One of the changes accompanying the major Thrift Savings Plan overhaul Congress passed earlier this year granted the surviving spouses of deceased federal employees the right to keep those employees’ TSP accounts. (Widows and widowers previously had to liquidate those accounts within 60 days of the death of a spouse.) But the board governing the Thrift Savings Plan won’t be finished setting up a system to do this until 2010. And the Office of Personnel Management just released a statement outlining the TSP’s interim procedures that will be in place until the system is finalized next year. Here’s how it will…
Browsing: Pay & Benefits
After more than five hours of debate, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23-12 on H.R. 2517 Wednesday, which would grant federal benefits to same-sex domestic partners of federal employees. The bill would entitle domestic partners to myriad federal benefits, including medical benefits and long-term care insurance. To receive the benefits, the partner and the federal employee would have to sign an affidavit affirming that they are in a committed, long-term relationship and live together except for financial, work or other reasons. Votes on the bill were split along party lines. Republicans spent several hours offering a series…
Is your health care plan among the 57 leaving the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, reducing its service area, or dropping an option or high-deductible health plan in 2010? Federal Times would like to hear from you. We’d like to find out how these changes will affect you, why you chose the plan now being dropped, and what your plans are. Take a look at this OPM document — the plan terminations and reductions are on the first nine pages. And if your plan is on this list, send an e-mail to Stephen Losey at slosey@federaltimes.com.
Will the House’s health care bill change your Federal Employees Health Benefits Program? It depends who you ask on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which oversees the FEHBP. Sixteen committee Republicans sent a letter to Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., on Nov. 4, calling on him to schedule immediate hearings to analyze the impact H.R. 3692 may have on the FEHBP. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Nov. 5 she has the votes to pass the health care bill on Nov. 7. In the letter, Republicans said they need clarification on what the bill could do to participants…
In the video game world, your Web site is ‘Pong.'” — Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told Greg Long, executive director of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, at a Nov. 3 hearing in reference to the state of the TSP’s Web site, comparing it to one of the first arcade games. The board is working to make its Web site more user friendly and improve the information available, Long told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommitee on the federal workforce, postal service and the District of Columbia.
President Barack Obama signed the Defense authorization bill into law Wednesday afternoon, marking the eventual end to the controversial National Security Personnel System. HR 2647 phases out the NSPS pay-for-performance system by Jan 1, 2012, and the Pentagon has six months from Wednesday to start transferring employees over to their original pay system. For many employees, that means a return to the General Schedule. The bill also contains a number of provisions long anticipated by federal employees: Federal Employment Retirement System (FERS) employees will be able to count unused sick leave toward their years of service, just as Civil Service…
Members of the House’s Washington, D.C.-area delegation are urging lawmakers to keep a series of civil service reforms in the final version of the fiscal 2010 Defense Authorization bill. The bill provides the long-desired FERS sick leave credit, which would allow sick leave to count as time served when calculating pensions. The provisions in the bill are the same as those contained in a bill introduced by Rep. James Moran, D-Va. “We’ve been working for a number of years to enact these common-sense federal employee reforms,” Moran said in a statement. “The House-passed Defense Authorization bill provides our best opportunity…
The Senate voted 57-40 Thursday to approve the nomination of Cass Sunstein to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, ending a months-long debate over Sunstein’s writings as a professor and his ideological views. At least two senators had placed holds on Sunstein’s nomination, due to concerns about his opinions on gun control and animal rights. Sunstein, a Harvard University professor, met with the senators, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and John Cornyn of Texas, and assured them he respected the Second Amendment and would not limit hunting or impose stricter gun control. The holds were then lifted.…
President Barack Obama today sent a letter to Congress reiterating his call for a 2.0 percent pay raise for federal employees in January. Obama said that the ailing economy, increasing demands on the federal government and the ongoing terrorist threat are straining the federal budget. And since the federal government’s attrition continues to be relatively low, Obama said it will be tough to justify a larger pay raise. The letter is something of a formality. In the unlikely event that Congress forgets to pass a federal pay raise, last year’s increase in the Employment Cost Index (which was 2.9 percent) would automatically become the…
The Pentagon said today that Brad Bunn, the program executive officer for the beleaguered National Security Personnel System, will be moving to the Defense Logistics Agency to be its human resources director. The move was announced hours after the Defense Business Board issued a final report recommending the Pentagon “reconstruct” NSPS. Bunn’s move means that new blood will oversee the effort to break the mammoth, highly controversial pay-for-performance system down to its core elements and build it up again.