Martha Johnson is taking more action at the General Services Administration. A day after she rearranged the deck chairs to put more emphasis on green building programs, the newly confirmed GSA administrator filled three political posts. Johnson named permanent appointees to head three of GSA’s regional offices: Jason Klumb as regional administrator of the Heartland Region, which includes Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. Klumb, who at age 24 was one of the youngest elected leaders in the Missouri House of Representatives, also is a major in the Army National Guard Judge Advocate General Corps. George Northcroft as regional administrator of…
Monthly Archives: February, 2010
Seems the American Federation of Government Employees wants to win the right to represent the TSA’s screening workforce: The union filed a petition with the Federal Labor Relations Authority calling for a TSA-wide election on the subject. That would be a substantial step towards collective bargaining rights for TSA employees.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Sam Hamilton died Feb. 20 after experiencing chest pains while skiing in Colorado. Hamilton’s death was consistent with an underlying heart problem, Summit County (Colo.) Coroner Joanne Richardson told The Associated Press. He was in Colorado for a regional leadership training meeting, which ended Feb. 19, said the agency in a news release. Hamilton, 54, was sworn in as director in September 2009 after more than 30 years with the service. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement that Hamilton’s leadership and commitment to the service will be missed. Sam was a friend,…
A noteworthy commentary in this morning’s Washington Examiner highlights an issue that we’ve previously reported: How few federal employees are fired in a given year. The column, which cites our coverage on the issue, criticizes the Office of Personnel Management for failing to analyze why so few employees are fired — just one half of 1 percent of the government’s 2 million employees last year. (It’s also worth noting that the writer of the column, Mark Hemingway, is the husband of one of our former staff writers.) What I found most interesting, however, was the headline above the column: “More…
The FBI today said it has formally closed its investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people — including U.S. Postal Service workers Joseph Curseen and Thomas Morris — and sickened 17 others. The 96-page investigative summary posted here concludes that Army anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, acted alone: Investigators learned that Dr. Ivins was alone late at night and on the weekend in the lab where RMR-1029 [the batch of anthrax spores used in the attacks] was stored in the days immediately preceding the dates on which the anthrax could have been mailed.…
Chinese and European hackers gained access to government computers at 10 federal agencies during a recently discovered malware attack. NetWitness, a Virginia-based private security firm, discovered the breaches at federal agencies and about 2,500 companies worldwide, and announced the findings in a Feb. 17 report. NetWitness did not disclose which agencies were attacked, but the malware appeared to be aimed more at gathering financial and personal login information from private corporations than state secrets. It affects computers running on Microsoft Windows operating systems. Affected computers are infected with a botnet named ZeuS, which collects and feeds the hackers personal information,…
Here’s some Friday Fun for space geeks like myself. NASA astronauts earlier this week installed the Tranquility node, featuring a domed window giving astronauts a panoramic view of Earth, on the International Space Station. This picture, the first taken through Tranquility’s 6.5 foot by 5 foot cupola window 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, is of the Sahara Desert. The window wouldn’t look out of place in the cockpits of Star Wars spaceships like the Millennium Falcon or TIE Fighter. Its intended purpose, NASA said, is to give astronauts a good, direct view of robots operating on the station’s exterior without having to rely…
Last week, I wrote how the General Services Administration was seeking applicants for a newly created position of chief greening officer. At the time, the vacancy announcement had been posted to private-sector job boards but not on the government’s official jobs site, USAJobs. The job listing has now been posted to USAJobs, and it offers some key details that were left out of the earlier post. For instance, the job will be a career position at the GS-15 level, which has a starting salary of nearly $124,000 in Washington. As a senior adviser to the head of GSA’s Public Buildings Service,…
Here’s a question for the readership: Does yesterday’s plane crash in Texas tap into any broader concerns you have about anti-government hostility, which seems to be mounting? Or do you view it as an isolated incident?
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo today announced the arrival of two prime candidates for the Daily Squee: A pair of clouded leopard cubs that were born on Valentine’s day. To hear the Zoo tell it, the birth of these little guys — or gals, it’s hard to tell — is something of a minor miracle. The breeding of clouded leopards has been a challenge, primarily due to male aggression, decreased mating activity between paired animals and high cub mortality. […] Since the cubs born in the Thailand breeding program are only one or two generations removed from the wild, their genes are…