The Justice Department is adding a whistleblower ombudsman to its team to better support those who report wasteful government spending and mismanagement, agency officials announced Wednesday. Robert Storch, counselor to the inspector general, will train and educate Justice Department employees about the role and importance of whistleblowers, as well as their legal rights and protections against retaliation, according to an agency news release. Storch will ensure that whistleblower complaints are reviewed and addressed by the Justice Department inspector general’s office promptly, tell whistleblowers about the status and resolution of their complaints and monitor inspector general investigations of retaliation claims. Storch…
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Last Tuesday marked another bittersweet milestone in the U.S. Postal Service’s seemingly endless downsizing campaign as almost 3,800 postmasters walked out the door. A few hundred more could follow them by the end of next month, according to USPS figures released today at FedLine’s request. The cause, of course, is the POStPlan, which calls for reducing customer service window hours at some 13,000 post offices nationwide to as little as two hours a day. As part of the same plan to save about a half-billion dollars annually, the Postal Service also intends to eliminate more than half of the 21,000…
The American Postal Workers Union has an update on the status of buyout talks, only to say that there’s really nothing to say. “I understand that there is great interest in this topic among some members, but it is simply not feasible or smart to conduct negotiations in public,” APWU President Cliff Guffey says in this week’s release on the union’s web site. “Great interest” may be an understatement, based on the feedback that FedLine’s been hearing. Among some union members, frustration is also running high that two months after mail handlers got a $15,000 buyout offer, clerks are still…
SAN DIEGO| It’s been more than a year since President Obama formally kicked off the “Campaign to Cut Waste” in a June 2011 executive order. Some agencies, though, seem to be taking the charge to reduce administrative costs more seriously than others, a newly released survey of chief financial officers and other federal financial managers indicates. Although 45 percent of respondents said they have been getting “good results” from the campaign, almost as many (44 percent) said they had little to report, were just getting started, had laid plans to start, or (uh-oh) hadn’t done anything, according to the unscientific survey, sponsored by the Association…
The Office of Management and Budget can no longer ignore the signs that Congress probably isn’t going to get its act together and avert devastating sequestration cuts by the end of the year. Acting Director Jeff Zients today issued a memo to agency leaders that said OMB will start discussing how sequestration could be implemented over the next few months. In his memo, Zients repeatedly reminds Congress that the whole point of sequestration was that it was so bad and devastating that they had no choice but to agree on a way to reduce the deficit, and prods them to…
SAN DIEGO | Not that there was much doubt on this score, but Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., this morning confirmed that Congress won’t act to head off a U.S. Postal Service default on a $5.5 billion payment into a retiree health care fund that is legally due Wednesday. The default “will occur,” said Issa, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is the lead sponsor of a USPS overhaul bill. The payment was originally due last September, but Congress pushed back the deadline until Aug. 1. Issa’s comments came in an interview after he spoke at an Association of Government Accountants conference here.…
Granted, it’s been a long time since Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital, the private equity firm that has taken a central role in the presidential election campaign. But considering the intensity of President Obama’s attacks on the presumptive Republican nominee’s record at Bain, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that a senior Obama administration appointee had money invested with the firm—at least until a few months ago. Last year, acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeff Zients held roughly between $116,000 and $315,000 in what his annual financial disclosure report describes as “Bain Capital Fund VII.” OMB released the report, which requires…
It’s official: The Thrift Savings Plan’s G-Fund is back to full strength after losing almost $400 million courtesy of last year’s debt ceiling showdown. The confirmation comes from a Government Accountability Office review of the Treasury Department’s maneuvering to head off an unprecedented U.S. default after Congress initially deadlocked over raising the nation’s borrowing limit. The standoff was resolved (at least temporarily) last August with approval of the Budget Control Act, which traded a debt-ceiling increase for spending cuts. But in the months before the act’s passage, Treasury resorted to a number of “extraordinary actions” to buy time. One involved…
Veterans Affairs Department employees have had access to one of the government’s best career-development tools since October. Soon, you may see something like it coming to your agency. Last week, top VA officials demonstrated the tool — called MyCareer@VA — at a meeting of administration and union leaders. “When you think about your own career, there are times that you want to figure out how to get ahead, but there are also times that you may feel like you’re stuck and want to do something else,” said VA Deputy Secretary Scott Gould as he presented the website July 18 to…
The Navy and Marine Corps are soliciting ideas on how to reduce costs through better management of information technology, efficient business processes and improving cyber-related procurements. Under orders last year to cut information technology budgets by 25 percent over the next five years, the Department of the Navy is consolidating data centers, increasing the use of departmentwide software licenses and reducing cellphone costs. Navy and Marine Corps employees, industry, academia and the public are welcome to make recommendations. Submissions must include a brief discussion of the problem, a proposed scope, key assumptions, constraints and risks, costs, savings and other benefits and operational impacts. Email completed submission forms to…