• Teleworking DoD employees are once again a target in the latest spending legislation from House appropriators. A policy rider in the fiscal 2025 defense spending bill would block any funding from going toward the costs of teleworking or remote working for defense employees and contractors. The GOP-led appropriations committee advanced the spending bill last week. The telework measure, however, may be unlikely to make it into the final appropriations package for fiscal 2025. Democrats, with a Senate majority, have remained largely in favor of federal telework. They say it fosters better workforce recruitment and retention.
  (Fiscal 2025 Department of Defense appropriations bill - House Appropriations Committee)
• Early signs are pointing in the right direction after some recent federal workforce reforms. The Office of Personnel Management’s initiatives over the last couple of years have included banning the use of salary history in hiring, creating a portal for internship openings and broadening eligibility for the Pathways Program. Larger impacts of those changes are likely still further down the road. But there are already some initially positive indications, especially for early-career recruitment: “It’s going to take a little more time. I do think what we’re seeing, though, is a renewed and increased interest in federal job opportunities by early-career talent,” OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said.
  (Early-career federal job openings seeing ‘renewed and increased’ interest, OPM’s Shriver says - Federal News Network)
• The Energy Department wants to secure the future electric grid from cyber threats. Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER) is working to set security expectations for using the cloud. Later this year, the CESER office will convene with big cloud service providers and the clean-energy sector to collaborate on cybersecurity requirements. The discussion comes amid growing threats to critical infrastructure, including the energy grid. Many renewable energy operators are relying on cloud computing for critical services.
  (Energy working with renewables industry, cloud providers on cyber requirements - Federal News Network)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to keep aging and disabled vets living independently. The VA is looking at how smart-home technologies and wearables like smartwatches can flag when aging and disabled veterans are having a medical emergency in their homes. Joseph Ronzio, VA’s deputy chief health technology officer, said the department is also taking steps to ensure veterans have a say as to who gets this data, and how it may be used. “Everyone nowadays has some smartness in their home, whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s light switches, whether it’s different types of lights or other physical devices — cameras, motion detectors that leave a digital service," Ronzio said.
  (VA looking at ‘smart home’ tech to keep aging, disabled vets living independently - Federal News Network)
• The Army has taken over the role of the Combatant Command Support Agent for U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). The Department of the Air Force has served in this role since 2017. The shift mainly happened because the primary location of CYBERCOM operations is at Fort Meade in Maryland, where the Army has a significant presence. About 350 Air Force civilian employees in U.S. Cyber Command became Army civilians as part of the reshuffle. The Army will now provide administrative and logistical support to CYBERCOM. Congress mandated the transition as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
  (Army becomes combatant command support agent for CYBERCOM - U.S. Army)
• The Defense Department has signed a $248 million deal with Duke Energy to deliver solar power to five military bases in the Carolinas over the next 15 years. The power will come from two newly-built solar arrays in South Carolina, and DoD has agreed to buy all the electricity those facilities can generate. Defense officials said the project helps meet the government’s energy sustainability goals, and – in combination with on-base microgrids – makes the five bases more resilient against disruptions to off-site power supplies.
  (DoD Announces Two Solar Projects to Supply Five Military Installations in the Carolinas With Clean Energy - Department of Defense)
• Three more agencies are getting nearly $30 million to accelerate their IT modernization projects. The governmentwide Technology Modernization Fund is granting $17 million to the Energy Department to update its human resources IT systems. The fund is also backing a Bureau of Indian Education project to modernize school websites for tribal communities. The Federal Election Commission is also getting funding to improve online services for political campaign filers.
  (Technology Modernization Fund announces investments to modernize tribal school websites, campaign finance software, federal HR system - General Services Administration)
• The Department of Transportation (DOT) is drafting a new cybersecurity strategy. Transportation officials told the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the agency will finalize the plan by September. GAO said DOT needs a strong cyber risk management plan to address threats to its data and systems. The congressional auditor is also urging Transportation officials to take a closer look at their cyber workforce needs.
  (Priority open recommendations for Transportation Department - Government Accountability Office )
• The Space Force’s first chief technology and innovation officer, Lisa Costa, has officially retired from federal service. At the Space Force, Costa was responsible for developing strategies and policies that advanced science and technology efforts across the service. She also spearheaded the Unified Data Library project, a repository that collects space situational awareness data from military and commercial sources. Prior to her current role, she served as the chief information officer at U.S. Special Operations Command. There is no information yet as to where Costa will be working next.
  (Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer retires from government service - LinkedIn)

The post Teleworking DoD employees targeted by House spending bill first appeared on Federal News Network.

It may be employees at the LaClare Family Creamery, a goat cheese manufacturer in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, that Republican Congressman Glenn Grothman passes by on his way home.

Or it may be the folks at the Old World Creamery, a family-owned food manufacturer located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which has been around since 1912.

No matter which of the many cheese factories in his home district of which Rep. Grothman was referring to, he seems to believe federal employees and employees who manufacture cheese have a lot in common.

“When I go home at night, [and this] is kind of a stereotype, but I got Wisconsin, I got all these cheese factories [that] I drive by depending upon which way I go home. They were all packed, even at one o’clock in the morning. So I just want to emphasize that I think, in many private sector jobs, they were showing up at work in the teeth of the [pandemic]. It’s time that we should be back to where we want to be,” Grothman said at the April 30 Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing.

Not sure if you knew this, but the cheese industry has been very important to Sheboygan County since the 1870s.

The same can’t be said for federal agencies. In fact, the Office of Personnel Management doesn’t list cheese or any specific food manufacturer in their list of job series. There is 7401 – General Food Preparation and Serving that includes cooking, bartending and even meat cutting, but sadly nothing about cheese.

Grothman was trying to make a point about federal employees needing to return to the office, but his analogy, like most from lawmakers, fell flat.

Just like Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) jab at federal employees back in April.

“Every day is ‘Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day’ when tens of thousands of bureaucrats are working from home,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), posted on X on April 16, which happened to be National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day.

Did Ernst know about some sort of “off the books” celebration at the Neal Smith Federal Building in Des Moines, Iowa, which includes 800 federal employees from more than 40 agencies, who were all wearing their pajamas to work?

By the way, did you know National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day started in 2004, by Pajamagram as a reward for the late nights working on taxes. If you are keeping score, the 2025 National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day is April 6.

But I digress, the return-to-office debate continues to boil over. Republicans continue to criticize federal employees and the Biden administration for what they see as waste and abuse.

No one size fits all for return to office policy

Democrats and the Office of Management and Budget are defending agency leadership to make decisions for how often federal employees need to come into the office based on what’s best for their agency’s mission.

Brian Elliott, executive advisor around the future of work and an expert on workplace culture, said both sides are missing the point and talking past each other.

“I think a big part of this is what you’re getting, is there’s no one size fits all for this because different jobs and different roles have different requirements. They always have and they always will,” Elliott said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The private sector has been grappling with this for a while too, and I work with companies that have a wide range of practices. But they figured out the moments that matter for a sales team are different than those for an engineering team or a finance team. But you would never apply one uniform set of rules to everybody and expect it’s actually going to work the same.”

Exactly why Grothman’s cheese manufacturer analogy or Ernst’s comments on what federal employees are wearing are the type of comments that rankle so many people and stops the real discussion from happening.

First off, as Jason Miller, the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, told lawmakers at the April 30 hearing four different times, over half of the federal workforce can’t telework because of their job responsibilities. That means more than a million federal employees — those who protect the border, secure the airports, inspect food and provide medical care to veterans at hospitals — are commuting, most likely are wearing business clothes — though hospital scrubs could be considered pajama-like — and working outside of their homes.

Miller said of the remaining 40% to 49% of employees working in everything from technology to human resources to processing tax returns or disability forms, about 80% of them are in the office at least half the time, which equates roughly to two-to-three times a week.

But just like before the pandemic, just being in the office doesn’t necessarily mean work is getting done.

Gauging productivity remains difficult

Elliott said it’s this reason and the concept of work being what you do, not where you do it, is why public and private sector employers have to change how they gauge productivity. He said this new view is a struggle no matter what sector you are in.

“We have to stop trying to measure activity, stop trying to measure the number of days a week somebody shows up, or the number of keystrokes they hit, and start figuring out what outcomes you’re trying to drive,” he said. “With most organizations, when we get deeper into this, you realize that you might be able to define productivity for a subset of the jobs, like customer service, which is one that you can usually put a yardstick against. You can measure quantity of output and quality of output. But you can do that regardless of where the human being is doing that customer support. It literally does not matter. But other work is much more complex. The important stuff is interdisciplinary, cross functional in nature, complicated problem solving and really hard to put a yardstick on.”

Elliott pointed to a story from an executive at the National Science Foundation who said the number of grant applications that came in peaked during the pandemic, but they were able to serve them just as well during that time period.

The focus, he said, is what is driving mission outcomes, not “sweating telework classifications” or other meaningless proof points.

“We’re very used to communicating, collaborating, doing work and even building relationships online. I have talked with senior agency leaders who will talk about the fact that the people above them, in the appointment suites as well, aren’t in the tools that their teams are using on a day in, day out basis. If your only familiarity with the digital tools your teams use is the occasional Teams call or Zoom call, and you’re not in Teams or Slack itself, watching the work happen, then it’s not surprising that when you come back into an office space and you don’t see a lot of activity, you’re then worried, are they really working?” Elliott said. “The same thing has happened in the private sector. The thing that I’ve done with a number of executives is literally show them how these tools work. We get into it enough so that they feel comfortable, so they can actually see the work that’s happening, that otherwise they’re missing out on. There’s definitely a transition here that has to do with generational differences in how we communicate.”

Elliott said it’s more than just using communication and collaboration tools. It’s the transformation across many sectors and in many offices that occurred over the last four years.

