Monthly Archives: August, 2013

Only days after it was introduced, a proposed Senate overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service is taking its lumps from both organized labor and the mailing industry. “This bill is fatally flawed,” Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a Friday statement denouncing the legislation as a betrayal of USPS employees. The Association for Postal Commerce, which represents business mail users, has some “significant issues” with the measure, such as its idea for widening the Postal Service’s discretion in applying an inflation-adjusted cap on rate increases for standard mail and other areas where it dominates the…

Glen Johnson, the former online politics editor of the Boston Globe who now serves as senior adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, required a special waiver so he wouldn’t run afoul of ethics rules by communicating with reporters from his old newspaper and the New York Times. The State Department granted the wavier back in February, but the decision wasn’t added to a public list of such waivers maintained by the Office of Government Ethics until last week. Under ethics rules that aimed to close the revolving door between government and special interests, President Obama has barred political appointees…

A former State Department contract employee and her husband pleaded guilty Friday to fraud and conspiracy charges in a scam to steer tens of millions of dollars in embassy construction contracts. Kathleen D. McGrade, 64, and Brian Collinsworth, 47, face up to 30 years in prison after their pleas in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. A sentencing date is set for Nov. 8. In plea documents, both admitted that McGrade, as contract specialist for the State Department, steered nearly $40 million in embassy construction work from 2008 to 2011 to her husband’s company, while keeping  their marriage a secret…

The White House has kicked off its fifth annual “Save Award” competition where thousands of federal employees submit ideas on how to cut waste from the government. Last year, Department of Education employee Frederick Winter won. Winter’s idea, which came to him after he turned 65, proposed that all federal employees with transit benefits shift from regular to senior fare as soon as they’re eligible. Steve Posner, associate director for strategic planning and communications in the Office of Management and Budget, said more than 85,000 ideas have come in from federal employees during the past four years. “We know these…