President Barack Obama today signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which contains several major overhauls to the government’s Thrift Savings Plan retirement program. The TSP overhaul will: Create a Roth option, which will allow TSP participants to pay taxes on money they invest in the program and make tax-free withdrawals in retirement years later. The Roth option is expected to mostly benefit military service members. Automatically enroll all new civilian federal employees in the TSP’s G Fund. Military service members will not be automatically enrolled. Allow new enrollees to receive automatic matching contributions from their agency right…
Monthly Archives: June, 2009
One more Postal Service post: The House Oversight and Government Reform committee has (finally) scheduled a markup hearing for H.R. 22, the bill that would give the Postal Service some relief from its retiree health benefit obligations. Don’t get too excited, though: This is actually just a subcommittee markup. The bill has a long way to go before it becomes law. The bill was introduced in January and it’s been stuck in committee limbo almost ever since. The Postal Service says it can’t pay all its year-end bills if H.R. 22 doesn’t pass.
The Washington Post has an editorial this morning about the Postal Service’s deteriorating finances. Most of it is pretty sensible, but it includes this bizarre claim (emphasis mine): If it continues on its present course, the U.S. Postal Service stands to post $6 billion to $12 billion in losses by the end of the fiscal year. I have absolutely no idea where they got this figure. We reported last month that the Postal Service has lost $2.3 billion during the first half of fiscal year 2009. So it would have to lose a whopping $10 billion in just six months…
The nation has its first chief performance officer. The Senate confirmed Jeffrey Zients’ nomination Friday. Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag welcomed his new deputy for management with this blog post. Now we wait to see what changes Zients will bring to federal performance management. He’s had a successful track record imbuing positive performance into private sector companies through his work at the Corporate Executive Board Company and the Advisory Board Company.
Federal Times has just released our first online National Security Personnel System chart. We’ve created an exclusive, interactive program to let you, the reader, conduct the same kind of analyses we used as the basis for our June 8 cover story, Race still a factor in DoD pay raises. You can drill down to any combination of demographic criteria to find the average rating, pay raise, bonus and total payout for different groups. Wondering how male Asian employees under 40 years of age fared under NSPS? How about Hispanic Army employees in Oklahoma? Pick and choose and our program will…
Federal agencies having a tough time meeting the plethora of green government mandates should take a close look at the 15 federal teams who have been recognized this year for spearheading environmentally sustainable practices at their agencies. Winners of the 2009 White House Closing the Circle Awards — handed out Wednesday during the middle of the three-day 2009 Federal Environmental Symposium East in Bethesda, Md. –Â Â are demonstrating best practices in areas such as recycling, green purchasing and fuel conservation. The big winner was the Air Force, which received four awards for initiatives under way at local bases and headquarters. The…
The White House has released a fact sheet outlining the benefits it will grant to same-sex domestic partners of gay and lesbian federal employees today: Domestic partners of federal employees can be added to the long-term care insurance program. Federal employees will be allowed to use sick leave to care for domestic partners and their non-biological, non-adopted children. The memo will also outline benefits for partners of State Department Foreign Service officers, who for the first time will: Be able to use medical facilities at posts abroad. Be medically evacuated from posts abroad. Be counted when State measures a Foreign…
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted unanimously Monday to approve the nomination of Jeffrey Zients as the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. If confirmed, Zients would also serve as the government’s first chief performance officer, tasked with improving agency operations and preparing the federal government for a wave of employees eligible for retirement in the coming years. Zients’ nomination now goes to the full Senate for consideration. The vote has not yet been scheduled.
The House Appropriations Committee approved the Homeland Security and Legislative Branch fiscal year 2010 appropriations draft bills at a markup Friday. The Homeland Security bill provides $42.63 billion for the agency, compared to President Barack Obama’s $42.83 billion request for fiscal year 2010. In 2009, the agency received $39.98 billion. The bill cuts $135 million requested for agency operations due to “staffing vacancies, redundant policy initiatives and poorly justified request to consolidate DHS headquarters for those agencies not moving to St. Elizabeths,” according to a committee news release. The bill includes: $10 billion for Customs and Border Protection, $82 million…
Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn gave a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this morning. He didn’t make any big announcement about the possible Pentagon “cyber command,” as some people had been speculating. He did, however, rattle off a few interesting statistics about the cost of cybersecurity: Cyber attacks on our military networks have not cost any lives, not yet. But in a six-month period, the Defense Department spent more than $100 million defending its networks… and we spend billions annually in a proactive effort to protect and defend our networks. $200 million annually on cybersecurity —…