Fairness doctrine, not really fair

He said this entire discussion comes back to this core issue of how do agencies or companies know if their employees are really working if they’re not physically in an environment where they can monitor them and put my eyeballs on them?

“That is the least effective way of measuring productivity and outcome that exists. It’s an input-driven mechanism. The equivalent would be if I’m going to put keystroke monitors on people’s laptops because the way that they actually produce something is through typing. So once you measure the number of keystrokes, you can go on Amazon.com and buy a mouse jiggler for $25, stick it into the side of your laptop and it will keep your mouse active for eight hours a day or however many hours you want to. And you can actually program in the number of pauses you want it to have. These systems can easily be gamed. You’re much better off instrumenting outcome driven metrics on top of this,” Elliott said.

Elliott added the other side of the argument is often referred to as the “fairness doctrine.” He said what’s fair to office workers should be what’s fair to frontline employees. But Elliott said that so-called doctrine is faulty.

“Frontline workers have to show up on the front line, and office workers don’t have to, and some will say that is unfair. There is an equality versus equity set of things that’s happening within this though. We already pay office workers more than we do frontline workers. That’s been true for eons,” he said. “What it’s really about is how do I attract workers for what is often the hardest jobs to fill these days? It’s those call center jobs. It is the fact that you’re investing a different type of flexibility for those workers, not just work location, which you can’t always give them, but flexible schedules. Giving people the ability to swap shifts, giving people flexibility when it comes to how many shifts they take per week, helps you attract more people into those jobs and retain them. What you’re after is, can I measure how good a job they’re doing at delivering for my customers? Not that they show up.”

That gets us back to the land of cheese and whining. If Grothman, and other lawmakers, want to make sure federal employees are using taxpayers’ money appropriately, serving citizens effectively and not abusing their privilege of working from home, they should demand to see the data and hold agency leaders accountable for meeting mission-focused goals. The workplace has changed, the remote work cork isn’t going back in the bottle, so both supporters and detractors should stop arguing over what was or used to be, and focus on measuring agency mission success in serving citizens.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

The term “telecommuting” was first coined in 1972 by Jack Nilles. At that time, Nilles was working remotely on a complex NASA communication system.

Source: Allied Telcom

The post Whine, cheese make the return-to-office debate pungent first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Special Counsel is looking to close what it says is a loophole in the Hatch Act, a law that limits federal employees’ political activity while on duty.

Among several updates to how OSC — an independent agency that investigates and brings cases before the Merit Systems Protection Board — will enforce and interpret the Hatch Act, one notable change looks at how OSC will handle violations from senior White House officials.

Most Senate-confirmed officials are excepted from MSPB enforcement, but White House staffers are not. As such, non-Senate-confirmed White House officials will now be held to the same standards as all other career federal employees, OSC said in a May 20 advisory opinion.

In practice, that means OSC will defer White House staff members who are in violation of the Hatch Act to MSPB, instead of deferring to the president as the officials were previously. OSC Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger said the decision behind the change is a result of the disparity between what the majority of career federal employees are subject to, and different rules specifically for White House staff.

“White House employees should be treated like every other government worker,” Dellinger said in a May 20 statement on OSC’s website. “My focus is balancing robust Hatch Act enforcement with careful consideration of government employee speech rights.”

The Hatch Act, which has been around since 1939, limits the political activities that federal employees are allowed to take part in while on the clock, at work, or otherwise acting in an official capacity. The rules for the Hatch Act depend on the type of position an employee holds, and what level of restrictions that position falls under.

But the inconsistency of the Hatch Act’s application between most federal employees, and White House staffers, has been a concern for a long time. While federal employees typically face a range of repercussions, some have said that there’s a double standard, as political appointees often don’t face the same level of punishment. Others have gone further to say that the Hatch Act should be reformed, or even replaced.

“This distinction creates separate and not automatically equal systems of accountability for violators, one where an independent adjudicator (the MSPB) can impose sanctions and another where it is left to the president to dole out — or not — any consequences,” Dellinger wrote in a May 20 op-ed in Politico.

At least 13 White House officials during the Trump administration were found to be in violation of the Hatch Act, but didn’t receive any repercussions. More recently, during the Biden administration, former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain also violated the Hatch Act by retweeting a post from a political group using an official social media account, but OSC did not pursue any disciplinary action.

Over the years, different OSC special counsels have had various approaches to how the Hatch Act should be enforced. The recent changes appear to be a different interpretation of the same language of the law that’s been around for decades.

The timing of OSC’s changes also lines up perfectly ahead of the presidential election this fall, noted Jim Eisenmann, a partner at Alden Law Group, which specializes in representing federal employees.

“It is no coincidence,” Eisenmann, who’s former MSPB executive director and general counsel during the Obama administration, said in an interview. “We’re in an election year — and there’s a brand-new special counsel. I think that’s all related to the timing.”

OSC previously exempted White House personnel from full enforcement of the Hatch Act in part because of the lack of a quorum at the MSPB during the Trump administration. Without quorum, OSC was unable to take action on Hatch Act violations that White House officials made.

“The MSPB’s return to a quorum allows OSC to utilize the agency as the adjudicator for all Hatch Act enforcement actions against individuals who are not presidentially appointed and confirmed by the Senate, instead of relying solely on the president to take action if White House commissioned officers violate the law,” OSC said.

Former employees and political candidate signs

The change for White House staff is just one of several updates OSC made in its recent advisory opinion. In another adjustment, OSC said that former federal employees can now face charges from Hatch Act violations that they may have committed while previously working for the government.

Generally, federal employees who violate the Hatch Act may face a suspension, firing, grade reduction or a debarment for up to five years. They may also have to a pay a $1,000 fine. In many cases, though, OSC attempts to settle with the employee or negotiate an informal resolution.

In light of OSC’s update, one question that may arise is what types of penalties could occur for former employees. If an individual has left government, it’s possible now that they also wouldn’t be able to take another federal job in government for several years to come.

“What they’re saying is just because someone has left government, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to go after them,” Eisenmann said.

In addition to the changes for former feds, OSC is revising the rules about when federal employees can wear or display political candidate signs while at work. During presidential election years, OSC had previously distinguished how that rule operated before and after Election Day.

“This distinction is being withdrawn in favor of a year-round prohibition on political candidate displays in the government workplace, which will now be consistent with the prohibition on party and partisan group items,” OSC said in the advisory opinion.

OSC said presidential candidates’ increasing association with specific political parties is one key reason behind the update. Not to mention, OSC said it should make it easier for federal employees to follow the rules, since it’s now more straightforward with the consistent, across-the-board ban.

But the switch to a year-round ban on candidate items may raise additional questions about what’s allowed and not allowed for federal employees, for example, when it comes to displaying signs from former or historical political candidates.

In the advisory opinion, OSC said the year-round ban on candidate items applies specifically to “current or contemporaneous” candidates or parties — meaning there are exceptions for any historic campaign memorabilia.

OSC said it plans to soon provide federal employees with more clarifications and guidelines on the new advisory opinion to help answer any questions. OSC has also created a list of “dos and don’ts” for feds about the Hatch Act’s rules and parameters.

The post What OSC’s Hatch Act updates mean for federal employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

Leaders at the Defense Logistics Agency say they are still assessing the effects of an aggressive return-to-office policy that’s led to widespread employee dissatisfaction and two formal allegations of unfair labor practices, but that so far, the policy does not appear to have had a serious negative impact on recruiting and retention.

DLA’s new policy is one of the most prescriptive in the federal government, but officials say it’s necessary as part of a broader effort to “transform” the agency for great power competition. The changes took effect in January, requiring all employees to be in the office at least three days each week.

The three-day in-office minimum isn’t unheard of among federal agencies. What’s unusual is that individual supervisors and employees have no say over which days those are. All 18,000 of the agency’s telework-eligible staff are required to report to their offices on the exact same days: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of each week. The across-the-board rule is significantly more restrictive and burdensome than even the polices that were in place before COVID, several DLA employees and union leaders told Federal News Network.

“I know for many, it’s not the most popular change that we’ve made over the past several years,” Brad Bunn, DLA’s vice director told a worldwide town hall presentation last month. “But given the requirements that we’re facing, and the urgency and speed at which we need to make these changes, the agency made that shift and standardized when folks are together. We already are challenged with a very geographically dispersed workforce and how our headquarters elements are dispersed throughout the agency. We wanted to have a process where we could bring folks back and have the environment where we could bring changes and use that collaboration and integration to drive solutions.”

DLA is an outlier, employees say

As part of a return-to-office survey Federal News Network conducted in April, which garnered thousands of responses from federal employees, responses from DLA staff stood out: Employees told us the rigidity of the policy has created unusual financial and logistical difficulties for employeess and made the agency overall a less attractive place to work.

“The strict DLA telework policy does not take into consideration any workplace or position-specific elements, including but not limited to: position description, if the employee is customer facing or not, where the employee’s colleagues or customers are located … and a supervisor’s ability to supervise their own employee rather than enforcing a one size fits all policy,” one survey respondent said. “Both my spouse and I work for DLA, therefore the RTO mandate negatively impacts our work-life balance and has created a family hardship.”

“DLA has mandated we are in the office six days a pay period. On the same installation, DFAS only has to be in the office four days a period, how would that make you feel?” asked another. Another added that “DLA is losing its most talented people in mass quantities. The people who remain have unmanageable workloads.”

Several also told us that they’re finding themselves less productive when they’re in the office than when they’re working remotely, and that challenges with insufficient parking, IT outages, and finding lunch options now that many cafeterias have closed or are overcrowded in the middle of the week are all common problems.

“I spend 50% of my day on teleconferences with customers not located in my office. The rest I spend writing contracts, emails to customers, statements of work, negotiation memorandums, and enjoy not having the distractions of the office,” another respondent wrote. “I need quiet to concentrate and write formal documents. An open-air office does not offer this environment.”

