The continuing spending resolutions continue . . . To give itself a little breathing room, Congress has approved a three-day extension of the continuing resolution, or CR, that would have expired at midnight tonight. The extension, approved Friday, pushed the deadline back to Tuesday. Before that point, lawmakers are expected to pass one more CR that would run into early next year. The resolutions generally leave agency spending frozen at fiscal 2010 levels; the latest round comes after Senate Democrats could not round up the votes to break a likely Republican filibuster of a catch-all appropriations bill for fiscal 2011. …
Browsing: 2011 Budget
If you’ve longed to own a copy of the appendix for the federal budget (all 1,416 pages for fiscal 2011), you’re in luck. You can snag a copy for just $9 .99 on Google’s ebookstore. The search engine giant is partnering with the Government Printing Office to offer federal government titles in its collection of ebooks, which include biographies and memoirs. GPO has added nearly 100 government titles in the catalog “and will continue to add titles in the next several months,” according to a GPO announcement made Tuesday. For now, you can read up about the space age or the history of Walter Reed Army Medical…
Happy Friday! On a voice vote Thursday evening, the Senate passed a continuing spending resolution to keep the government in business through Dec. 18. The House had approved the resolution Wednesday. It will extend a similar measure that was set to expire Friday at midnight, so no government shutdown for at least another two weeks. Like its predecessor, this new resolution basically keeps spending at fiscal 2010 levels. Since Congress is not likely to finish up work on a dozen fiscal 2011 appropriations bills in the week before Christmas, there will probably be at least one more continuing resolution to push…
The Obama administration has yet another dashboard on the way. Dan Gordon, head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, told Federal Times in a statement that the administration will launch a dashboard to track agencies’ progress on acquisition reform later this summer. The administration has had its much-ballyhooed IT dashboard up and running for about a year, and is working on another dashboard to track agencies’ progress toward “high priority performance goals.” Dave McClure at GSA is also working on something called a “citizen dashboard” that we probably won’t see until sometime next year. Some agencies, apparently realizing that…
Stan Soloway and Alan Chvotkin over at the Professional Services Council expressed their displeasure with Defense Department insourcing efforts in a May letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Recent congressional attention to the issue hasn’t done much to assuage their concerns. In a conference call with reporters this morning to discuss the Senate and House versions of the 2011 defense authorization bill, Soloway and Chvotkin said PSC supports an amendment by Rep. Jim Langevin that would prohibit DoD from setting quotas for its insourcing efforts. However, two other amendments passed by the House seem to conflict with the Langevin amendment,…
The Senate earlier today voted down the latest Republican deficit reduction proposal that would have frozen federal pay raises and bonuses. The tax bill amendment, offered by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., would have also capped federal staffing levels and imposed a 5 percent across-the-board budget cut for all federal agencies except the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments. The amendment was defeated on a 41 – 57 vote. Thune blasted lawmakers for defeating the amendment, which he called “a common sense step toward restoring fiscal sanity.” “The defeat of my amendment was a missed opportunity for Congress to prove they are serious about tackling…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A leading Republican deficit hawk proposes cutting out federal employees’ 1.4 percent 2011 pay raise, which would represent less than two-tenths of a percent of the annual $1.4 trillion deficit and not even scratch our fiscal troubles. Federal unions holler and decry the effect a pay freeze will have on federal workers, who are — let’s be honest — relatively shielded from the economic troubles facing much of the rest of the nation, such as layoffs. Both sides pull out their own conflicting numbers on the difference between federal and private-sector pay — neither…
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s office tells me that they’re hoping to attach a proposal to cut out next year’s federal pay raise to the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, possibly today. Cantor, R-Va., plans to use the so-called “motion to recommit” — a House rule which gives the minority party one last chance to amend a bill — to force a vote on the issue. If a pay freeze is attached to something as big and crucial as the Defense authorization bill, that could make it tough to extricate. There’s a lot that could happen — it could get stripped out…
The Senate just voted 53-45 to table an amendment that would have frozen federal employees’ raises, bonuses and salary increases for one year. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican to break ranks and vote to kill the measure, which was sponsored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla. But six Democrats — Evan Bayh of Indiana, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bill Nelson of Florida, and John Tester of Montana — voted to continue debating the amendment. Of course, that’s not necessarily the same thing as voting for…
Shameless self-promotion time: I’ll be on News Channel 8’s Federal News Tonight program this evening at 7:30 to talk about a few controversial issues we’ve been covering lately. I’ll first talk about Federal Times’ exclusive look at an upcoming report on problems with the intelligence community’s pay-for-performance system. And then we’ll discuss the growing controversy about federal pay raises and the Republican push to cut them to help balance the budget.