We’ll have more about this in Monday’s edition of Federal Times, but it’s an odd enough story that I think it merits a blog post tonight. The major postal unions — APWU, NALC, NRLCA and NPMHU — sent a letter on Tuesday to Jim Messina, the White House deputy chief of staff. They requested a meeting to discuss the Postal Service’s “deepening crisis.” They want the White House to intervene with Congress and reduce the Postal Service’s contributions to its retiree health care trust fund. Without that change, the Postal Service is going to run out of cash this year.…
Browsing: Agencies
During a week when much of the Senate ground to a halt for the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, the Senate cleared two nominees Wednesday to lead NASA. Marine Corps Major Gen. Charles Bolden is now NASA’s administrator, with Laurie Garver as deputy administrator. The nominations were approved by voice vote. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., managed Bolden’s nomination on the floor. Nelson, a former astronaut, flew with Bolden on a 1986 space shuttle mission.
From Steve Losey at the Pentagon: The National Security Personnel System Task Force is about to recommend the Defense Department continue with NSPS with some major revisions, such as improved communications between managers and employees and improved transparency for the pay pool process. Check back with FederalTimes.com later today for Steve’s full report on the task force’s NSPS recommendations.
I’m skimming over a conference report from the Senate Financial Services and General Government appropriations committee (really a fun way to spend your Wednesday afternoon!), and I came across this passage on the Postal Service: Because some experts, including OPM, have expressed concerns about the assumptions made in the Postal Service IG report, the Committee directs the Postal Service, in coordination with OPM and OMB, to develop a fiscally responsible legislative proposal to grant a limited measure of relief from the PAEA requirements to pre-fund retiree health benefits. If I’m reading this right, the Senate is not going to move…
I spent some time this afternoon analyzing the Postal Service’s year-to-date business, and the numbers aren’t good, to say the least. Mail revenue and volume are dropping far faster than the Postal Service expected at the beginning of the fiscal year — so postal officials could find themselves hundreds of million of dollars short of their projected $76.2 billion revenue this year. Data and graphs are after the jump. But first I should note that these numbers are a little imprecise, because they’re based on data from the first two quarters of 2009 (the third quarter ended on June 30,…
Alyssa Rosenberg over at Government Executive’s blog thinks it’s reasonable to get rid of the color-coding in the Homeland Security Advisory System. I would go a step further and say it’s reasonable to scrap the whole thing. The system is ineffective because the “alert level” is stuck in the middle of the scale. It has been either yellow or orange since the system was created 7 years ago — except for a few days in 2006, when it went to red because of the British airline plot (and the red level only applied to the airline industry). That’s understandable. DHS…
BoingBoing, the self-proclaimed “directory of wonderful things,†points out an interesting exchange in a State Department town hall meeting Sec. Hillary Clinton and Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy held Friday. Here is what BoingBoing quoted from the meeting’s transcript: MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle: Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t…
The Senate yesterday afternoon confirmed Robert Groves as the next director of the Census Bureau. The confirmation comes at a critical time for the Commerce Department bureau, which is about to undertake its once-a-decade tally of the U.S. population. Groves has the skills to tackle this challenge, top senators say. From 1990-1992, he was associate director for statistical design, standards and methodology at the Census Bureau. For the last eight years, he has directed the University of Michigan Survey Research Center. “Dr. Groves is a brilliant social scientist, he has impeccable credentials and the administration would have had a hard time…
The House Oversight and Government Reform committee voted last week to approve H.R. 22. And during the hearing, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., made what sounded to me like a very questionable assertion: At each hearing the news about the state of the Postal Service’s finances has gone from bad to worse… postal officials have notified us they will have trouble making their payroll. The first part of this statement is undeniably true. But I was skeptical of the second part, about not making payroll, so I checked in with the Postal Service. And the Postal Service tells me it never…
Dr. Regina Benjamin, a family practice doctor who works with the rural poor in Alabama, is President Barack Obama’s choice for surgeon general, Obama said Monday. Obama praised Benjamin’s commitment to health care and to providing access to care for those who can’t afford insurance. She is the founder of the Bayou Le Batre Rural Health Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., a fishing village, and has served as its chief exective officer since is founding in 1990. Benjamin has rebuilt the clinic several times, including after it sustain heavy damages by Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Katrina in…