Collective problems require ‘presence,’ leaders say

Lt. Gen. Mark Simerly, who took over as the agency’s director in February, acknowledged there may be some truth to the productivity arguments — on an individual basis. But right now, he said, DLA is hyper-focused on problems that cross organizational and functional boundaries, making in-person collaboration essential.

“We are improving our ability to tackle and solve collective problems by physical presence in the workplace,” he told attendees at the town hall. “Part of the purpose is team building and innovation that is just very difficult to conjure in a virtual setting. I just know from my own personal experience that I run my best wind sprints when I’m with a group. And I think we can achieve our best results when we can encourage each other — we can problem solve, we can innovate when we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder. In many cases, we can be individually more productive [in remote settings]. But I don’t know if we can be as productive as a team when we operate in isolation and separately.”

DLA officials said they’re open to making changes to the new telework policy, and that they’re carefully watching workforce data and gathering employee feedback. So far, Bunn said, there aren’t any metrics that show clear declines in hiring or retention: The number of people applying for DLA positions is down about 5% compared to last year, but retention is up over the same period.

“My initial assessment is I think it’s having the intended effect,” he said “I’m seeing more collaboration happening in real time. I’m seeing shorter lead times to solutions. We’re starting to see that traction, but nothing is set in stone. We will continue to assess our whole [telework] posture over the next year or so, and then we will work with our our policy experts and employee representatives to determine what the best approach is going forward into the future.”

However, union representatives and multiple employees alleged DLA has declined to share specific statistics on hiring and retention since the implementation of the new, much more rigid telework policy. Anecdotally, several survey respondents told us it’s clear that hiring has slowed and that people are leaving at a faster clip than they otherwise would.

“If DLA returned to the telework policy that was in place prior to COVID, I think most people would be fine,” one said. “DLA used to be the agency to work for. Now we are all overworked and under appreciated due to everyone jumping ship,” wrote another.

DLA’s transformation objectives

As far as the big, transformational, organizational changes DLA is trying to achieve, Simerly said they’re largely about putting the agency on a combat footing, and getting DLA to think about how to operate in an era of great power competition, in much the way the military services are.

“When we think about logistics and the way it’s delivered from port to fort, or from factory to foxhole, it’s significantly different than it ever has been. We call that contested logistics,” he said. “We need to understand that logistics is vulnerable; that’s why our enemies will target our logistics capabilities … if anything can be seen on the future battlefield, it will be targeted, and if it can be targeted, it will be destroyed. Those are some of the challenges and changes that have taken place across the world that we have to respond to.”

As one example of near-term changes Simerly wants to make to help prepare for that contested logistics future: DLA personnel need to be regularly participating in the exercises the military services are already conducting to prepare for possible conflict with China.

“As they learn about operating in a contested logistics environment, we have to be shoulder-to-shoulder with them, learning those lessons at the same time and incorporating them back here. We can’t wait for it to come out in the lessons learned compendium one or two years later,” he said. “We have traditionally had people that we’ve been committing to those things over the years. In some cases, we send those people to those things to observe. That’s got to change, we have to send people to participate. And that might mean we have to send different people with different skill sets in order to gain the insights that we need.”

Bunn said at the same time, DLA is making big changes to the business side of its operations that, he argues, also require more physical presence.

For example: the implementation of a new warehouse management system, and changing business processes to hopefully pass a financial audit by 2028.

“The audit is a high-risk proposition, given how many notices of findings and recommendations we have,” he said. “And every one of those corrective action plans is trying to address a pretty gnarly challenge: digital business transformation. That’s recapitalizing our IT infrastructure, our business systems that we’ve relied on for many decades. We are making a ton of changes in a short, compressed period of time, and it requires us to rethink how we do business. That’s not just a [CIO] thing — it’s the business and technology enablers coming together across multiple functions to make those things happen.”

Employees say DLA still hasn’t explained ‘why’

However, many employees told us that agency leaders have not clearly articulated why a future of contested logistics and business transformation requires tens of thousands of employees — across dozens of global locations — to be in their respective offices on the exact same days.

And DLA’s largest union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has filed two separate complaints alleging unfair labor practices with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, arguing that the new policy also violates the agency’s contract with AFGE.

Parts of the contract were imposed by a federal impasse board during previous disputes under the Trump Administration. The contract stipulates that employees need to be in the office for 60% of their work hours, but says nothing about which specific days of the week those hours must be.

And throughout 2023, DLA had been operating under a “pilot program,” in agreement with AFGE, that allowed much more telework flexibility. According to the union, the agency abruptly terminated that informal agreement last September and notified AFGE that it would insist on the three-day per week requirement, and interpret the contract in such a way that the agency could choose the days of the week that would add up to 60% in-office.

AFGE’s complaints to the FLRA allege that the agency refused to bargain with the union over the new arrangement, and violated other portions of the contract, including some that were imposed by the prior impasse panel over the union’s objection.

Regardless of what the FLRA decides about the new policy’s legality, there are implications to the inflexible telework policy that are turning out to make it work even worse in practice than how it looks on paper, said Terry Day, the president of AFGE Council 169, which represents the union’s DLA’s employees.

For instance: if Mondays and Fridays are the only permissible telework days across an agency of thousands of workers in many different locations and work functions, it’s guaranteed that the most junior members of the workforce are going to get the short end of the stick — since it’s almost impossible for any individual worksite to have all of its employees teleworking on any one day.

For those younger employees, Day argued, the new policy is effectively a telework prohibition.

“The people with the most tenure, 20-30 years, are going to take up the Mondays and Fridays. It’s a severe disadvantage for the people who have just gotten out of college and are just starting — that’s what they’ve taken away from these employees,” he said. “A lot of those younger people are going to go to jobs where they can telework five days a week. You’re not going to keep people around if they can go to a contractor where they make more money and get better benefits.”

The post Upset at DLA over unusually restrictive telework policy first appeared on Federal News Network.

• A group of academic and former public sector executives is pushing forward an alternative to Schedule F. The Working Group to Protect and Reform the U.S. Civil Service is proposing a different vision for a future federal workforce. Led by Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University; Don Kettl, former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy; and Paul Verkuil, a former chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States; the working group outlined five areas that the next administration would focus on to re-imagine the federal workforce. The non-partisan experts say bringing Schedule F back would have negative effects on the quality of the government by opening the door to politicization and patronage throughout the federal workforce.
  (Experts push new vision for federal workforce - Working Group to Protect and Reform the US Civil Service)
• A well-known agency chief information officer is moving to industry. Gerry Caron, CIO at the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration, is leaving federal service after more than two decades. Federal News Network has learned Caron is heading to a new job in industry. His last day will be May 31. The specifics about where he is going are unknown. Caron, who is well-known on the federal speaking circuit, has been the ITA CIO since February 2023. Before that, he was the CIO for the inspector general office at the Department of Health and Human Services and worked for the State Department for 18 years. Caron also has played a big role in helping drive the development of zero trust concepts through the CIO Council's Innovation Counsel for Zero Trust.
  (ITA CIO Caron heading to industry - Federal News Network)
• A former White House official is taking a top job at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Jeff Greene will join CISA as a senior adviser next month. Greene is currently the senior director of cybersecurity programs at the Aspen Institute. He is expected to help pick up the responsibilities of CISA executive assistant director for cybersecurity Eric Goldstein, who is leaving his role next month. Greene previously led defensive cyber and incident response efforts at the White House National Security Council. He also served as director of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
  (Greene joining CISA as senior adviser - CISA)
• The Office of Personnel Management is defending recent moves to block the return of Schedule F. OPM finalized a rule last month reinforcing civil service protections for career federal employees and hampering the return of Schedule F. That was a Trump-era policy that made it easier to fire career federal employees in policymaking positions. Acting OPM Director Rob Shriver said that the return of Schedule F would have a “chilling effect” on career federal employees and prevent them from providing candid feedback on policy matters. “The human capital challenges that the federal government already faces will be dramatically exacerbated," Shriver said.
  (OPM defends rule to hamper Schedule F’s return, backs telework amid return to office push - Federal News Network)
• The Navy has taken a look at its scores on the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and decided it has some work to do. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro is launching what he calls Project Even Keel. It’s a four-phase effort to boost civilian employee engagement across the Navy and Marine Corps. The first phase is underway now, and focuses on gathering FEVS data from various commands. According to the Partnership for Public Service’s recently-released Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings – which are based on FEVS data – the Navy Department placed 11th among 17 large agencies.
  (SecNav Memo - Department of the Navy)
• The Defense Department is expanding its military spouse career pilot program. The Pentagon will expand its program that offers paid fellowship opportunities to include entry-level jobs. Last year, the program mainly focused on placing “career-ready” military spouses into paid fellowships. This year, the program will provide opportunities for military spouses who are at the beginning or early stages of their career. The program connects hiring managers and talent acquisition specialists with military spouses for paid 12-week fellowships across different career fields. Congress wants to make the pilot program permanent next year.
  (DoD expanding military spouse career pilot program - Federal News Network)
• Patrick Space Force Base in Florida will be the permanent home for STARCOM, the Space Force's Space Training and Readiness Command. STARCOM handles the Space Force’s training, doctrine, and test and evaluation missions. The command has been provisionally located at Patrick since last summer, but a decision on a permanent home has been awaiting a formal environmental review.
  (Patrick picked as permanent STARCOM HQ - Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.))
• The Pentagon's office of industrial base resilience is seeking public input on how to support the defense industrial base integration of artificial intelligence into defense systems. Public feedback will help guide the Defense Department’s efforts as it works with the DIB to rapidly adopt AI for defense applications. The office wants to know what investments in the DIB the Defense Department needs to make to support adoption of AI into defense systems. It also wants to know if there are vulnerabilities in the current and future supply chain that the department needs to address prior to incorporating AI into defense systems. Respondents have 60 days to provide their feedback.
  (DoD seeks public input on AI integration into defense systems - DoD)
• The Senate Intelligence Committee’s latest bill would create a new fund for spy agencies to acquire emerging technologies. That is just one provision in the fiscal 2025 intelligence authorization act, which the committee passed unanimously on Wednesday. The bill would promote reforms to the national security classification system and improve protections for intelligence community whistleblowers. The legislation would also require federal agencies to better engage with the private sector on threats to artificial intelligence systems.
  (Senate intelligence committee passes the fiscal 2025 intelligence authorization act - Senate Select Committee on Intelligence )
• The Social Security Administration closed field offices early on two Fridays this month. SSA granted that time off to thank its employees during Public Service Recognition Week. But the top Republicans on two Senate committees said those half-days made it harder for constituents to seek help from the agency. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.) are asking SSA how many appointments and services were impacted by closing early and how much notice was given to the public about these early closures.
  (Collins, Capito raise concerns about SSA beneficiary access after SSA shutters operations during business hours - Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine))

