The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will meet tomorrow to vet Joe Jordan, the President’s nominee to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Jordan joined the Office of Management and Budget in December as a senior adviser on procurement issues — the standard setup for potential nominees. Former OFPP Administrator Dan Gordon left the office Jan. 1. Members in the contracting community have expressed concern that Jordan’s nomination could be held up by the elections but no signs of that yet. Industry and federal officials are eager to get a leader in place. “In this time of budget austerity, procurement policies…
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Postmaster General Pat Donahoe may be having his difficulties with Congress, but he can take solace in one fact: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle still use the mail. Among the correspondence Donahoe received this week: A Wednesday letter from 43 senators pressing him to extend the U.S. Postal Service’s self-imposed freeze on post office and processing plant closings. That moratorium is currently set to expire May 15; the group of mostly Democratic senators wants the Postal Service to hold off on any closures until Congress approves a comprehensive fix for the mail carrier’s problems. “We are deeply concerned that the closing…
Financially, the U.S. Postal Service has been performing a bit better than expected lately. Politically, that could be bad news for the mail carrier. Why? Because USPS leaders have banked on a sense of crisis to rouse Congress to agree to some heavy-duty service cuts. The faintest glimmer of hope may be all it takes to persuade lawmakers to let the Postal Service instead muddle through until after the November elections–if not longer. “Congress is never going to really do something final until it knows the clock has run out, the money has run out, it’s got no choice,” said Gene Del…
Lower than expected usage rates have forced NASA to decommission its three-year-old social networking website Spacebook. NASA plans to shut the site down on June 1 and archive all user accounts and content uploaded to the website, according to an internal email sent to employees last month. “When Spacebook came, we were on the initial cusp, but with Facebook and MySpace…the marketplace is a far more challenging space,” Sasi Pillay, NASA’s chief technology officer for information technology, said during a telework event inWashington. “Even getting some tools adopted internally is hard.” NASA launched Spacebook in June 2009 to facilitate collaboration…
On Capitol Hill, members of Congress have had plenty to say about alleged abuse of the federal workers’ compensation program. Ricky Cook would like to offer a different view. “I’m very upset at the perception that everybody who’s on workman’s compensation is abusing it,” Cook, a Federal Aviation Administration employee in the Kansas City, Kansas area, said in a phone interview this week. “That’s just not the case.” Cook, who had been an air traffic control supervisor, suffered lasting spinal damage in an on-the-job accident in 2007. He was out of work for almost two years. Although the FAA eventually…
The Interior Department expects to migrate 92,000 employees to a single cloud-based email system by December, according to a senior agency official. Interior awarded a $35 million contract for cloud email and collaboration tools to Ohio-based Onix Networking Corp, according to an announcement on fbo.gov. The Google Apps for Government solution will also provide employees with instant messaging, desktop video conferencing, web-based collaboration systems and email on their mobile devices. “That is one of our first big enterprise services that we hope we can ramp up quickly,” Andrew Jackson, deputy assistant secretary for technology, information and business services, said in…
Take it for what it’s worth, but here’s a data point to start the week: Since fiscal 2011, about 1,268 IRS employees have taken advantage of early retirement and buyout offers. That number amounts to a bit more than 1 percent of the agency’s workforce, which totaled almost 91,000 as of December, according to official figures posted online. Federal Times received the information under a Freedom of Information Act request filed earlier this year after attempts to obtain the data from the IRS’ public affairs office in Washington were unsuccessful. The mini-exodus is part of a looming human capital challenge…
As anyone who follows postal matters knows, the Senate this afternoon approved legislation aimed at putting the U.S. Postal Service back on its feet financially. But the USPS Board of Governors just put out the following statement indicating that it’s anything but happy with the outcome. Here’s the statement in full, following by separate comments from Postmaster General Pat Donahoe: “The Board, in working with management, has spent the past two years preparing a comprehensive business plan to make the Postal Service viable so it would not become a liability to the American people. This plan was validated by outside…
Looks like the Senate’s going to be very busy next Tuesday with rapid-fire voting on more than three dozen amendments to S. 1789, the postal overhaul legislation. According to a message this evening from the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the amendments pertain to everything from post office closings to unions to compensation for U.S. Postal Service executives. There’s also one from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., that would require more reporting by government agencies on conference spending. (Hmm–FedLine can’t imagine what prompted that.) Anyway, for the hard-core postal aficionados out there (and in the interest of open government), here’s the portion…
The General Services Administration is canceling Oracle Corp.’s Schedule 70 contract for information technology services because the company failed to meet the terms of its contract agreement, the agency confirmed. The company can finish work on existing task orders, but agencies cannot place new orders or extend existing task orders with Oracle after May 17, GSA announced on its website Wednesday. Blanket purchase agreements with Oracle through Schedule 70 will terminate on May 17. Agencies can still purchase Oracle software from technology resellers that have Schedule 70 contracts. An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment. “Based on the GSA’s review of Oracle America,…