Forget constitutional separation of powers for a moment: The federal judiciary (Article III) is unabashedly appealing to President Obama (Article II) for help in undoing some of this year’s budget cuts in fiscal 2014. As congressional leaders and the administration seek to reach a 2014 spending deal, the judicial branch “will not have a seat at the table,” Judge John Bates, secretary of the Judicial Conference of the United States, wrote in a letter released today asking Obama to help make a case to raise court funding above this year’s sequester level. The sequester, which cost the courts almost $350…
It looks like Donald Trump is interested in expanding is collection of used federal buildings. Having recently completed a deal with the General Services Administration for the Old Post Office building in Washington, Trump told the Washington Post that he would be interested in buying the current FBI headquarters as well. GSA has been looking for a new location for the agency, which has outgrown its dated 1970s headquarter in Washington. GSA has requested proposals from developers on how it could trade the old headquarters for a new one in the area. So far prime targets are an old FBI…
For federal agencies, the current sequester-related budget crunch is unprecedented. Congress, however, isn’t letting go of one venerable tradition: Paying a year’s congressional salary (currently at a base level of $174,000) as a death benefit to the spouse of a lawmaker who dies in office. No across-the-board cut here: The fiscal 2014 continuing resolution unveiled yesterday authorizes the full payment to Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg, widow of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. Frank Lautenberg died in June at age 89. After rising from childhood poverty to lead the Automatic Data Processing payroll management company, Lautenberg was numbered among the Senate’s…
Home to many federal agencies and employees, the nation’s capital is feeling the brunt of sequestration, counting thousands of fewer government jobs this year and tens of millions of dollar likely to disappear from the local economy next year. “We’re beginning to see some alarming trends,” D.C. Department of Employment Services Director Lisa Mallory said in a phone interview. “We’ve seen a big decrease in federal jobs.” From January through July, government jobs decreased by 7,000. And city officials, who outlined their concerns in a press briefing last week, say that after cutting the unemployment rate from more than 10-percent…
Two federal employee unions, along with the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, are wading into the fight over postal legislation. In a joint letter to members of a Senate committee released yesterday, NARFE, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the National Treasury Employees Union objected to provisions in a Senate bill pertaining to the federal workers’ compensation program and the U.S. Postal Service’s hopes of revamping its participation in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. You can read the letter here; whatever the merits of the arguments, it’s safe to say that the opposition of three organizations…
The board that oversees the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent federal agency that doles out foreign aid, is meeting next week to discuss open data and transparency. But the meeting, it turns out, is closed to the public. As a policy, MCC board meetings are held behind closed doors. But with transparency on the agenda, “it’s hard to see why the entire board meeting would be closed to the public,” said John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for increased government transparency. He credited the MCC for releasing copies of its meeting minutes. Meanwhile,…
While many feds sit in the office most of the day, a few at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., recently spent their work day smashing a Marine CH-46E helicopter fuselage filled with 15 dummy passengers into the ground. The experiment aimed to test seats and seat belts and gauge the odds of surviving a helicopter crash. You can read more about the testing here, but for an inside look at what goes on when a helicopter falls from 30 feet, check out the video released by NASA. The guys in the front row didn’t seem to far too…
The Mansfield Fellowship Program is looking for a few good federal employees interested in spending some quality time in Japan. The program, named for the late Sen. Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., who also served as the U.S. ambassador to Japan, couples seven weeks of language training with ten months in Japan placed with the government and other organizations. The program is designed for 10 fellows; more information is available here. Among other requirements, fellows must have two consecutive years of federal service by next July, obtain their agencies’ approval and be willing to spend at least another two years with the…
The Office of Personnel Management is again asking feds what they think of their benefits, according a recently posted memo on the agency’s web site. OPM will be administering the Federal Employee Benefits Survey this summer by email to a random sample of workers, acting OPM Director Elaine Kaplan said in the Aug. 13 heads-up. The survey was last done two years ago after traditional benefits questions were dropped in 2010 from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. Completing the benefits survey should take about 15 minutes and doing it during work hours is OK, Kaplan indicated. The survey’s chief purpose…
The Merit Systems Protection Board is making headway in containing an unprecedented surge in appeals fueled by Defense Department employee furloughs. As of yesterday, the board had docketed almost 16,600 appeals, or about half the total. It now expects to have most of the remainder done soon after Labor Day and then begin the adjudication process for the DoD cases, according to the latest update posted on its home page. Challenges of sequester-related furloughs–most of them from Defense Department workers–have swollen the MSPB’s workload to roughly five times its normal level. Consider some numbers provided today by Board Clerk William…