The post Promoting Schedule F alternative, working group warns against Trump-era plan resurgence first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Federal employees in their 30s are relatively unsatisfied with their jobs. New analysis from the Partnership for Public Service shows that feds ages 30 to 39 scored the lowest of any age group for their views on senior leadership, workplace recognition, work-life balance and professional development. And when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility efforts, employees with disabilities and LGBTQ employees are scoring their agencies the lowest. On the other hand, Asian and white employees have the most positive views for how they feel their agencies are managing DEIA issues.
  (2023 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government - Partnership for Public Service)
• Martin Gruenberg, the embattled chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, will resign in the coming months. Gruenberg said in a statement that he is prepared to step down from his responsibilities once a successor is confirmed. His decision comes on the heels of a Senate hearing and a critical report from an independent committee that found a workplace environment that fostered “hostile, abusive, unprofessional and inappropriate conduct.” Gruenberg, who has been with the FDIC since 2005, has been under pressure since last fall when news reports surfaced about the agency's toxic workplace culture.
  (FDIC chairman to resign - FDIC)
• House lawmakers are trying to roll back the Securities and Exchange Commission’s controversial cybersecurity rules. The Financial Services Committee last week advanced a resolution that would nullify the SEC’s cyber requirements. The rules just went into effect last year. They require publicly traded companies to disclose material cyber incidents, as well as to report on their cybersecurity risk management strategies. But some House Republicans argue the SEC’s rules create too much of a burden on public companies and in some cases require them to disclose confidential information. The resolution now has to be approved by the full House. But the White House has said President Biden will veto any attempt to overturn the SEC requirements.
  (House Financial Services Committee advances slate of bills to full House for consideration - House Financial Services Committee)
• The Postal Service is rejecting calls for its regulator to weigh in on its network modernization plans, at least for now. USPS just told Congress it is putting a shakeup of its mail-processing operations on hold until at least January 2025. But USPS said it is not legally required to get a regulator’s stamp of approval for those plans to proceed. Federal law requires USPS to seek out an advisory opinion from its regulator whenever it makes changes that would impact service nationwide. USPS told the Postal Regulatory Commission its plans may potentially require it to seek an advisory opinion at some point in the future. But seeking that opinion now would be “premature.”
  (USPS rejects calls for regulator to weigh in on now-paused network modernization plans - Federal News Network)
• The Environmental Protection Agency is urging water utilities to improve their cybersecurity practices. The EPA, in a new enforcement alert released Monday, said a majority of recent water system inspections have turned up alarming cybersecurity vulnerabilities, including the use of default passwords, as well as shared log-in information. The EPA said these cyber shortfalls put water systems at risk and potentially violate the Safe Drinking Water Act. The agency vowed to step up its enforcement of cyber practices across the water sector amid an increase in attacks on water systems.
  (EPA outlines enforcement measures to help prevent cybersecurity attacks and protect the nation’s drinking water - EPA)
• The Navy has created a new unit to help the service integrate unmanned surface vessels. Unmanned Surface Vessel Squadron Three will oversee a fleet of small, uncrewed surface vessels, including Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft manufactured by the Maritime Applied Physics Corporation. The Navy recently introduced a new robotics warfare specialist general rating to accelerate development of deep expertise in autonomous technologies. Those robotics warfare specialists will be part of the new squadron. Capt. Derek Rader assumed command of the unit.
  (Navy establishes unmanned surface vessel squadron - U.S. Navy)
• The Defense Department's chief digital and artificial intelligence office is trying to make it easier to connect emerging technologies to the Pentagon's workflow. William Streilein, the chief technology officer for the CDAIO, said that his office is developing an AI maturity model. The initiative aims to translate where the technology best fits into DoD's needs. Streilein said the model will use a rubric to make it easier to understand where AI can integrate into the DoD's operations. The five levels of the rubric will help DoD employees connect their work with large language models to ensure the accuracy and validity of the information. Streilein made the comments yesterday at the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference.
  (DoD creating an AI maturity model, rubric - ACT-IAC)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs approved its millionth claim for disability benefits under a historic piece of legislation. The 2022 PACT Act expanded VA health care and benefits eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service. The legislation also covers the treatment of certain rare cancers and other diagnoses and conditions veterans sustained during their military careers. The PACT Act is the largest expansion of VA services in more than 30 years, and the VA has paid out nearly $6 billion in PACT Act benefits so far.
  (President Biden to announce 1 million PACT Act claims approved, benefits delivered to veterans in all 50 states and U.S. territories - White House)
• President Joe Biden has nominated Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind to become the next superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy. Bauernfeind currently leads the Air Force Special Operations Command. Bauernfeind graduated from the academy in 1991. Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, who has been the academy’s superintendent since 2020, is leaving the service for a high profile civilian job as the executive director of the College Football Playoff.
  (Biden nominates Air Force Academy superintendent - DoD)
• The General Services Administration donated 45 laptops, worth more than $48,000, last month to a rural school in Mississippi. The school is still recovering from a major tornado that struck the area in 2023. As part of its Computer for Learning Program, GSA has donated more than 4,700 computers since January 2022 to students across the country. The next batch of 50 laptops will go to elementary and middle school students in New Mexico, who attend a tribal-controlled school. Before being donated, the laptops are cleared of federal applications and data, leaving an operating system where schools can build with their selected software.
  (GSA transferred 4,700 computers to schools since 2022 - GSA)

The post Feds in their 30s relatively unhappy on the job, study shows first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Federal employees will have more support from their agencies when dealing with issues of domestic violence and abuse. Under new guidance issued yesterday from the Office of Personnel Management, employees will be able to take time away from work to deal with the short- or long-term consequences of abusive behavior, like getting medical treatment or securing housing. OPM said the new guidance applies to both federal employees as well as their family members. An employee's statement that he or she is dealing with domestic violence is generally enough for the agency to grant leave.
  (Federal employees get enhanced leave support - OPM)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs’ IT shop is preparing for big cuts across some of its priority areas, but not for its growing workforce. VA’s Office of Information and Technology is proposing a more than 80% cut to IT modernization funding in fiscal 2025 and more than a 65% cut to its infrastructure readiness program. That is because the VA is planning for a major increase in cybersecurity spending. The tech workforce budget is also going up, because of a Special Salary Rate VA approved last summer. VA Chief Information Officer Kurt DelBene said this pay raise doesn’t take away from other budget priorities. “The SSR is not a significant portion of our budgets, in the absolute terms. And I would do it again, because we need the best. The most important resource we have as an organization, bar none, is our people." DelBene said.
  (VA IT shop defends raises under Special Salary Rate amid budget cuts - Federal News Network)
• The Department of Commerce has a new technology leader. Brian Epley, the principal deputy CIO at the Energy Department, will be the new chief information officer at the Commerce Department. Federal News Network has confirmed Epley will start June 3. He will replace Andre Mendes, who left in in January to join Tarrant County, Texas to be its CIO. Epley joined the Energy Department in September 2022 as its principal deputy CIO. He previously worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for six years as the deputy CIO and as the deputy assistant administrator for administration and resources management.
  (Energy deputy takes over as Commerce CIO - Federal News Network)
• The Defense Department will hold a virtual career fair for military spouses. The department is hosting a series of free events to help military spouses meet their career goals and connect with potential employers. The first three days of the symposium are dedicated to career development, including resume tips and negotiation tactics. Next week’s webinar series will prepare spouses for the career fair, which is scheduled for May 29 and May 30.
  (DoD to hold career fair for military spouses - DoD)
• Where are the Best Places to Work in the federal government? NASA is once again the number one. The agency’s gold trophy now marks the 12th year in a row it has maintained that top spot. For midsize agencies, the Government Accountability Office is ranked the best place to work, for the fourth year running. The National Indian Gaming Commission took first place among small agencies, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s Office of Negotiations and Restructuring once again claimed the number one spot for agency subcomponents. The full rankings from the Partnership for Public Service will be released Monday morning, along with a ceremony to recognize the top-ranked agencies this year.
  (Best Places to Work top 10 list has a few new faces, and many familiar ones - Federal News Network)
• Senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee are digging in their heels on a federal telework bill. During a mark-up yesterday morning, the committee delayed advancing the Telework Transparency Act. The bill would require agencies to report more up-to-date information on telework. But a few committee Republicans called for even more requirements. They want a stipulation for agency managers to monitor federal employees who work from home. The committee has opted to consider further amendments to the bill before advancing it to the full Senate.
  (Senators delay federal telework bill to consider adding work-from-home supervision - Federal News Network)
• Agencies could save millions of dollars, by making better use of federal buildings, according to the Government Accountability Office. GAO said agencies could save about $100 million if they used predictive models to make smarter decisions about deferred maintenance and repairs. The watchdog office said the government could save even more money by setting federal building utilization benchmarks and addressing underutilized office space. These GAO recommendations are part of a broader package that has helped agencies save tens of billions of dollars over the past 14 years.
  (Billions of Dollars in Potential Savings - GAO)
• Dozens of federal employees gathered in front of the White House yesterday to protest the Biden administration’s stance on the War in Gaza. The government workers came together on Nakba Remembrance Day, which marks the mass Palestinian displacement in 1948, with the emergence of the state of Israel. The government workers are part of a coalition called “Feds United for Peace,” and are calling for an end to the government's support of Israel. After getting questions about federal employees’ ability to discuss the Israel-Hamas War at work, the Office of Special Counsel clarified that feds can share their opinions while on the clock, as long as it is not a statement for or against a political party. To avoid legal trouble, leaders of Feds United for Peace also encouraged feds not to use any government property or resources while planning protests.
  (Nakba Day ceasefire rally and teach-in at White House - Feds United for Peace)
• Brig. Gen. Camilla White, who currently serves as the deputy of the Army’s program executive office for command, control and communications-tactical, will depart from her role in two weeks. Col. Kevin Chaney will take over the position. Chaney most recently served as the project manager for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program. The Army canceled that program in February, citing new technological developments, battlefield developments and budget projections.
  (PEO C3T deputy to exit in two weeks - AFCEA Belvoir)
• Agencies now have a prioritized list of areas to focus the collection-and-use of acquisition data around which to drive better results. In the new Circular A-137 released Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget said agencies should apply the high-definition acquisition framework to market research, to supply chain demand-and-management, and to vendor management-and-engagement support. Agencies will be required to share their acquisition data, such as prices paid and terms-and-conditions, with limited exceptions. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy, meanwhile, will develop policies and practices to support the collection, sharing, and use of acquisition data. It will also provide governance processes to help agencies manage, use, and secure the information.
  (OFPP finalizes acquisition data, management circular - White House)

