Every year in May people across the country join together to recognize the work done by federal employees. Public Service Recognition Week – organized by the Public Employees Roundtable – will be held May 5 to 11 and will include a public town hall meeting with Cabinet secretaries and a congressional breakfast to announce the finalists of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals. The Federal Times will also be running several pages worth of stories about hard-working federal employees and their contributions to their agencies, missions and to the good of the country. Here is a video of…
Yearly Archives: 2013
Sylvia Mathews Burwell appears assured of Senate confirmation after two panels today approved her nomination to head the Office of Management and Budget. Burwell’s nomination cleared both the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on voice votes; a final vote by the full Senate could come within the next week. Burwell is an OMB alum from the Clinton administration who most recently headed the Walmart Foundation. If confirmed, she would replace Jeff Zients, who has served as acting OMB chief since January 2012, when Jack Lew left to become White House chief of staff.
For U.S. Postal Service employees, the disclosure that an envelope addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., may have contained a poison could revive unnerving memories of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed two workers at the Brentwood mail processing plant in Washington, D.C. According to USA Today, the envelope is undergoing further analysis to confirm the presence of the toxin known as ricin. Here’s what the Postal Service is saying so far, in a statement provided by spokesman Dave Partenheimer this morning. “The U.S. Postal Service is working diligently with authorities to determine if there was in fact a hazardous substance inside an envelope addressed to a U.S. senator, and, if so, what type…
The Defense Information Systems Agency is one step closer to standing up cloud broker services for the Defense Department. As DoD’s cloud broker, DISA will manage the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiate contracts between cloud service providers and DoD consumers. DISA announced Tuesday that it has developed a process for gathering and assessing DoD’s cloud computing requirements, evaluating vendors’ cloud offerings against contract requirements and has created a catalog for cloud services. In a June 2012 memo, DoD Chief Information Officer Teri Takai said all DoD components must acquire government or industry-provided cloud services using DISA, or obtain a…
The head of the Defense Department’s closely watched audit-readiness effort has left for the private sector. Joe Quinn is now a senior manager at Ernst and Young’s federal practice, where he will advise clients on strategies “to improve financial, accounting and cost management capabilities,” the firm said in a news release last week. As director of the Pentagon’s financial improvement and audit readiness (FIAR) program for the last three years, Quinn was point man for the mammoth undertaking of getting DoD’s books in order. Under a timetable that Congress has now written into law, the department is supposed to have an auditable statement…
Federal, state and local agencies are working together in the aftermath of 3 explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon that has left at least 2 dead and more than 20 people injured. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said in a press conference with reporters Monday that he has talked personally with President Obama and the FBI – who have pledged to help in any way required. He said the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI, Massachusetts State Police and the National Guard were all working together along with local law enforcement and first responders. “There is…
Put all government security clearance holders together and you’d have the second-largest city in the United States, according to the latest annual numbers from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As of October, the number of federal employees and contractors allowed coveted access to secret information totaled almost 4.92 million, an increase of about 1 percent over the preceding year. Of that total, about 3.5 million were feds, augmented by almost 1.1 million contract employees, the ODNI report said. There were also about 300,000 cleared individuals who fell in the category of “other,” meaning that records didn’t make…
House lawmakers will consider a bill Wednesday that would allow companies and federal agencies to voluntarily share and receive cyber threat information with each other. The Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence April 10 and will be introduced on the House floor Wednesday. A vote is expected by Thursday. An earlier version of the bill passed the House last April but lacked additional privacy controls included in the revised bill. Still, that has not satisfied the White House and civil liberties groups who say the bill’s current provisions are insufficient. CISPA…
President Obama this afternoon bid farewell to departing Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry today in a statement: John Berry has served the American people well as Director of the Office of Personnel Management. He’s streamlined the way federal employees are hired, modernized the workplace, made the federal workforce more diverse, and increased the number of returning servicemembers hired by the government. John has been a champion for federal workers – men and women who devote their lives to vital tasks like securing our borders, curing disease, and keeping the American people safe. This country is better off because…
The president’s budget will propose a 2 percent increase in overall information technology funding in 2014 to about $82 billion. The slight increase is compared with 2012 levels and may mean that agencies will be allowed to reinvest savings from targeted cuts the administration directed last fall. The increased funding, however, seems to contradict administration efforts to reduce IT spending. Cybersecurity, innovation and delivering efficient IT are among the priorities expected to be outlined in the budget. More details to come…