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…
Yearly Archives: 2013
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…
The General Services Administration is hoping to trade its Metro West building in Baltimore for construction or renovation services on its other facilities, according to an agency announcement Wednesday. The agency plans to issue a request for information for developers in the area Aug. 8 and interested parties will have 45 days to respond. The 1.1 million-square-foot building will become vacant in 2014. The facility has a parking garage and sits on nearly 11 acres of land, according to the agency. “Now that the Metro West facility will soon no longer serve the government’s needs, GSA is seeking ideas from…
Legislation that would enhance agency cybersecurity efforts and boost research into protecting critical systems from cyber attack passed out of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Tuesday. The Cybersecurity Act of 2013 would task the National Institutes of Standards and Technology with developing a set of voluntary standards and guidelines to reduce cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. The legislation would also direct the Office of Science and Technology at the White House with developing a cybersecurity research plan that would include guidelines on how to test and build new software and how to improve consumer education on cybersecurity. Sen.…
Two Obama administration candidates for nuts-and-bolts jobs are scheduled to get confirmation votes at 10 a.m. today from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. First up, according to a committee advisory, is the nomination of John Thompson to head the Census Bureau. Thompson, who previously worked for the bureau as far back as the 1970s in such posts as associate director for the decennial census, is currently president and CEO of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, according a White House bio. The Senate panel is also supposed to vote on the nomination of…
The Defense Department could cut as many as five furlough days from the 11 currently planned by the end of the fiscal year in September, according to an Associated Press report. The report, which cites only anonymous sources, says that Pentagon officials are looking at trimming the total number of unpaid days off to somewhere between six and eight. Hold your breath, though–no announcement is planned this week, according to the AP. At present, about 650,000 DoD civilian employees are generally losing one day per week to the furloughs that began early this month; as Defense News is reporting, the furloughs–imposed as part of the…
For hundreds of thousands of federal employees, there’s been no escaping the effects of sequester-related budget cuts, either on their jobs, their paychecks or both. For the general public, though, not so much. In a national poll this month by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 55 percent of those surveyed said the cuts have had little or no impact on themselves and their families. There is another way to look at the results. As NBC News’ story notes, the percentage of respondents who said they’ve felt “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of impact stood at 22 percent, up from 16 percent in April. But with…
Furlough-related appeals continue to pour into the Merit Systems Protection Board. As of this morning, the number of docketed appeals stood at 4,647, up about 50 percent in a week. And that number doesn’t include another 4,587 cases that have been received but are not yet docketed—most of which are likely furlough-related as well, Clerk William Spencer said in an email. The surge temporarily knocked out the board’s electronic “e-Appeal” service a few times this week. It has also prompted the board to post the following message on its homepage: “Due to the unprecedented large volume of furlough appeals being…