on their own.
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- It's Official: Federal Employees Cannot Sleep in Their Offices - November 5, 2019
- By Eric Katz, Government ExecutiveThe federal government would like to remind its employees their offices are for working, not sleeping.In a Federal Register notice that will publish Tuesday, the General Services Administration will notify employees that sleeping in government buildings is prohibited. GSA carved out certain exceptions, such as when authorized by a supervisor to conduct official business and it is “necessary for the person to sleep on the premises” or in a shelter-in-place emergency.
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- Not Everyone Will Be Posting Opportunities to the FedBizOpps Replacement - November 4, 2019
- By Aaron Boyd, NextgovAfter Veterans Day weekend, federal agencies will no longer be able to post their procurements to Federal Business Opportunities, or FBO.gov, as the General Services Administration migrates those capabilities to a tab under beta.SAM.gov. Not every agency will transition immediately.At least one contracting office, the Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters office, won’t be posting to the Contract Opportunities page on SAM. The office posted an announcement Thursday on its own procurement site, FAA Contract Opportunities, telling vendors to check that site going forward.
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- Social Security Administration Cancels Telework For Most Staff - November 1, 2019
- Jessie Bur, Federal TimesOver 44,000 staff at the Social Security Administration’s Office of Operations discovered Oct. 28 that a six-year telework program at the agency would be coming to a close Nov. 8, giving employees that rely on such a program less than 10 work days to make themselves ready for new in-office requirements.“In recent years, Operations has faced a number of significant service challenges, including increases in wait times for customers on the 800# and in field offices, processing times for program workloads, and [Program Service Center] backlogs. Our Commissioner Andrew Saul is committed to improving customer service and this is his highest priority for the agency,” SSA Deputy Commissioner for Operations Grace Kim wrote in an email to staff obtained by Federal Times.
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- New Flexibilities for TSP Withdrawals Shake Things Up, and More - October 31, 2019
- Erich Wagner, Government Executive Officials at the agency that administers the federal government’s 401(k)-style retirement savings program said the first full month of expanded withdrawal options for participants has produced some significant shifts in how federal employees and retirees have been using their accounts.Last month, the Thrift Savings Plan implemented the TSP Modernization Act, which allows participants to make multiple post-separation partial withdrawals. Federal workers ages 59 and a half and older may make up to four in-service withdrawals per year. Participants may also choose whether their withdrawals come from their Roth accounts, traditional accounts, or a combination of both.
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- SSA Ends Telework Program For Operations Employees, Citing Need To Focus On Customer Service - October 30, 2019
- By Nicole Ogrysko, Federal News NetworkThe Social Security Administration is ending its telework policy for several thousand employees in the agency’s field offices, operational units and other customer-facing organizations.The change applies to all employees at SSA’s tele-service centers, field offices, workload support units, program service centers, area director’s offices, regional offices and the Office of Central Operations, Grace Kim, the agency’s deputy commissioner for operations, said Monday in an email, which Federal News Network obtained.Support staff for the deputy commissioner for operations will also be impacted.
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- The Government Wants To Get Rid Of These Job Titles - October 29, 2019
- Jessie Bur, FederalTimesThe Office of Personnel Management proposed Oct. 24 to get rid of nearly 50 federal job classifications that are underutilized by agencies or outdated when compared with industry standards.“These series selected for cancellation have approximately 25 or fewer incumbents government wide, and the work covered can be classified to other existing occupational series,” Kimberly Holden, deputy associate director for talent acquisition and workforce shaping at OPM, wrote in a memo to HR directors.
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- Microsoft Wins Massive JEDI Cloud Contract - October 28, 2019
- By Patrick Tucker and Frank Konkel, Next Gov,After months of speculation, intrigue, lawsuits, and presidential leaning, Microsoft has won the Pentagon’s $10 billion “JEDI” cloud storage contract, upsetting the presumed frontrunner Amazon.The outcome comes as a surprise to many observers who described Amazon as the almost-certain winner of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, program. Amazon was considered by many to be the only qualified bidder because it had the largest enterprise cloud infrastructure and already had reached the necessary highest security level, known as Impact Level 6.
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- OPM OUTLINES REQUIREMENTS FOR REPORTING ON OFFICIAL TIME - October 24, 2019
- Personnel Agency Demands Data on Use of Union Official Time, TeleworkBy Erich Wagner, Government ExecutiveThe Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday released the requirements for agencies to report the use of official time by union employees, as the government’s HR agency continues implementation of President Trump’s controversial workforce executive orders.
