Yesterday, Secretary Hillary Clinton held a town hall meeting with State Department employees. One human resources intern, Chris Dilworth, had a very pointed question for her: Will you ban private security contractors? Clinton, after noting that private security contracts are a concern and the contract with the controversial Blackwater Worldwide will be terminated, had this to say: I certainly am of the mind that we should, insofar as possible, diminish our reliance on private security contractors. Whether we can go all the way to banning, under current circumstances, seems unlikely, but we ought to be engaged in a very careful review…
Monthly Archives: February, 2009
If you don’t yet have your digital converter box, your TV won’t go black on Feb. 17. The House voted 264-158 Wednesday to delay the switch from analog to digital television transmission until June 12. The Senate has already passed the bill, and President Barack Obama is expected to sign it shortly. The bill was delayed to provide time for more seniors and low-income people to acquire coupons to buy digital converter boxes, necessary for analog televisions to pick up signals with without cable. The Federal Communications Commissions has pushed hard to let people know of the impending transition, including…
Rep. James Moran, D-Va., is preparing to reintroduce a bill that would allow employees under the Federal Employees Retirement System to count unused sick leave as time toward their annuities. Moran spokesman Austin Durrer said the bill could be reintroduced as early as next week. A previous sick leave bill sponsored by Moran was attached to a tobacco bill approved by the House last year, but the Senate’s version did not have a similar provision and the sick leave proposal did not survive.
The FERS Redeposit Act is getting a second life. Three representatives reintroduced the bill, HR, 828, Tuesday, which would allow federal employees returning to the federal workforce from the private sector to reinvest their full federal retirement annuity without losing any credit for previous years of service. The bill, first introduced in 2007, died in the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia. The bill was introduced by Reps. James Moran, D-Va., Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Gerald Connolly, D-Va. It’s been referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and will likely…
The Postal Service just announced its financial results from the first quarter of 2009, and they were pretty bleak. Bear in mind — the first quarter is usually the Postal Service’s busiest, because it encompasses the holiday season (it runs Oct. 1 – Dec. 31). Mail volume declined by 5.2 billion pieces, compared to 2008 — more than a 9 percent decline. The biggest decline was in Standard Mail, which dropped about 11 percent. That’s probably because of the recession; the housing and financial sectors are big mailers, so when they hit a downturn, so does Standard Mail. But First-Class…
President Barack Obama wants a review of the Food and Drug Administration after a massive peanut butter recall for salmonella contamination. In an interview with The Today Show’s Matt Lauer before Sunday’s Super Bowl, Obama said he isn’t happy with FDA’s inspections process. Well, I think that the FDA has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to catch. And so we’re going to be doing a complete review of FDA operations. I don’t want to prejudge this particular case, but there have been enough instances over the last several years –-…
Steve calls out the wrongheaded argument that spending $75 million on FBI salaries is not economic stimulus. We can go a step further: Everything on the Republican list of “wasteful projects” is stimulative. $88 million for a new Coast Guard icebreaker? Someone is getting paid to build the ship. $248 million for new furniture at DHS headquarters? Someone has to build the furniture. Even the $400 million for the CDC’s STD prevention programs has an effect on the economy, because someone — whether feds or contractors — is getting paid to administer those programs. You can argue that these aren’t…
Two retirement security groups are highlighting a little-known provision in the federal government’s rules that could hurt some spouses or children of federal employees under the Civil Service Retirement System. If a CSRS employee leaves the federal government, but dies before applying for a pension, that employee’s spouses, former spouses or children would not receive a survivor annuity, the Pension Rights Center and Women’s Pension Project note. In a letter sent yesterday to the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, the groups asked the agency to send a notice to CSRS employees reminding them of this wrinkle. Survivors of Federal…
This one is slightly unbelievable. You may remember Milton Dial from last year’s Minerals Management Service scandals. He pleaded guilty in September to violating federal conflict-of-interest law. And today, he was sentenced by a federal judge, Robert C. Jones. What was Dial’s punishment? “I apologize to you, sir,” U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Jones as he imposed a minimum sentence on Milton Dial, a former deputy associate director in the Lakewood, Colo., office that handled billions of dollars of oil and natural gas contracts. The judge said he felt Dial, who retired from the agency in 2004 after 33…
House Republicans yesterday unveiled a list of spending items in the stimulus bill that they called wasteful. One item in particular jumped out at me: “$75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI.” Gregg Carlstrom last week highlighted Republican reluctance to pay for new cars for federal employees, but Republicans have also criticized many more line items affecting feds. Even though the construction industry is facing its own hardships in the economy, the GOP feels that building, renovating or repairing facilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Homeland Security Department, State Department and Public…