The post OPM issues time-off guidance for feds experiencing domestic violence first appeared on Federal News Network.

Last year the Defense Department staged an innovation challenge. It wanted new ideas for talent management. And did it ever get them. It got 200 ideas. Now officials have picked nine finalists. For an update, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with program analyst Beth Stewart and challenge director Dr. Jeannette Haynie.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin Last year, the Defense Department staged an innovation challenge. It wanted new ideas for talent management — and did it ever get them. Two hundred ideas came in. Well, now officials have picked nine finalists. And here with an update, program analyst Beth Stewart. Ms. Stewart, good to have you with us.

Beth Stewart Good morning.

Tom Temin And challenge director, Dr. Jeannette Haynie. Dr. Haynie, good to have you with us.

Jeannette Haynie Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here.

Tom Temin And just review for us, exactly, what you were driving at with this challenge. Talent management can mean a lot of things, I guess. Dr. Haynie?

Jeannette Haynie It certainly can, and we are really grateful to be joining you again to talk about this challenge. I’ll just go back briefly to reset on what the challenge was, and why we did it. As you know, the Defense Department has quite a few people. We have several million. And there is no shortage of challenges in the talent management space. And so we recognized pretty early on, as a team and as a department, that we need to be able to leverage the creativity and the ideas that come from the breadth and scope of the whole force. And so we launched this challenge last summer, to identify from those working closest to a lot of the pain points, what the challenges were that they faced in talent management, and what kind of solutions they would propose in response. And so, we opened up that challenge to the entire department, military and civilian personnel alike, and pulled in over 200 ideas from folks across DoD who were very interested in helping us solve these problems. I can talk a little bit about the stages, but let me pause there for you.

Tom Temin All right. And what was the incentive for people to send in ideas? Usually, a challenge has a little squiff there at the end.

Jeannette Haynie It does. It does. And so, part of this was being part of the solution. Part of the draw was, you know, we’re working with folks across DoD who are by these pain points and who want to solve them, if nothing else, to make their daily lives easier. But really, because the folks who contributed ideas to this are passionate about the work they do, and they want to make things better. So, that was part of the draw. Being able to meet with the senior policy leaders and talk through the challenges and solutions, but also being able to be seen as part of the solution set and part of how we solve problems. We use our people. DoD has 3 million people. If we’re not using the strength of that people, then we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

Tom Temin And did the talent management idea apply to uniform personnel? Because that’s a pretty different world, in some ways, than civilian. And yet, often, they work side by side on the same function.

Jeannette Haynie It did. It was for uniform members and civilian members alike, and we got a range of ideas across pretty much every population you can imagine in DoD.

Tom Temin Sure. So, let’s get to the finalists there. Maybe give us a sense of what it is they proposed.

Jeannette Haynie Absolutely. And just for a little reference, we pulled in over 200 ideas, narrowed them down to 33 for the semifinal round. For the semifinalists, we had folks from every service, every military service, different OSD components. We had military members, civilian members, enlisted officer, different grades and ranks, executives all the way down. So we drew from a wide population and then narrowed it down to nine ideas. And if you’d like, we could go into a little bit a brief overview of those different nine ideas.

Tom Temin Well, first I want to get from Ms. Stewart, what is it that are the pain points in general? I mean, because people chose to enter this, that means they probably had something that really bugged them.

Beth Stewart I think the biggest finding and confirmation is that people have a lot of talent to offer the department, that we’re not even close to tapping into. We get binned by our occupation series or MOS ASFC, and people tend to tend to stay in those channels, but they also have additional skills and aptitude and abilities that we can draw out and lean on, especially when we’re looking for short-term projects and just an additional little help, a boost to a program or a project, that we just have no way of recognizing in this really structured hierarchical system.

Tom Temin And was it mostly HR types of people that answered the challenge, or did you get it from people that have a program or some kind of a functional responsibility who have to deal with the need for talent?

Beth Stewart Not at all. I think there are very few HR applicants. I think everybody else came from a different functional specialty.

Tom Temin All right. We’re speaking with Beth Stewart. She’s a program analyst, and Dr. Jeannette Haynie is director of the Defense Department’s talent management innovation challenge. And let’s get to some of the themes that came out in the nine finalists. What ideas did they come up with?

Jeannette Haynie Most of the ideas were clustered around the idea that we have a vast number of people in this department, and we just don’t know and map their skills and capabilities as well as we could to the jobs in the challenges that we face. So the challenge ideas, the ones that made it to the final round, were really clustered around understanding who our people are, what they bring to the table, and how we can best leverage their diversity, their brilliance, their intelligence and creativity to accomplish the DoD mission.

Tom Temin And Beth, tell us about some of the ideas.

Beth Stewart One of the more intriguing ideas was an idea called Go Fish. Government to fix spousal hiring. This idea aims at bringing in civilian talent, but it also helps us retain military talent, which I think, you know, covering the spectrum there of the people that work for the department. The ideas that are in the final round range from acquiring talent, onboarding, developing, assessing, assigning and retaining them. The next idea in the onboarding category was a talent emerge program. It’s an extensive onboarding program to help people understand the culture of the organization that they’re being drawn into, and give them, you know, a sense of a friend, and colleagues that are in the same boat with them, acculturated into their agency. And this program was not just for new employees to the department, but for people who’ve been around a while and just joined the agency. And we’re getting their feet wet in that new culture.

Tom Temin So it sounds like one of the themes is knowledge of the knowledge that’s there, almost.

Jeannette Haynie We don’t know about people, and if we’re not really accessing all the skills and the capabilities and experiences people have to offer, then we’re not exploring the potential that we have in this department. And one more idea to talk about the agile talent ecosystem powered by Gig Eagle was an idea that was fairly mature, and along the way has been used in various ways in the Air Force already. And that’s a way of mapping people with specific skill sets to short-term opportunities across DoD. All of these kind of get at a broader shift around how we think about our people, how we engage our people, and how we leverage our people.

Tom Temin Right. And maybe the second theme then is not keeping people in the channel or in the bucket that you mentioned, the bin, but maybe tasking them from time to time to something exciting that uses another part of their talent, which makes the career more interesting and makes people maybe want to stay around longer.

Jeannette Haynie Yeah, absolutely. There’s definitely a retention aspect to this. If people feel like they are being able to use the full breadth of skills that they bring to the table to do meaningful work across DoD, that’s a huge point of it. And what was really fascinating about the ideas as well, I’ll say two things. One is, none were in direct conflict with each other, the ones that made it to the final round. There are so many challenges in the space that they were all kind of across a continuum, tackling different facets of talent management challenges and are actually stronger woven together in different ways, which was pretty cool to see.

Tom Temin And by the way, who did the picking of the nine finalists?

Jeannette Haynie Oh, that was a team effort across DoD and particularly the personnel and readiness component. We leaned heavily on experts who own military and civilian personnel policy, talent management force resiliency and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Tom Temin All right. And in the DoD, there’s often a valley of death, as they call it, between the creation of an external idea, say, from industry and turning it into a product that the DoD can use and deploy. Will there be a valley of death on these ideas, or what’s the next steps to make sure they get implemented in some way and into the system?

Jeannette Haynie You know, the valley of death, indeed. So, that’s what we’re in the middle of right now is figuring out what are the near-term actions and what are the long-term actions, and how do we continue to make progress on these right now as a department, while mapping them towards everything we do in the future? I don’t want to get out ahead of the leadership decisions right now, so we’re happy to do another update down the road if there’s interest. But, you know, our goal right now is to weave as much of this into existing efforts and advance what we can via pilots. You know, we’ve got a chief talent management officer on board, working closely with him and his team to figure out what we can bring on from these, moving forward. And how do we make a challenge like this, something that is ongoing year over year.

Tom Temin Beth, let me ask you this. Do you get the sense that the ideas can be implemented if people choose to, without a whole big rigmarole of rulemaking or doctrine rewriting and policy changes?

