Make sure you keep checking FederalTimes.com through the day for up-to-the-minute coverage of the White House’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal. The budget will go online at 11:15 a.m. today, and the Federal Times crew will immediately start diving into the numbers to find out who are the winners and who are the losers. (Although given the way things have been going lately, we expect a lot more losers than winners this year.) We already know that President Obama is going to propose switching to the chained CPI, and cutting federal retirement benefits by $35 billion. Check our story from last…
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The House Budget Committee’s report on Rep. Paul Ryan’s fiscal 2014 budget fills in a few more details on how it would affect federal employees. The budget, which the House passed March 21, would get rid of the Federal Employees Retirement System supplemental payment beginning in January 2014. That supplement is paid to FERS employees who retire before age 62, to replace the Social Security payment for which they are not yet eligible. The bill also would eliminate student loan repayments for federal employees. And its 10 percent federal workforce cut would be achieved by allowing agencies to only hire…
As Congress and the administration grapple with how best to cut the federal deficit, a group of industry and government leaders are suggesting that information technology be used to reduce that number by billions of dollars. The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s (ACT-IAC) Institute for Innovation on Tuesday released recommendations for the Obama administration to cut the deficit by $220 billion annually through increased use of data analytics and industry best practices. ACT-IAC is public-private partnership focused on helping government use technology to serve the public. More than 100 volunteers from government and industry provided input for ACT-IAC’s first Quadrennial…
Margaret Baptiste, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, just put out a statement urging senators to oppose a spending bill amendment that would freeze federal salaries. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., want to cover the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan war spending by eliminating expenses such as federal civilian raises and bonuses. Their proposal — as well as a House bill also targeting the 2011 raise — would not affect military service members. Baptiste said: We believe it is wrong to single out federal workers for cuts that others serving our country are not…
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz, and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., today filed amendments to the Iraq and Afghanistan war supplemental spending bills that seek to offset its costs by cutting spending elsewhere — and feds aren’t going to like what they’ve got in mind. McCain and Coburn want to save about $2.6 billion by freezing federal employees’ raises, bonuses and other salary increases for one year. This comes on the heels of their House counterparts’ move to put federal raises on the chopping block as part of their YouCut program. They also seek to eliminate non-essential government travel ($10 billion over 10…
The House GOP’s YouCut program this week seeks to put next year’s proposed 1.4 percent civilian raise on the chopping block. And so far, it’s the top choice to be cut — House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., said today that 40 percent of the nearly 218,000 votes cast so far this week were in favor of eliminating the 2011 raise. (People must really want to keep those mohair subsidies.) YouCut combines the democratic ideals of American Idol with the excitement of a Heritage Foundation seminar. Each week, Republicans propose five programs to be cut, and then let people vote online or via…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a tough message earlier today for his department’s bureaucracy (not to mention its contractors): The spending spree is over. Read an account of his Kansas speech and some of his planned changes at our sister publication, Military Times, here. And the Washington Post’s article has this interesting detail on contracting: Among Gates’s apparent targets for major cuts are the private contractors the Pentagon has hired in large numbers over the past decade to take on administrative tasks that the military used to handle. The defense secretary estimated that this portion of the Pentagon budget has…
Agency budgets will stay flat for the next few years as the government faces an $11 trillion deficit, presenting fewer opportunities for vendors to do business with agencies. Vendors can separate themselves from the competition by identifying how they can save agencies money, said budget expert Stan Collender at INPUT’s Federal Market View 2010 conference today in Falls Church, Va. Vendors and contractors who know how to sell themselves to agencies can carve out a piece of the narrowing contracting pie, he sad. You should expect extreme scrutiny on the programs you care about. There’s almost no way around it…
Federal Times reported last week that the 2011 budget would propose a standardized slate of pay and benefits for federal civilians deployed to war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s apparently still coming, but it’s not here yet — the budget documents OMB released Monday contain no incentive package proposals. The Pentagon just sent this statement to Federal Times after we inquired about the missing proposals: “We are still working on the standardized combat pay provisions package for submission into the fiscal year 2011 budget.”
Reactions are starting to roll in on what may be the smallest pay raise in the General Schedule’s history. The three largest federal unions applauded the White House’s return to pay parity, but objected that the modest pay raise would do little to close the pay gap between federal and private-sector workers. The American Federation of Government Employees, National Treasury Employees Union and the National Federation of Federal Employees all pledged to push Congress to increase the administration’s modest pay raise. Here’s a sampling of comments: At best, 1.4 percent is a modest adjustment. But in this economy, a modest increase is…