The Recovery Act has been in place for 100 days today. To celebrate, the White House published this report today highlighting the effects of 100 projects funded through the act. Already $112 billion in funds have been spent and over 150,000 jobs created, according to the White House. The White House is currently working on a roadmap for the next 100 days and in October plans to post detailed spending information on Recovery.gov, according to the White House blog.
Monthly Archives: May, 2009
The intelligence community has talked about using open-source data for years, but a George Mason University doctoral candidate and his cohorts are taking the concept to the next level. The Wall Street Journal last week reported that Curtis Melvin and about a dozen other “citizen snoops” — some of whom are former military analysts — have spent the last two years using Google Earth’s satellite images to map out the infrastructure of North Korea. It’s not easy, since North Korea is perhaps the most secretive country on the planet. Melvin and others sift through news reports, photographs and eyewitness accounts,…
Two civil servants and a soldier were killed in Iraq Monday by a roadside bomb near Fallujah, the Associated Press reported today. State Department employee Terrence Barnich, 56, was the deputy director of the Iraq Transition Assistance Office, which oversees reconstruction projects in Iraq. He was killed alongside a U.S. soldier and a Defense Department civilian employee working for the embassy in Baghdad. Two others were injured. The other victims have not yet been named. On this day after Memorial Day, it reminds us all of the sacrifices being made by civil servants, as well as the military, to bring…
Deadline day around here and things are a bit busy, but I wanted to comment on an FDA appropriations hearing I covered this morning. The agency is getting a huge boost in the president’s 2010 budget proposal — $511 million, or 19 percent. Much of that money will pay for more than 1,200 new hires. That means a 30 percent staffing boost over two years, when you include the 1,500 new employees hired this year. The numbers prompted some back-and-forth with legislators, as you might expect. A few Republicans thought they were too large; Democrats hinted they might be too…
A few odds and ends from today’s House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing about the Postal Service’s deteriorating financial condition — the latest in a continuing series (at least the third hearing this year, by my count). We broke the news in February that the Postal Service wanted permission to switch to 5-day delivery. But there’s been some debate over which day would be cut — Tuesday? Saturday? William Galligan, the Postal Service’s senior vice president for operations, answered that question: it would be Saturday. I believe the six-day frequency, which is essentially [cutting] the Saturday delivery day, it’s not a question…
I’m at the release event for the Partnership for Public Service’s 2009 “Best Places to Work” report, which measures employee satisfaction at agencies across the government. We’ve got a quick summary of the results, and you can view the whole survey (which contains lots of interesting data) here. One interesting point: OMB director Peter Orszag just gave a quick speech, and he said this about the survey results: We will be looking to include the results in the fiscal year 2011 budget process, because we should not just let this be a report that generates a one-day news story. It…
More than 100,000 Social Security numbers as well as Secret Service and White House operating procedures are on a hard drive missing from the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA’s inspector general briefed members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Tuesday about the national security information breach at the administration’s College Park, Md., facility. The drive contains one terabyte of data from Clinton administration records, according to a news release from the committee’s Republican staff, including: 100,000 Social Security numbers, including one of then-Vice President Al Gore’s daughters, Contact information, including addresses, for Clinton administration officials, Secret Service…
The Senate approved more than a dozen nominees Monday, including the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Margaret Hamburg to be FDA commissioner, Department of Health and Human Services. Roger Baker to be an assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs. Charles Blanchard to be general counsel of the Air Force. William Gunn to be general counsel of the VA. Thomas Lamont to be an assistant secretary of the Army. Raymond Mabus, Jr. to be secretary of the Navy. Daniel Poneman to be deputy Energy secretary. Jose Riojas to be an assistant secretary of the VA. David Sandalow to be an…
Dr. Thomas Frieden, commissioner of the New York City Health Department, will be the new director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, President Barack Obama announced Friday. He will replace acting CDC Director Dr. Rich Besser, who will return to his role leading the CDC’s Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response. Please visit Federal Times for updates on this story.
As a condo dweller with precious little outdoor space, I naturally love Home and Garden Television (HGTV). And like many network viewers, I’ve drooled over the spacious HGTV “Green Home” in Port St. Lucie, Fla., which the network is raffling off. But I did not realize the home had a government connection: It’s EPA certified! I also didn’t know EPA certified TV prizes, but according to this EPA press release the home has “earned EPA’s Indoor AirPlus and Energy Star labels.”