The Health and Human Services Department will rely on the expertise of current federal employees to implement hundreds of changes mandated in the recently-signed health care law, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said April 6. “We’re not starting with the assumption that we have to build a new bureaucracy … One of the ways we’ll save money is by depending heavily on people and systems that are already in place. Our department already has great talent, resources, and knowledge of the health care system,” she said at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C Sebelius’ speech was billed as a look…
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Six people, including at least two Pakistani security guards employed by the State Department, were killed in a suicide bomb and rocket attack against the U.S. consulate in Peshawar this morning. No Americans were killed. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the assault and compared it to December’s suicide bombing of a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. State has been trying to increase the security of its embassies and consulates since 1998, when al Qaida destroyed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Despite the loss of life this morning, the Peshawar consulate’s beefed up security measures appear to have helped repel the brunt…
Happy Census Day! April 1 is the day the 2010 Census forms are officially due, but it’s kind of a soft deadline. The Census Bureau will keep accepting forms by mail until mid-April, and will start door-to-door surveys May 1 to collect information from households who haven’t yet responded. Of course, they’d prefer to get as many mail responses as possible. It costs the Census Bureau $57 to visit an average household, versus the 42 cents it costs to mail a survey in. Only 54 percent of the nation’s estimated 134 million households have so far responded to the Census. It’s…
The General Services Administration is replacing more than 5,600 of its least fuel-efficient cars and trucks with hybrids, the agency announced today. The move effectively doubles the federal government’s inventory of hybrid vehicles, which pair an electric motor with a traditional gasoline-powered engine. The new hybrids will be leased to agencies that are replacing vehicles this year. The Energy Department already said it will take 753 of the 5,603 new vehicles, bringing the total number of hybrid vehicles in the department to 888. The purchases announced today are in addition to the 3,100 hybrid vehicles agencies received last year as…
The Census Bureau is pulling out all the stops to get people to return their Census forms this year. So far, the agency has bought Super Bowl ads, had Commerce Secretary Gary Locke talk it up on the Daily Show, and even gotten Dora the Explorer in on the act. But none of their outreach efforts have been quite as tasty as the event Census Director Robert Groves has planned for tomorrow morning. Groves will appear at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. to answer citizens’ questions about the 2010 Census and encourage people to mail…
Associated Press reporter Eileen Sullivan just broke the news that Robert Harding, President Obama’s second nominee to run the Transportation Security Administration, withdrew his nomination this evening. Sullivan reported that Harding said he withdrew because his previous work as a defense contractor had become “distractions” to the administration and the Homeland Security Department.
The General Services Administration will begin design work this fall on a new federal courthouse in Greenville, S.C. After more than a year of deliberations, GSA picked a vacant lot across from the Greenville County Courthouse for the new facility, city officials announced Wednesday. The 204,000-square-foot facility will be more than three times the size of the current courthouse, which was built in 1937. The new courthouse was estimated to cost $135 million in 2007, according to local news website Journalwatchdog.com. Construction won’t begin until at least 2013, but Congress has already given the facility its new name. Lawmakers voted in…
The Social Security Administration is turning to pop culture icons to educate Americans about its offerings. First they used Chubby Checker to promote a “twist” in its Medicare prescription plan costs. Now it’s using Patty Duke and the cast of her 1960s television show, “The Patty Duke Show,” to get the word out about its new online application for Medicare benefits. To view one of the ads, click here. Of course, this could risk making some beneficiaries feel really old — not only are you old enough for Social Security, but the icons of your youth are being used to…
Martha Johnson, administrator for the General Services Administration, spoke with reporters this afternoon at FOSE. She’s only been in the job for about two months and is learning where the agency should go. GSA is at a “crossroads,” she said, and can either stay the same or fight to grow. She thinks it should grow and improve communications and responsiveness with the needs of both agencies and companies who contract with GSA. What’s in our hands and what I’ve got some real sense of is the whole notion of upping our performance, simply cleaning up and performing better for our…
The Postal Service launched a new Web site today to sell its vision for 5-day mail delivery (which lawmakers may be slowly warming to). Many of you probably know the highlights already: USPS thinks 5-day will save $3 billion per year, post offices and other facilities will remain open on Saturdays, etc. One thing that’s not posted yet, which I know is of great interest to the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Government Accountability Office, and other analysts: An official estimate of how much mail volume will suffer from switching to 5-day. As I said on Monday, I’m skeptical of the…