If you were looking to go to the Lincoln Memorial today you are out of luck, according to news reports. Apparently someone threw green paint onto the statue of Abraham Lincoln and the National Park Service has closed the monument in order to clean it. From CNN: Vandals splashed green paint on the base of the Lincoln Memorial’s statue overnight, prompting officials to temporarily close the marble fixture on Washington’s National Mall, authorities said. Police were alerted just before 1:30 a.m. and found paint splattered on the leg and base of the 19-foot-tall statue of Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Park Police…
Yearly Archives: 2013
The National Institutes of Standards and Technology is on track to develop a preliminary set of voluntary cybersecurity standards by October, according to the head of the agency. Patrick Gallagher, NIST director, said at a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee hearing Thursday that the agency is working closely with private industry as mandated by a Feb. 19 executive order. “We have made significant progress but we still have a lot to do,” Gallagher said. He said the agency has already held three workshops for industry feedback and will continue to work with the private sector to develop a flexible…
Federal employees found to have violated the Hatch Act’s prohibitions on partisan politicking would face penalties ranging from a reprimand to a five-year ban from federal employment under proposed changes published in today’s Federal Register. Up to now, the only sanction has been automatic firing, unless the three-member Merit Systems Protection Board unanimously agreed to impose a 30-day unpaid suspension. As a result, agencies were sometimes reluctant to pursue minor infractions. The Office of Personnel Management’s proposed changes follow up on the framework laid out in the Hatch Act Modernization Act, which Congress approved last December in part to give…
The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board plans to ask Thrift Savings Plan participants whether the sequester and–in many cases, employee furloughs–has prompted them to change their investment choices. The question will be added to the biannual survey going out to a sample of about 50,000 TSP account holders this fall, Renee Wilder, the board’s director of enterprise planning, said in a brief interview today. At the board’s monthly meeting, Wilder said that TSP participation among active Federal Employees Retirement System members dipped slightly in June to a 12-month low of 2.39 million, but it is unclear whether that decline stemmed from…
At&T has shown it can meet strict security standards for the cloud computing storage offerings it provides to federal agencies. The certification is called the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and vendors must be FedRAMP certified to complete for certain cloud contracts. The FedRAMP program announced that AT&T had been granted provisional authorization. Before this announcement only a handful of vendors have gone through the FedRAMP certification process: Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, Amazon Web Services, CGI and Autonomic Resources.
So lets have a little bit of fun today. It seems that every group, school and town is getting a list, so lets add federal employees to those groups! Feel free to add your own at the bottom of the blog. 1. When people shout “high five!” and your first thought is “over my dead body. 2. Jan. 1 doesn’t even hold a candle to Oct. 1. Its the cleanest slate you can imagine. 3. You give your children 180 days to respond to a new rule you are proposing. Corollary: You refer to your family as “stakeholders.” 4. You…
Organized labor is urging a congressional committee to allow House members to vote on two amendments dealing with federal employee furlough policy when they take up a fiscal 2014 defense spending bill. One of the amendments would “register a vote of no confidence” in the Defense Department’s use of furloughs; the other would stop furloughs of DoD employees paid through working capital funds, according to a letter this week from William Samuel, head of the AFL-CIO’s government affairs department. The letter was addressed to leaders of the House Rules Committee, which acts as gatekeeper in deciding which amendments House members…
Agencies would move to a two-year budget cycle, consolidate duplicative programs and slash travel spending under a series of bills introduced Thursday by a bi-partisan group of lawmakers. The nine separate pieces of legislation introduced by the No Labels Caucus include a number of changes to agency budgeting, procurement and spending rules. “Forget, for a moment, whether you think government should be doing more or less, which is really the fundamental debate in this town,” said Rep. Reid Ribble, a member of the caucus. “We should all be able to agree that whatever government is doing now should be done…
The Senate voted today to confirm Thomas Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor in a 54 to 46 vote. Before his confirmation Perez led the Justice Department’s civil-rights division and was previously Maryland’s labor secretary. President Obama said in a statement that Perez had dedicated his career to keeping the American dream alive for families across the country. “At the Department of Labor, Tom will help us continue to grow our economy, help businesses create jobs, make sure workers have the skills those jobs require, and ensure safe workplaces and economic opportunity for all,” Obama said.
A multi-million dollar U.S.-funded construction project to build a teacher training facility in Afghanistan remains years behind schedule and marred by shoddy construction work and dangerous conditions, a government watchdog has found. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction detailed the findings in a report released Wednesday after inspecting a teacher training facility built in the northern Afghan city of Sheberghan. Calling the U.S.-funded project an example of broken promises and unfulfilled results, the IG found contract close out files reflect the fact work was finished, even though a host of electrical problems and other issues remained unresolved. What’s more,…