Beth Stewart Yes. And the rules are there for a reason, but they’re always meant to be challenged. And we have to make sure that our rules serve us well. And we have to think beyond where we’ve come from to where we’re going, and to make sure that we designed a system that values people, puts them at the center of our mission, capability and focus. And we have to just change our our way of thinking about how we leverage talent. People bring a lot more to the table than we ask of them if we let them. And that’s probably the biggest takeaway.

Tom Temin Beth Stewart is a program analyst with the Defense Department’s Talent Management Innovation Challenge. Thanks so much for joining me.

Beth Stewart Thank you.

Tom Temin Good to be here. And Dr. Jeannette Haynie is director of that challenge. Thanks for joining me.

Jeannette Haynie Thank you so much. Good to be here.

Tom Temin We’ll post this interview along with a link to more information at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Hear the Federal Drive on demand. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

The post DoD challenge brought in 200 great talent management ideas first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Federal employees convicted of sex crimes would lose their government pensions if a bipartisan bill makes it through Congress. Under current law, feds can only lose their pensions if found guilty on national security charges such as treason, espionage or giving false testimony to a U.S. court. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) are leading the bill, called the No Taxpayer-Funded Pensions for Sex Criminals Act.
  (Ernst, Gillibrand cut off sex offenders’ pensions - Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa))
• Legislation designed to paint a clearer picture of telework in government is on the agenda this morning for senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. On a list of bills slated for mark-up today, the Telework Reform Act is one that would set new standards for data on telework, and require feds to work in person at least once a week. Another bill, the Telework Transparency Act, would require agencies to more specifically report on how telework affects productivity, office space and recruitment. If the committee advances the bills, they will go to the full Senate for consideration.
  (May 15 business meeting - Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)
• The federal chief information security officer is leaving after two years. Chris DeRusha, the federal CISO since January 2021, is moving on from federal service. DeRusha has led many of the administration's key cybersecurity initiatives over the past few years including the creation and implementation of a zero trust strategy. Federal News Network has also learned that Mike Duffy, the associate director for capacity building in the cyber division at CISA, will take over on an acting basis starting next week. Duffy has been with the Homeland Security Department for 15 years. DeRusha joined the Office of Management and Budget after coming over from the Biden presidential campaign. He also worked as CISO for the state of Michigan and spent five years at the Homeland Security Department and two years as a senior cyber adviser for the White House.
  (Federal CISO DeRusha leaving - Federal News Network)
• A bipartisan bill is seeking more pay flexibilities for the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act would allow the VA to waive pay limitations for up to 300 personnel, in order to recruit or retain critical health care employees. The legislative package also requires each VA physician, podiatrist, optometrist and dentist to receive an annual pay evaluation. VA would have to give Congress an annual report on the outcome of these pay evaluations and all resulting market pay adjustments. The sweeping bill includes pay and workforce legislation that lawmakers introduced during this session of Congress.
  (Sweeping VA bill seeks more pay flexibility for health care workers, stricter EHR requirements - Federal News Network)
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking to keep the needle moving to boost the cyber workforce. NIST has already made recent updates to how it defines the skills needed for cyber positions. But those changes are only the start. The agency is now planning to expand the total number of cyber occupations in its workforce framework. They are also planning to continue updating the definitions of current ones. The idea is to help agencies stay ahead of the curve, said Karen Wetzel, a manager at NIST. “This is not a field that stays the same, and in a lot of these work roles, even though the content underneath them has been updated, we have not reviewed them in that context since 2017,” Wetzel said. As NIST makes those updates, the agency is also planning to incorporate more specific AI skills.
  (NIST aims to cut ‘tech speak’ from cyber workforce framework - Federal News Network)
• House lawmakers want the Defense Innovation Unit to set up a test-and-evaluation cell. A draft version of the House defense policy bill would require the DIU to establish a cell to implement alternative testing and evaluation pathways. The new cell would be responsible for testing commercial dual use technologies, software-based technologies and technologies that are not integrated into an established program of record. The DIU would have to work with the Joint Staff, the combatant commands, research labs within the DoD, and the under secretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment.
  (Draft NDAA requires DIU to establish test and evaluation cell - House Documents)
• The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is demanding more details about how the White House is addressing ongoing problems at the FDIC. Top committee Republicans wrote to President Joe Biden, asking him to make good on his vow to hold senior leaders accountable for their behavior. The letter comes after a May 7 independent review of the FDIC, revealing what was identified as "a toxic work environment" under the leadership of Chairman Martin Gruenberg. The committee is requesting documents and details by May 22.
  (House committee seeks WH answers to FDIC problems - House Oversight Committee)
• The Army kicks off the first phase of what is called Global Commercial Solutions for Classified, which is the National Security Agency’s program that provides commercial security technologies to the Defense Department to protect classified information. It is expected to reach initial operational capability by next summer. The effort will allow soldiers to access classified networks securely from anywhere in the world. For the last four years, the Army has been working toward a unified network plan, in order to collapse its networks into one greater Army network by 2027.
  (Army moving closer to unified network - AFCEA Belvoir)
• The Defense Department is struggling to recruit and retain child care workers for the four military branches, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. The DoD, which operates the largest employer-sponsored child care system in the U.S., reported turnover rates ranging from 34% to 50% in 2022. The GAO report has seven recommendations for how the services can assess and track recruitment and retention efforts. The DoD concurred with the recommendations that included establishing workforce plans, developing competency and staffing requirements, conducting continuous recruiting, and providing financial incentives.
  (GAO asks military to assess child care worker retention - GAO)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs may face new requirements to get the rollout of its next Electronic Health Record system back on track. The Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act would keep the VA from rolling the Oracle-Cerner EHR out to new facilities, until sites already using it return to normal productivity levels. If those sites do not recover within two years, the legislation would require the VA to pull the plug on the EHR Modernization Program. The new EHR is running at six VA sites.
  (Sweeping VA bill seeks more pay flexibility for health care workers, stricter EHR requirements - Federal News Network)

The post Feds convicted of sex crimes might lose their pensions first appeared on Federal News Network.

The National Labor Relations Board is at a crossroads: Within the same moment, the agency is trying to manage a growing caseload, while also dealing with relatively low staffing numbers.

In the last decade, NLRB field staffing has declined by a third, while in the same timeframe, the case intake per agency employee has surged by 46%.

“So, you can do the math,” NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said in an interview.

The lion’s share of NLRB’s casework gets handed to employees working in the agency’s field offices. They’re in charge of reviewing and processing incoming cases and petitions, but at the same time, those employees have been struggling to get enough staff on board to handle a continually rising workload.

To try to manage the increasing work, Abruzzo said NLRB is prioritizing hires in field offices, while also getting creative in the agency’s pooling of resources and other employees.

“We are using headquarters personnel more to assist the field with investigations and with litigation and with representation cases,” Abruzzo said. “A lot of our headquarters staff are researchers and writers, so that’s certainly within their skill set.”

In just the last six months, the disparity between workload and staffing has become even more noticeable. The number of union election petitions filed at NLRB field offices has risen 35%, in comparison with this time last year. In numbers, that’s 1,618 petitions filed, compared with 1,199 petitions last year.

NLRB is also seeing a spike in unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, which have risen from 9,612 to 10,278 between this year and last year — a 7% increase. Between both petitions and ULP charges, the agency has seen an increase of 10% in the workload at its field offices. A spike in both employer-filed and employee-filed petitions largely drove that uptick, NLRB said, as a result of a decision the agency made in August 2023 that gave more leeway to private sector unions.

The caseload has impacted staff burnout as well. In the 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), just 48% of NLRB employees agreed that their workload was reasonable, compared with 62% agreement governmentwide.

“We’re not seeing a mass exodus of folks [and] our board agents are as committed as they’ve ever been,” Abruzzo said. “But of course, they are doing more with less. And they are more stressed as a result of not only the increased caseload, but also of the more complex matters that we’re dealing with.”

In the long run, being able to handle all the work ultimately comes back to the agency’s budget, Abruzzo said, which has been a challenge at NLRB for years. For fiscal 2025, the White House is requesting $320 million, an increase that Abruzzo said would at least begin to help rebuild NLRB’s staffing capacity and address some of the agency’s immediate technology needs.

“But we really need over $400 million, frankly, in order to staff up appropriately, so we can address the needs of the public in real time, and improve our infrastructure, which not only includes our external website to make it more user-friendly, but also our internal electronic case filing system, which really is on its last legs,” Abruzzo said.

NLRB has received flat funding in nine of the last 10 years, but the agency did get a slight budget increase of $25 million during fiscal 2023, which let NLRB move past a hiring freeze and at least begin addressing some issues, Abruzzo said.

The agency isn’t alone in its challenges, either. For fiscal 2024, like many agencies, Congress opted to give NLRB a flat budget of about $299.2 million.

Moving forward, Abruzzo said it will require steadier and even higher budgeting to progress further, rather than just stay afloat.

“That just basically kept our lights on,” Abruzzo said. “It did not allow us to do the necessary hiring of critical positions that we needed, and it did not allow for us to upgrade our infrastructure. Our caseload continues to outpace our staffing capacity.”

The post NLRB ‘doing more with less’ between growing caseload, stagnating staffing first appeared on Federal News Network.

Schedule F, the Trump-era civil service innovation, not the tax form, is like a zombie. It is dead, having been canceled by the Biden administration, but it still seems animated, judging from the range of activities devoted to keeping it entombed. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with the Policy Counsel at POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, Joe Spielberger.

Interview Transcript: 

Joe Spielberger Schedule F refers to an executive order that former President Trump signed near the very end of his presidency. It would have created a new category of federal worker that basically would have existed outside of the regular laws and regulations governing the rights and protections that most federal employees have. And basically, it would have been it would have just made it easier for a president or a political appointee to fire employees for, for almost any reason.

Tom Temin But it was for the excepted service, not the regular civil service. Correct?

