The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will meet tomorrow to vet Joe Jordan, the President’s nominee to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Jordan joined the Office of Management and Budget in December as a senior adviser on procurement issues — the standard setup for potential nominees. Former OFPP Administrator Dan Gordon left the office Jan. 1. Members in the contracting community have expressed concern that Jordan’s nomination could be held up by the elections but no signs of that yet. Industry and federal officials are eager to get a leader in place. “In this time of budget austerity, procurement policies…
Monthly Archives: May, 2012
Federal supervisors aren’t doing nearly enough to hold poor performers accountable — or keep them from ending up as poor performers in the first place, two chief human capital officers said today. Reginald Wells of the Social Security Administration and Jeri Buchholz of NASA, speaking at Government Executive’s Excellence in Government conference, agreed that managers need to be more willing to take action when an employee isn’t cutting it. Maybe that means retraining that employee to get him up to snuff, Wells said, or punishing him. But a manager might only need to “call it as it is” and let…
For more than a year, cash-strapped agencies across the government have been offering buyouts and early outs to reduce their payrolls. Several of those agencies said it’s better to cut the rolls voluntary to avoid messy, morale-killing layoffs, or reductions-in-force for those who speak government-ese. But at today’s Excellence in Government conference, a common refrain emerged: The dreaded RIF may be unavoidable — and may even be a better tool for managing the workforce than buyouts and early outs. “The R-word — RIF — has its place, because it is the most surgical,” said Ron Sanders, the intelligence community’s former…
Building on an effort to improve communications between federal agencies and industry about government contracts, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy released part two of its “Myth-Busting” campaign to address misconceptions from industry. The memo reiterates the importance of “early, frequent and constructive engagement with industry,” especially for high-risk procurements and large information technology projects, that former OFPP administrator Dan Gordon introduced in a memo last year. That memo directed agencies to share more information with contractors. Here are four of the eight myths OFPP listed in its memo, which was released today by Acting Administrator Lesley Field: Myth: “The best way…
Postmaster General Pat Donahoe may be having his difficulties with Congress, but he can take solace in one fact: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle still use the mail. Among the correspondence Donahoe received this week: A Wednesday letter from 43 senators pressing him to extend the U.S. Postal Service’s self-imposed freeze on post office and processing plant closings. That moratorium is currently set to expire May 15; the group of mostly Democratic senators wants the Postal Service to hold off on any closures until Congress approves a comprehensive fix for the mail carrier’s problems. “We are deeply concerned that the closing…
Financially, the U.S. Postal Service has been performing a bit better than expected lately. Politically, that could be bad news for the mail carrier. Why? Because USPS leaders have banked on a sense of crisis to rouse Congress to agree to some heavy-duty service cuts. The faintest glimmer of hope may be all it takes to persuade lawmakers to let the Postal Service instead muddle through until after the November elections–if not longer. “Congress is never going to really do something final until it knows the clock has run out, the money has run out, it’s got no choice,” said Gene Del…
Karen Golinski, a lesbian federal employee, won a major court victory in February when a federal judge ruled that the government had to extend health benefits to her same-sex wife. But other gay and lesbian feds won’t be able to benefit from Golinski’s victory at this time. The Office of Personnel Management in March ordered Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover Golinski’s wife, Amy Cunninghis. But today, OPM sent a notice out on its listserv that said the Golinski ruling does not apply to anyone else. “OPM has been directed by the Department of Justice to continue applying the Defense…
For several months, we’ve been tracking a disturbing increase in federal retirements — one which both complicated the Office of Personnel Management’s efforts to fix the pension process and suggests many feds have had it with the proposed pay and benefit cuts. But OPM’s latest stats show a surprising drop in the number of feds retiring. OPM said it received 6,616 retirement claims in April. That’s 17 percent less than the 8,000 it expected to receive last month, and 15 percent less than the 7,773 feds who retired in April 2011. Up until this point, retirement claims for the first…
Lower than expected usage rates have forced NASA to decommission its three-year-old social networking website Spacebook. NASA plans to shut the site down on June 1 and archive all user accounts and content uploaded to the website, according to an internal email sent to employees last month. “When Spacebook came, we were on the initial cusp, but with Facebook and MySpace…the marketplace is a far more challenging space,” Sasi Pillay, NASA’s chief technology officer for information technology, said during a telework event inWashington. “Even getting some tools adopted internally is hard.” NASA launched Spacebook in June 2009 to facilitate collaboration…
On Capitol Hill, members of Congress have had plenty to say about alleged abuse of the federal workers’ compensation program. Ricky Cook would like to offer a different view. “I’m very upset at the perception that everybody who’s on workman’s compensation is abusing it,” Cook, a Federal Aviation Administration employee in the Kansas City, Kansas area, said in a phone interview this week. “That’s just not the case.” Cook, who had been an air traffic control supervisor, suffered lasting spinal damage in an on-the-job accident in 2007. He was out of work for almost two years. Although the FAA eventually…