UPDATE: OPM appears to have made a mistake in their press release. I sent them an inquiry this morning asking why their release called the results “record-setting” while growth was apparently flat from 2008 to 2009, and asked for exact numbers. OPM spokesman Marcus Williams just sent me an e-mail saying federal employees pledged $282,620,139 in 2009, and $275,898,745 in 2008. That represents a 2.4 percent increase. OPM’s release has not yet been updated as of Wednesday evening. ORIGINAL POST: Federal employees pledged nearly $276 million to charities during last year’s Combined Federal Campaign, the Office of Personnel Management said…
Browsing: John Berry
First Peter Orszag. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And CNN just reported that Kal Penn, better known as Kumar, has officially left the White House. It’s hard to tell which will be the most devastating loss to the administration. Seriously, though, the Washington Post’s Al Kamen has a roundup of potential Orszag replacements here, including current Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry. But whoever ends up replacing Orszag will face the thankless task of reducing the nation’s deficit, as Slate’s Christopher Beam details here.
The Office of Personnel Management has posted nearly 70 recipes from its Feds Get Fit Healthy Recipe Challenge online here. I haven’t had a chance to try any of them yet, but there’s a wide variety of dishes that sound pretty tasty. They’ve got some vegan foods, breakfast foods, turkey and veggie chilis, and even some bison dishes. You can also find Social Security Administration employee Melissa Knoll’s award-winning roasted tomato curry coconut soup with shrimp and peas. This challenge was one of OPM Director John Berry’s “wellness” ideas for encouraging federal employees to take a little more care of…
The Office of Personnel Management really pulled out all the stops at today’s event announcing President Obama’s reforms to the federal hiring process. Held in an auditorium at OPM’s E Street offices, it had the feel of a campaign event, with U2’s “Beautiful Day” playing on loudspeakers before the event as media, special guests and OPM employees took their seats. Marvin Carraway, one of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency officers credited with stopping a gunman at the Pentagon subway station March 4, was on hand as one example of an exemplary federal employee. He got a standing ovation. OPM director…
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry is a full-fledged convert to the Results Oriented Work Environment theory of employee management, under which employees are given complete leeway to choose where and when they work, as long as they get their jobs done. He’s even getting ready to experiment with the ROWE program at OPM headquarters and its facility in Boyers, Pa. But will it work? We’d like to hear from employees and managers alike about the potential benefits and pitfalls of such a program, and the challenges that might come from trying to change an office’s culture so thoroughly. E-mail…
Ouch. And just in time for Public Service Recognition Week. If Sen. Tom Coburn is still wondering why OPM Director John Berry feels the need to polish the image of federal employees, this sketch from the April 24 episode of SNL helps illustrate why. The crowd over on GovLoop mostly seems to be taking the sketch with good humor, but recognizes it as a sign of how bad civil servants’ image has become. Some posters appear thankful that while the sketch first appeared ready to slam federal employees alongside DMV workers, none of the “awardees” ended up being feds. One thing jumped out…
The five healthiest federal chefs in the Washington area will square off Wednesday afternoon at the Office of Personnel Management’s headquarters. The finalists in OPM’s Feds Get Fit Healthy Recipe Challenge will cook their original, tasty meals for judges, and the winner will be published in a special Feds Get Fit cookbook. Recipes will be judged by OPM Director John Berry, nutritionist and chef Robyn Webb, Top Chef finalist Carla Hall, and former New England Patriot Darryl Haley. Berry has made encouraging federal employee wellness a top priority at OPM. The finalists come from the Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development and…
Any Washington reporter will tell you that most senior government leaders go out of their way to avoid cracking a joke or saying anything remotely controversial. But not Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, who (I assume) ad-libbed hilariously at IRMCO this morning while discussing some lingering resistance to the government’s new central hiring register program: I’ve been going around, talking to managers, [saying] “What’s going on?” Sometimes people have long memories in this town, in Washington, and evidently I found out OPM had done registers a long time ago, and they did them kind of half-assed. And the…
As God is my witness, KSAs as an initial screening tool will fall. – Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, channelling Scarlett O’Hara in his address to the IRMCO conference this morning. Seriously, though, Berry outlined the future role he wants knowledge, skills and abilities essays to play in the government’s hiring process. Some agencies will likely still require finalists for a job opening to write essays outlining their experience and special skills, Berry said, but they shouldn’t need KSAs from thousands of first-round applicants. “Whittle it down until you’ve got the pool of 10 or 20,” Berry said.…
Traffic’s gonna be ugly next week in Washington — way uglier than usual. President Obama and the leaders of more than 40 other countries will be meeting at the Washington Convention Center Monday and Tuesday for a major nuclear weapons summit, and several nearby streets will be completely closed. So the Office of Personnel Management is advising Washington-area federal employees to telework or use alternative work schedules on Monday and Tuesday. The road closures are likely to snarl traffic throughout downtown Washington, and parking restrictions, detoured buses and the temporary closure of the Mount Vernon Square Metro Station won’t help either. OPM…