Joe Spielberger Right, exactly. It would have created this new category in the excepted service. And so, it would have allowed agencies to unilaterally transfer employees from the competitive service to this new category, or from other excepted service categories into the into schedule F as well.

Tom Temin Right. So, for example, a senior executive program manager, a career person could potentially under schedule F be moved into schedule F. And the presumption is that the administration at the moment didn’t like the way that program was being run or felt that its policy was being thwarted by that person.

Joe Spielberger Exactly. And while the executive order only started to become implemented, it was estimated that the number of employees who would have been impacted under schedule F would have totaled in the tens of thousands, up to 50,000, even 100,000 or more. And so, just to put that number in a little bit of context, normally there are roughly 4000 political appointees. So just by those estimates alone, it would have exponentially increased the number of political appointees by ten, 20 or even more.

Tom Temin And it would have had the potential, again, to emphasize that point of arbitrarily converting some people that were already in competitive service to noncompetitive or the schedule F type of thing. So that means, given that potential number of 100,000, that goes way beyond the senior executive service, which is only about 9000.

Joe Spielberger Exactly. And then, you know, if you talk to some of the pro schedule F proponents, you know, they will argue that it wouldn’t be necessary to transfer that number of employees. But what’s important is that they are very clear, about using this as, chilling example, you know, firing a few employees, at first to set an example and then just establishing this really culture of fear and intimidation in agencies across the federal government.

Tom Temin And now the status of schedule F is that I think that was one of the first things that the Biden administration did away with. Correct?

Joe Spielberger That’s right. Yes. President Biden rescinded the executive order upon taking office. Of course, now, as we’ve seen, through, the current presidential race, you know, schedule F has really gotten the consensus of much of the Republican Party. And so, Ross, but, for instance, the former OPM head, who’s now playing a key role in the Heritage Foundation and their project 2025, has said that it’s unlikely that any future Republican president would fail to implement schedule F. And so regardless of what happens in this upcoming election, this is an issue that certainly is not going away anytime soon.

Tom Temin In the meantime, though, besides the repealing that happened early by the Biden team, there’s also an OPM rule, correct, that bans it, so to speak.

Joe Spielberger Yeah. So OPM recently finalized a new rule to strengthen protections for civil servants. It does a few really important things. First, it clarifies that employees would retain the same adverse action protections when they are transferred into this type of category. It also clarifies the loophole that President Trump exploited by, further defining that when we talk about this confidential policy determining, policy making or policy advocating employees, that really refers to employees who are non-career political appointees. And then the third main thing that it does is it also outlines a new process that agencies would have to follow to transfer and initiate new hiring actions. And so, this is a really important roadblock. It’s not the end all be all. You know, we still need legislation to fully prevent a more politicized civil service. But this is an important, next step in strengthening these protections for civil servants.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Josh Spielberger, our policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight. Yes, there’s a rule from OPM. But of course, let’s face it, OPM has directors that are appointed by administration. So OPM itself moves back and forth policy wise with respect to who’s in power. So, the rule then is a little bit stronger maybe than the executive order. But rules can be rerolled also. What is the prospect for legislation here? There is something that comes up from time to time in Congress.

Joe Spielberger There is there’s been legislation the past couple of years, in the House, sponsored by Representative Gerry Connolly. And then, there’s a Senate companion bill sponsored by Senator Tim Kaine. POGO and other good governance advocates have, lobbied strongly for that. We understand the political dynamics make it really unlikely to see that bill moving this Congress. So, we’re continuing to have conversations both on the Hill, and in executive branch agencies to see what other defensive mechanisms we can enact this Congress.

Tom Temin What has POGO been doing on this and what type of work have you done?

Joe Spielberger So POGO is, again, continuing all of these conversations with lawmakers, with advocates. And the main thing that we’re trying to do right now is really make it clear that when we talk about schedule F and threats to civil servants, we are not just talking about the impact on federal employees themselves, but we’re really talking about the harms to communities and, rights and benefits and services that we all rely on and many of us take for granted that would be under threat, under a more politicized civil service. And so especially, looking towards this upcoming presidential election, we want to make sure that voters across the country and advocates and lawmakers are really keeping this issue front and center in their mind so that they’re aware of the threats that await us.

Tom Temin Well, what threats, what policy or benefit to the community, to a community could be threatened by this?

Joe Spielberger So there are so many different, of course, critical roles that impact us in our day to day lives. I think a really good example is disaster relief. If your home is threatened by a hurricane or a natural disaster, your community is at risk. You want to make sure that federal relief arrives safely and timely and effectively, regardless of where you live. How your state voted in the previous presidential election. You know, we always see accusations of political gamesmanship, when it comes to providing disaster relief, things like Social Security benefits. If you apply for Social Security and other government benefits, you need to be able to trust that the people processing and delivering those benefits, you know, are in those positions, because of their qualifications and not because of their political ideology. And so, at the end of the day, everyone deserves a federal government that, treats them fairly and effectively, regardless of who they are, where they live, or how they vote.

Tom Temin And is the potential, though, for the schedule F to run in two directions. That is to say, if a Democratic administration had it, the same ill effects could happen as if a new Trump administration or something had schedule F.

Joe Spielberger Absolutely. This is a really bad policy, regardless of whether there’s a Republican in the White House or a Democrat in the White House. And again, there’s a reason why we rely on these nonpartisan civil servants to provide these protections and services that we all rely on, and make sure that those services and benefits are being provided fairly and effectively.

The post Schedule F is dormant, but still haunts the civil service first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Employees dealing with a pregnancy or childbirth can request telework as a reasonable accommodation. That accommodation is a possibility that stems from the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The new law requires agencies — and all U.S. employers — to provide reasonable accommodations for any pregnant employee experiencing limitations at work. Accommodations can include things like longer bathroom breaks, adjustments in a work schedule, and even include telework. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finalized its regulations to implement the new law just last week. EEOC began accepting charges alleging violations of the law in June 2023, when the act first took effect.
  (Pregnant Workers Fairness Act final rule - Equal Employment Opportunity Commission)
• A team of cyber experts from the Defense Department, once again, dominated the 5th Annual President's Cup Cybersecurity Competition. The group called Artificially Intelligent and composed of members of the DoD, the Army and the Air Force, won the team competition, besting 312 other teams from across the government. In the individual competitions, Army Maj. Nolan Miles won Track A, which focused on defensive operations. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Michael Torres won the Track B individual competition, focused on offensive operations. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency hosted more than 1,400 individuals across the two tracks in the President's Cup. The winning team and individuals will be recognized for their accomplishments during a ceremony at the White House.
  (DoD dominates President's Cup Cybersecurity Competition - CISA)
• The Defense Department's Cyber Crime Center has launched a vulnerability disclosure program to support the defense industrial base. The program will allow white-hat hackers to analyze companies’ security vulnerabilities. Companies supporting the defense industrial base are encouraged to apply to the program, which is voluntary and free for eligible participants. DoD Cyber Crime Center partnered with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to launch the program. The program comes after two organizations concluded a yearlong defense industrial base vulnerability disclosure pilot program.
  (DC3 & DCSA Partner for Defense Industrial Base Vulnerability Disclosure Program - DoD Cyber Crime Center)
• Experts on America's military’s health system said it is on the verge of falling behind the times, in ways it will not be able to recover from if it does not do something soon. The Defense Health Agency and the Defense Innovation Unit are asking vendors for ideas to make DoD health care more human-centered. They also want proposals on how to make sure military treatment facilities have the same technologies that health care professionals expect from civilian hospitals and clinics. Brief descriptions for how to solve those problems are due a little over a week from now.
  (Military Health System Inflection Point - Defense Innovation Unit)
• Agencies have new rules for purchasing sustainable and environmentally-friendly products. The final rule from the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council requires agencies to follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendations for buying products. EPA has more than 40 recommended environmental standards and ecolabels across 34 product and service categories. The council said EPA’s recommendations help purchasers identify thousands of American-made products and services that address environmental and human health issues, including energy and water efficiency, chemicals of concern and the use of plastic. The FAR Council rule goes into effect on May 22.
  (New environmental purchasing standards to take effect May 22 - White House)
• The Defense Department has awarded $14.4 million to speed up production of solar-cell components for satellites under the Defense Production Act. The investment will help expand the capability to produce germanium substrates used in solar cells for defense and commercial satellites. DoD said the effort will bolster supply chains that support the space ecosystem. This is the latest of 13 awards made through the Defense Production Act program since the beginning of fiscal 2024.
  (DoD awards $14.4 million to bolster production of space-qualified materials for solar cells - DoD)
• Senior executives in government have an upcoming opportunity to sharpen their leadership skills. The Office of Management and Budget and the Federal Executive Institute are hosting a second-annual leadership academy. Training through the academy will center on evidence-based decision-making. Or in other words, how to use data to test out new ideas and strategies. The series will feature five leadership training sessions between June and September this year. OMB is accepting applications from SES members until May 3.
  (Evidence-Based Decision-Making Leadership Academy - Office of Management and Budget)

The post New law requires telework option for pregnant workers first appeared on Federal News Network.

TSA Administrator David Pekoske said the technology, still in development, could take some burden off transportation security officers, especially during peak travel periods.

“We’re going to see some days this summer that might have 3.1 million passengers, and you figure 3.1 million means well over 6 million images that officers are reviewing on a given day,” Pekoske said Tuesday before the House Appropriations Committee’s homeland security subcommittee. “That’s a lot. What we find in our testing is that the constant review of images can be very fatiguing.”

The Department of Homeland Security writ large is exploring different AI applications across many missions and components. Customs and Border Protection, for instance, is using “AI-curated synthetic data” to train computer vision models to detect narcotics and other contraband in vehicles at ports of entry.

Though it’s not yet deployed, Pekoske said the TSA and DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate have been developing a way for X-ray screening machines to detect explosives. He said the machine can then alert screening officers for further action.