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- How Frontline Supervisors, Federal Leaders Digest And Respond To Employee Engagement Results - October 23, 2019
- By Nicole Ogrysko, Federal News NetworkAs agencies begin to parse through the latest employee engagement scores for 2019, the Office of Personnel Management has a new toolkit designed to help supervisors better understand and take action based on the feedback.The toolkit, which OPM released earlier this week, gives supervisors step-by-step guidance to review the results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) within their agencies and individual work units, share the survey results with employees and then create actionable plans to improve engagement based on the data and feedback.
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- After Falling 'Badly Behind Schedule,' Senate to Begin Moving Spending Bills Next Week - October 22, 2019
- By Eric Katz, Government ExecutiveThe Senate will look to advance its first packages of fiscal 2020 spending bills next week, with leadership in the chamber already acknowledging lawmakers have fallen behind schedule.In what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., described as an olive branch to his Democratic colleagues, Republicans will first bring up a package of appropriations measures to fund domestic agencies. Under a budget agreement signed by President Trump earlier this year, most agencies will receive a funding boost once full-year spending levels are set. Federal agencies are currently operating under a stopgap continuing resolution, which is set to expire Nov. 21.
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- Lots Of Under-35s Work For The Government, Just Not In It. - October 21, 2019
- By Tom Temin, Federal News NetworkThe refrain is familiar. Someone said it the other night at the Service to America medals ceremonies. Only a small percentage of the federal workforce is under 35 years old. Still tinier is the fraction under 30.Yet untold numbers of younger workers are working for the government. They’re just not on the government payroll. They work for contractors, and they’re doing important and difficult work.
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- VA Exposes Sensitive Veteran Data to Thousands of Unauthorized Employees - October 18, 2019
- By Jack Corrigan, NextGovA regional office of the Veterans Affairs Department mishandled its patients’ personal data, leaving medical records, internal communications and other sensitive information accessible to thousands of unauthorized agency personnel, according to an internal watchdog.According to the VA Inspector General, the agency’s Milwaukee regional office was storing personally identifiable information on its patients in two shared drives on the Veterans Benefits Administration’s enterprise network. The security lapse, first flagged by a whistleblower in September 2018, left the data exposed to more than 25,000 remote users across the country, many of whom had no need to access the information, auditors found.
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- The Army Has Ideas For Reducing Civilian Time-To-Hire - October 17, 2019
- By Jared Serbu, Federal News NetworkArmy leaders say they’re committed to bringing modern talent management principles into their personnel system — not just for soldiers — but for civilian employees too.That second category is in some ways trickier, because the Army can’t overhaul the federal civil service system all by itself. But officials say there’s a lot they can do, including, hopefully, a significant acceleration of the hiring process.
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- Feds Call For Family Leave Guarantee In 2020 Budget - October 16, 2019
- By Jessie Burr, Federal TimesFederal employee groups are calling on Congress to include provisions in the final National Defense Authorization Act for 2020 that would guarantee civil servants 12 weeks of paid leave in the event of the birth or adoption of a child or a family member falling critically ill.“The idea that in 2019 federal employees don’t have paid leave to use to welcome a new child into the family or to care for a sick and aging family member is truly unacceptable. As one of the country’s largest employers, the U.S. government should be leading this effort. Candidly, it should be a model employer, but instead they’re lagging behind the private sector employers and nearly every other industrialized country in the world,” Tony Reardon, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in an Oct. 10 press call.
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- AGENCY REORGANIZATION PLANS IS LIGHT ON DETAILS - February 13, 2017
- Transferring Responsibilities and Consolidating Offices Highlight Trump Reorganization PlanBy Eric Katz, Government ExecutiveMore than one year after President Trump issued an executive order calling on all federal agencies to submit a comprehensive plan to reorganize and reform themselves, the administration has proposed what it is now calling a “first step” toward submitting those changes.The proposals were laid out in Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget, often focusing on consolidating administrative functions or merging various programs with similar functions, but not every agency detailed its plans. Some agencies put forward more specific ideas, such as shifting bureaus to new locations or transferring responsibilities to other agencies. The administration said more details would be forthcoming, pledging to create concrete goals and trackable metrics with “senior accountable officials” to oversee them.
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- BOTH STAFF CUTS AND BUDGET INCREASES FOR FY 2019 - July 13, 2017
Staff Cuts and Budget Increases Are Both on Tap for 2019
By Eric Katz, Government Executive
The Trump administration has provided federal agencies with the latitude to request up to a 5 percent funding boost in fiscal 2019, saying the White House may accommodate a “limited number” of programmatic increases in its final blueprint.
Generally, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said in a memorandum to department and agency heads, agencies should keep their 2019 spending requests in line with what the White House spelled out in the fiscal 2018 budget submission. They should also, however, “identify additional investments in effective programs that further support their mission and fill a clear federal role.”
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