Good morning! It’s another working (cue the snarky comments) weekend for members of Congress as news accounts describe lots of talking but no consensus on how to end the partial government shutdown and raise the nation’s debt ceiling in time to avoid default as early as next week. Attention is now focused on the Senate, where Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., are working on legislation that would fund government through the end of March. Sequester-related cuts would continue, but agencies would have more flexibility in apportioning them, according to details reported by McClatchy. The plan would also raise the borrowing…
Browsing: 2014 Budget
Good morning! For hundreds of thousands of federal employees rounding out their first full week on furlough or else working with no paycheck in sight, this is not a happy Friday. For those paying attention to what’s happening in Washington, however, there was plenty to watch yesterday. The good news: House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the Obama administration are talking. The bad news: No one seems to be sure where the conversation is heading. Although the stock market responded with a big upward bounce, Stan Collender, a veteran budget watcher, isn’t especially optimistic. In an interview last night, Collender called…
Good morning! As many observers predicted, the government shutdown crisis has now morphed into the will-Congress-raise-the-debt-ceiling-in-time-to-avert-a-global-financial-panic crisis. Although there are some glimmers of movement, it’s less clear in what direction. If the presumption is that both stalemates will be settled together, however, that means furloughed feds will likely remain out of work through at least part of next week. The Washington Post, for example, reports today that key congressional Republicans are showing willingness to back down from their insistence on delaying or defunding implementation of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as the price of reopening shuttered agencies. But with…
Good morning! For several hundred thousand federal employees, it’s another day of unpaid time off with-once again—no end on the horizon as President Obama, House Republicans and Senate Democrats all remain seemingly dug into their respective positions. There’s also no immediate sign that Congress is going to give final passage to legislation that would ensure retroactive pay for furloughed feds once the shutdown ends. After Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, signaled objections to fast-track consideration of the back-pay bill passed by the House on Saturday, the House GOP leadership tried again yesterday, linking a separate back-pay measure to legislation that would…
The big news today is what’s not happening—i.e., there is no indication of any deal in sight to reopen the government this week. In addition, a bill to ensure back pay to hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees appears to be hitting a Senate slowdown. The measure, sponsored by Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., raced through the Republican-run House on a 407-0 vote Saturday; supporters had hoped for a similar glide through the Democratic controlled-Senate. But on Monday, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called it “premature” to move ahead with the back pay bill while Democrats were refusing to take up…
Good morning! Today we launch a new–and presumably temporary–feature on FedLine: A regular (as events warrant) rundown of all the noteworthy shutdown-related news that we can find. Given what happened over the weekend, we’re playing catch-up today. As always, would appreciate your help in keeping federal employees informed on what’s happening across government. You can email tips at any time to shutdownstories@federaltimes.com. Feel free to offer suggestions on how to make this feature useful. We’ll start by calling it “Shutdown Watch,” but are definitely open to something more original. So, we start Day 7 of the partial shutdown with what…
The closing of a vast swath of government operations is now under way as this Office of Management and Budget memo makes clear. The U.S. Agriculture Department, meanwhile, has wasted no time taking down its website. The Office of Personnel Management’s site, however, is still live, with a page with guidance on everything you probably never wanted to know about employee furloughs.
At least one federal conference is being postponed this week because of a potential government shutdown. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is postponing its Cloud Computing and Mobility Forum this week “because we could not guarantee NIST’s facility would be open on the first day of the meeting, Oct. 1,” according to an agency spokeswoman. “The meeting has not been rescheduled.” More than 500 people had registered for the conference, including about 130 federal employees. Many federal employees would be forced to stay home without pay if Congress doesn’t strike a budget deal by midnight. Just at DoD, some 400,000 employees…
The odds of a partial government shutdown starting Oct. 1 spiked with House Republicans’ decision today to push a 2014 continuing resolution that would also cut off funding for “Obamacare” implementation. What would your agency do? A starting point can be found at the Office of Management and Budget’s website. Back in 2011, (i.e., several crises ago), OMB collected links to the contingency plans for dozens of agencies on a single page and–perhaps presciently–never took them down. Here’s the link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/contingency-plans. In a memo today, OMB Director Sylvia Burwell told agencies to update those plans, which determine–among many other issues–which…
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…