TSA is now working on how to expand that initial detection capability to other prohibited items.

“We’re using artificial intelligence to train the technology to detect all the prohibited items, so all the explosives and all of the other knives and firearms, etc. that are there,” Pekoske said.

TSA has also been expanding its use of facial comparison technology – considered the agency’s primary AI use case to date – to verify a passenger’s identity at airport screening checkpoints. TSA says the technology helps streamline and speed up the airport screening process.

While some lawmakers have pushed to ban TSA’s use of facial recognition, the agency says the use of facial verification is optional. TSA also says passengers should be able to use an alternate verification method without losing any time or their place in line.

TSA looks to grow more flexible workforce

Meanwhile, TSA has seen its attrition rate drop from 20% to nearly 11%, Pekoske testified, after Congress approved a historic pay increase for transportation security officers and other employees last year. The increases brought TSA pay in line with much of the rest of the federal workforce.

The fiscal 2024 funding agreement reached by Congress last month continues the new salary rates. Pekoske said TSA is seeking $377 million in fiscal 2025 to annualize its new compensation plan.

While attrition is down, TSA still hired 9,000 officers last year to keep pace with rising air travel. And Pekoske pointed to how the agency is seeking funding to increase its numbers to meet customer demands, while also providing the TSA workforce with some much needed flexibilities.

“I would really like to get to the point where we have a little bit more flexibility in our TSO numbers, because right now, it’s a very sharp pencil where we figure out exactly how many people we need – life doesn’t work that way. People get sick, they have other things going on,” Pekoske said.

“What I’d like to do is just build up the size of the workforce a little bit more to provide that flexibility,” he added. “So there’s a lot we have to do on our end to make sure that we resource it well.

Pekoske’s comments come after TSA and the American Federation of Government Employees reached a landmark collective bargaining agreement. The seven-year contract includes some of the flexibilities Pekoske touched on, including expanded official time and fewer restrictions on their sick leave policy.

AFGE ratified the agreement in March. TSA leadership is currently completing its final review.

“We should sign that next month,” Pekoske said during this week’s hearing.

The post TSA chief sees potential for AI to reduce burdens on security screeners first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The Office of Management and Budget is disbanding the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force and rescinding all COVID-19 related executive orders and guidance. New memos from OMB and the Office of Personnel Management officially ended certain leave policies that are no longer needed. OMB said agencies should still promote and establish a safe and healthy federal workplace and ensure pandemic preparedness. OPM said agencies should limit when they give COVID-19-related administrative leave, stipulating it should be allowed for employees getting vaccinated, but not given to an employee who is assisting a family member in getting vaccinated or if the employee is having an adverse reaction to a vaccine.
  (OMB disbands Safer Federal Workforce Task Force - White House)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Russia-linked hackers stole emails between agencies and Microsoft. CISA is telling any affected agencies to reset their passwords and deactivate old accounts. In an emergency directive issued late last week, CISA said the stolen emails pose a grave risk to the federal government. The hackers were able to steal the messages — which could include sensitive log-in details — from Microsoft's corporate IT systems. Agencies have until April 30 to investigate whether their credentials were stolen and reset any affected systems.
  (CISA directs agencies to investigate if Russian hackers stole Microsoft account details - Federal News Network)
• A new request for information is asking for feedback on a new part of the Federal Acquisition Regulations. The Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council wants to know if it got FAR Part 40 right. The council is asking for agency and industry feedback on whether the new cybersecurity and supply chain security section captures the right acquisition regulations or if it is missing something. The FAR Council established FAR Part 40 on April 1. In the RFI, the council is seeking feedback around specific examples of how an organization is or would be impacted negatively or positively by the scope and subparts of the new section. It is also asking for any revisions and how they would be more effective. Responses to the RFI are due by June 10.
  (FAR Council is asking whether they got FAR Part 40 right - Federal Register)
• Union petitions and charges of unfair labor practices are soaring. And the agency handling them is struggling to keep up. The National Labor Relations Board said the surge in its caseload comes alongside limited funding and staffing shortages. Funding from Congress for fiscal 2024 helped some. It ended a hiring freeze, prevented furloughs, and helped the agency backfill some staff vacancies. But the agency is calling for more resources to further improve staffing. The NLRB said it has worked with flat funding in nine of the past 10 years.
  (Union petitions up 35%, Unfair Labor Practices charge filings up 7% in the first half of fiscal year 2024 - National Labor Relations Board)
• Military pharmacies are finally back to business as usual, after a February cyber attack that affected huge swathes of the nation’s health care industry. The Defense Department said all of its pharmacies had to resort to manual workarounds to fill prescriptions starting in late February. That is when Change Healthcare, a health IT company that delivers data to DoD and private care providers, was hit by a ransomware attack. The Defense Health Agency said its connections to those services came back online a little under two weeks ago, and military pharmacies have been moving back toward normal operations since then.
  (Military Pharmacies Restored to Full Operations After Change Healthcare Cyberattack - Defense Health Agency)
• The Social Security numbers of federal employees will no longer appear on most Office of Personnel Management paperwork sent through the mail. The change is meant to prevent fraud and identify theft, while also protecting feds’ privacy. A final rule from OPM on Friday made the change official. There may still be rare exceptions where a Social Security number is included on mailed documents, but that will only happen if OPM deems it absolutely necessary.
  (Social Security Number Fraud Prevention Act requirements - Office of Personnel Management)
• The intelligence community is getting a new chief financial officer. Jon Rosenwasser will be the IC’s CFO after more than a decade as a professional staff member on the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence. He most recently served as the committee’s Budget and Policy Director. Rosenwasser was instrumental in helping lawmakers put together the annual intelligence authorization act. From 2006 to 2013, he worked at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including a stint on the National Intelligence Council. As CFO, Rosenwasser will lead the 18 intel components and agencies in putting together the classified National Intelligence Program budget.
  (DNI Haines welcomes Jon Rosenwasser as the IC chief financial officer - ODNI)

The post OMB discards COVID-19 executive orders first appeared on Federal News Network.

When most agencies go to the bargaining table with their federal union, there’s already a clear starting point for negotiations. Labor and management officials usually agree to reopen a handful of articles from their existing collective bargaining agreement, then discuss and implement the various changes each party wants to make.

But for the Defense Health Agency, that’s not the case. After the agency’s employees unionized, the American Federation of Government Employees spent the better part of the last two years figuring out what employees’ rights will look like, encompassing everything from relocations and overtime work, to how to handle disciplinary actions.

“There’s no prior agreement, so you’re literally starting from scratch — you have to bargain everything for the first time,” AFGE Deputy General Counsel Cathie McQuiston said in an interview.

Although DHA employees voted to gain union representation with AFGE back in 2022, the labor and management parties didn’t open negotiations until October 2023. DHA finally reached a baseline master agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees on April 5.

The new interim agreement outlines, for the first time ever, cohesive policies on leave, work hours, official time, telework and much more for some 38,000 agency employees nationwide.

“This was a recognition for both parties, [deciding] jointly what are [the] basic matters that are important to have — rules of the road for both the union and management to follow,” McQuiston said.

DHA did not immediately respond to Federal News Network’s request for comment about the new interim agreement.

Building from an initial agreement for DHA headquarters, and with some minor tweaks, the interim contract now applies to all DHA bargaining unit employees across the country. DHA’s nationwide agreement encompasses hundreds of locations all under a single contract, similar to AFGE’s structure within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“We had just bargained [the headquarters agreements] in the last six months, we had gotten them through agency head review,” McQuiston said. “It didn’t make sense for either side to sit down and start from scratch when we’d just bargained something … that is [already] appropriate for the agency.”

DHA employees will have “input and influence”

DHA, first created 10 years ago, initially had a fairly limited mission of offering shared services to military medical organizations. But since 2017, the agency has been growing significantly. It now encompasses practically all aspects of the Military Health System. As part of that expansion, DoD reorganized about 45,000 health care employees into DHA, most of whom were previously working for individual military branches.

An estimated 75% of employees at DHA headquarters didn’t have union representation before the 2022 election that brought in AFGE as the union representative for the employees.

“Prior to them being transferred and combined in DHA, the Army had their own rules and regulations, the Navy had theirs, the Air Force had theirs. Everybody was dealing with different rules, different policies,” McQuiston said. “Now the representation provides the opportunity for employees to engage … and have input and influence when the decisions are made, and before they’re made.”

Now with the interim agreement in place, AFGE and DHA will move forward on negotiations within the next three months, with the goal of reaching agreements on even more articles to include in the contract.

But the exact parameters of what those negotiations will entail are up in the air. That’s because AFGE is also still working on establishing a bargaining council, which will eventually comprise agency employees who will be elected as representatives of the overall DHA workforce.

“They will be responsible for doing the bargaining, making the calls on priority,” McQuiston said. “We’re right now in discussions about what articles we’ll move. We certainly want to get the views of the workforce about issues that are important to them in the workplace day-to-day and incorporate their concerns.”

Although it’ll still be a while before everything is completely set, McQuiston said she believes the representation will have a positive impact for DHA personnel, even in the short term. Under the interim agreement, DHA employees now have an official process, for instance, to flag concerns for management, and official documentation of their rights they can point back to, if necessary.

McQuistion said especially with the recent executive order reestablishing labor-management forums as a requirement for all agencies, she hopes DHA employees will have more opportunities to be involved in the decision-making process for any workforce changes from management, and to be able to offer input along the way, rather than only dealing with implementation of workplace changes after the fact.

“I think it will provide a better workplace for the employees at the end of the day,” McQuiston said. “This is a big change, it’s a huge opportunity [and] I think it’s a huge net positive for these employees.”

The post DHA, AFGE cement workplace policies for 38K DoD health employees first appeared on Federal News Network.