For federal agencies, the current sequester-related budget crunch is unprecedented. Congress, however, isn’t letting go of one venerable tradition: Paying a year’s congressional salary (currently at a base level of $174,000) as a death benefit to the spouse of a lawmaker who dies in office. No across-the-board cut here: The fiscal 2014 continuing resolution unveiled yesterday authorizes the full payment to Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg, widow of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. Frank Lautenberg died in June at age 89. After rising from childhood poverty to lead the Automatic Data Processing payroll management company, Lautenberg was numbered among the Senate’s…
Browsing: 2014 Budget
Home to many federal agencies and employees, the nation’s capital is feeling the brunt of sequestration, counting thousands of fewer government jobs this year and tens of millions of dollar likely to disappear from the local economy next year. “We’re beginning to see some alarming trends,” D.C. Department of Employment Services Director Lisa Mallory said in a phone interview. “We’ve seen a big decrease in federal jobs.” From January through July, government jobs decreased by 7,000. And city officials, who outlined their concerns in a press briefing last week, say that after cutting the unemployment rate from more than 10-percent…
A $15 hourly pay cut is coming for lawyers in private practice who represent indigent defendants in federal criminal cases. The looming cut, effective Sept. 1, will lower the hourly rate for so-called “panel attorneys” in most cases from $125 per hour to $110 per hour, said Karen Redmond, a spokeswoman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. For lawyers working on behalf of defendants facing the death penalty, the change will take their hourly compensation from $178 to $163. The reductions, signaled in a letter released today from William Traxler, chairman of the executive committee of the Judicial Conference…
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…
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…
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…
Make sure you keep checking FederalTimes.com through the day for up-to-the-minute coverage of the White House’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal. The budget will go online at 11:15 a.m. today, and the Federal Times crew will immediately start diving into the numbers to find out who are the winners and who are the losers. (Although given the way things have been going lately, we expect a lot more losers than winners this year.) We already know that President Obama is going to propose switching to the chained CPI, and cutting federal retirement benefits by $35 billion. Check our story from last…
Agencies were directed last fall to cut a combined $7.7 billion from their information technology budgets in 2014 and propose ways to redirect those funds for priority projects. Duplicative investments, failing projects, help desks and contracts for email, desktops and mobile devices are among the areas targeted for cuts, according to budget guidance released by the Office of Management and Budget in August. Details of the proposed cuts were included in agencies’ budget submission documents and were incorporated into the president’s budget, which is due out Wednesday. For each agency, cuts will amount to 10 percent of their average annual…