For 40,000 federal employees, this has not been a happy Friday. The reason: They didn’t get paid. Because of problems at the Interior Business Center (IBC), which handles payroll processing for numerous agencies outside of the Interior Department, paychecks that were supposed to be direct-deposited today didn’t go through, spokesman Michael Fernandez said in a statement later posted on the center’s website. Paychecks will now be deposited Tuesday, he said. The affected employees work in 23 of the 42 agencies served by the business center. They represent about 17 percent of the 240,000 workers paid through the IBC, according to the statement.…
Monthly Archives: September, 2013
Nearly a decade after he died, the complicated marital turnabouts of a U.S. Forest Service employee named Don King gave rise Friday to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. First, some background. Try to follow along, it’s complicated. In 1967, King married a woman named Diana. They divorced in 1980. They remarried in 1981. Then, they divorced again 18 months later. And yet they held themselves out to be married for years afterward, living in the same house, keeping joint accounts and even celebrating their (original) anniversary. But in 2002, Don moved out. He…
Forget constitutional separation of powers for a moment: The federal judiciary (Article III) is unabashedly appealing to President Obama (Article II) for help in undoing some of this year’s budget cuts in fiscal 2014. As congressional leaders and the administration seek to reach a 2014 spending deal, the judicial branch “will not have a seat at the table,” Judge John Bates, secretary of the Judicial Conference of the United States, wrote in a letter released today asking Obama to help make a case to raise court funding above this year’s sequester level. The sequester, which cost the courts almost $350…
It looks like Donald Trump is interested in expanding is collection of used federal buildings. Having recently completed a deal with the General Services Administration for the Old Post Office building in Washington, Trump told the Washington Post that he would be interested in buying the current FBI headquarters as well. GSA has been looking for a new location for the agency, which has outgrown its dated 1970s headquarter in Washington. GSA has requested proposals from developers on how it could trade the old headquarters for a new one in the area. So far prime targets are an old FBI…
For federal agencies, the current sequester-related budget crunch is unprecedented. Congress, however, isn’t letting go of one venerable tradition: Paying a year’s congressional salary (currently at a base level of $174,000) as a death benefit to the spouse of a lawmaker who dies in office. No across-the-board cut here: The fiscal 2014 continuing resolution unveiled yesterday authorizes the full payment to Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg, widow of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. Frank Lautenberg died in June at age 89. After rising from childhood poverty to lead the Automatic Data Processing payroll management company, Lautenberg was numbered among the Senate’s…
Home to many federal agencies and employees, the nation’s capital is feeling the brunt of sequestration, counting thousands of fewer government jobs this year and tens of millions of dollar likely to disappear from the local economy next year. “We’re beginning to see some alarming trends,” D.C. Department of Employment Services Director Lisa Mallory said in a phone interview. “We’ve seen a big decrease in federal jobs.” From January through July, government jobs decreased by 7,000. And city officials, who outlined their concerns in a press briefing last week, say that after cutting the unemployment rate from more than 10-percent…
Two federal employee unions, along with the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, are wading into the fight over postal legislation. In a joint letter to members of a Senate committee released yesterday, NARFE, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the National Treasury Employees Union objected to provisions in a Senate bill pertaining to the federal workers’ compensation program and the U.S. Postal Service’s hopes of revamping its participation in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. You can read the letter here; whatever the merits of the arguments, it’s safe to say that the opposition of three organizations…
The board that oversees the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent federal agency that doles out foreign aid, is meeting next week to discuss open data and transparency. But the meeting, it turns out, is closed to the public. As a policy, MCC board meetings are held behind closed doors. But with transparency on the agenda, “it’s hard to see why the entire board meeting would be closed to the public,” said John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for increased government transparency. He credited the MCC for releasing copies of its meeting minutes. Meanwhile,…