Trying to take skills-based hiring a step further, Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) introduced the bipartisan ACCESS Act Tuesday. If enacted, the legislation would remove college degree requirements from jobs in the federal contracting space.

The concept of prioritizing hands-on skills over educational background for job candidates is not new. Beginning in the Trump administration, and now continuing through the Biden administration, skills-based hiring efforts for the federal workforce have remained a priority for agencies as they recruit for federal jobs.

An executive order from the Trump administration initially urged agencies to focus on skills over education. After the Biden administration upheld the order, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance to agencies on how to implement it.

Despite the continued emphasis, a spokesperson for Mace said the pace of skills-based hiring efforts remains unclear.

“This bill is meant to accelerate those efforts,” the spokesperson said in an email to Federal News Network. “The Biden administration maintained [the Trump administration’s] executive order, though it’s unclear how effectively they are implementing it.”

Currently, cybersecurity, human resources and acquisition remain the three major governmentwide, mission-critical skills gaps, OPM has said. Many experts, however, view skills-based hiring as one way to help address these gaps.

Now, the ACCESS Act seeks to stretch that concept to encompass personnel working on federal contracts, in addition to the federal workforce overall. Specifically, the legislation would bar contract solicitations from including minimum experience or educational requirements for the proposed contractor personnel.

Contracting officers, however, could still include degree requirements in some cases, but only if they include a written justification explaining why personnel with college degrees would be necessary for the specific solicitation.

Additionally, under the ACCESS Act, the Office of Management and Budget would be required to give agencies implementation guidance and help them establish the new requirements within 180 days of the bill’s enactment.

“We believe in empowering talent over credentials, and the ACCESS Act embodies this principle. By removing unnecessary degree barriers, we’re not just opening doors, but unlocking a wealth of untapped potential,” Mace said in a statement. “It’s about recognizing skills, not just diplomas, and ensuring that everyone, regardless of their educational background, has a fair shot at contributing to our nation’s workforce and innovation landscape.”

Skills-based hiring has become a priority in large part due to long-standing skills gaps in the federal workforce. Skills gaps appear when agencies don’t have the right skills or enough employees in the first place, on board.

In turn, skills gaps can create persistent challenges for agencies and their programs. In fact, more than half of the areas on the Government Accountability Office’s 2023 High-Risk List stem from issues related to mission-critical skills gaps. Strategic human capital management, or the ability for agencies to address mission-critical skills gaps, has remained on GAO’s list since 2001.

OPM has pointed to several promising practices from agencies as they work to increase their use of skills-based hiring.

For instance, the Interior Department reported that 74% of its job announcements use an additional assessment for candidates beyond the typical self-assessment questionnaire. Self-assessments often lead to inaccurate self-ratings, unwieldy applicant pools and large numbers of unqualified applicants, OPM said in its Workforce of the Future playbook.

The concept of skills-based recruitment is also included in the Chance to Compete Act, a bill which the House passed in a vote of 422 to 2 near the start of 2023. The Senate version of the bill was referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but so far has not had further action.

For the ACCESS Act, a spokesperson for Mace said for now, there is no leading partner for a Senate version of the legislation.

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is reviewing more than 4,000 positions at risk of a downgrade in their respective pay scales.

The six VA positions under review include a mix of white-collar General Schedule (GS) and blue-collar Wage Grade (WG) positions.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) estimates about 56% of VA employees in these 4,000 positions are veterans. Some of the positions under review cover VA employees who make less than $20 an hour.

The positions the VA is reviewing cover all 18 Veterans Integrated Services Networks (VISNs). More than 1,700 positions under review are located in the Veterans Health Administration’s Finance Revenue Operations and Procurement and Logistics Office.

AFGE says affected employees have received notices in the mail about the consistency reviews. But Thomas Dargon, supervisory attorney for AFGE’s National VA Council, said the union hasn’t received notice from the VA yet about any imminent downgrades.

However, if the VA decides to downgrade any of these positions, Dargon said the department will face an even harder time filling these positions.

“The bell’s already been rung here. I’ve seen the letters that have gone out to impacted employees, and VA doesn’t have a lot of answers to the questions they’re asking,” Dargon said.

The VA put a moratorium on downgrading employee positions in 2012, allowing the department to revise a national handbook, computer software and other administrative tasks to ensure it classified employees fairly and consistently.

The VA, however, ended that moratorium earlier this year, and is conducting “consistency reviews” on six of its occupations, at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management.

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes told Federal News Network in a statement that OPM directed the VA to conduct agency-wide consistency reviews of these six occupations, after VA employees appealed the classification of their positions to OPM.

OPM, following a classification oversight review of VA in spring 2023, determined that two positions, industrial hygienist GS-0690-12 and purchasing agent (prosthetics) GS-1105-06, were not properly classified at the correct grade level.

VA, in a memo obtained by Federal News Network, said its Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer, “is working to strengthen consistency and oversight of classification determinations across the department by taking action to ensure employees are in appropriately and consistently classified positions, reduce geographical and organizational pay disparities and decrease hiring times.”

The VA is conducting consistency reviews on the following positions:

• File Clerk (GS-0305-05 and above)
• Financial Accounts Assistant (GS-503-all grades)
• Industrial Hygienist (GS-0690-12 and above)
• Purchasing Agent (OA) (GS-1105-07 and above)
• Housekeeping Aid (WG-3 and above)
• Boiler Plant Operator (WG-5402-10 and above)

Reviews of these occupations will occur in two phases. The first phase of reviews began on March 1 and will conclude on April 26. The department will start a second phase on April 29, and complete the reviews by May 1. VA expects to submit all its reviews to OPM by May 1.

“VHA Consolidated Classification Units will be required to initiate a consistency review process, which will require the identification of [position descriptions] in need of review. [Position descriptions] determined not properly classified will be sunset through attrition and positions impacted will be recruited at the appropriate grade levels, as applicable,” the VA memo states.

Once VA conducts its consistency reviews, it will provide reports back to OPM on whether their internal findings demonstrated that those positions are properly classified as compared to OPM standards.

“From there, I suspect some decision will be made,” Dargon said. “AFGE has not been notified of any imminent downgrade at this point, but I do not suspect the consistency reviews to result in employees being upgraded.”

Dargon said AFGE “does not support any downgrade whatsoever, and that “there is already a significant pay disparity between the public sector and the private sector.”

“VA has a notoriously difficult time not only recruiting, but retaining employees, and downgrading these positions is not going to make it any easier to fill them. And it is not going to bolster morale in the workplace,” Dargon said.

Hayes told Federal News Network that the VA issued a letter temporarily suspending changes to lower grade actions on June 29, 2012. Hayes said OPM assessed VA’s classification process in March 2023, and in September 2023, “determined there were no barriers prohibiting VA from conducting the reviews.”

VA, he added, expects to complete its consistency reviews of these positions by May 31.

“Should the reviews conclude that any positions were improperly classified, VA will consider all potential options to correct this misclassification,” Hayes said. “VA will do all we can to mitigate any potential adverse impact to our current employees. VA is committed to partnering with OPM to update classification standards and ensure they reflect the work done at VA and across the federal government.”

According to slides obtained by Federal News Network from a VA briefing presentation, VHA directed its Workforce Management and Consulting Office to cancel any VHA job opportunity announcements (JOAs) for occupations and grades that are subject to the consistency reviews.

As part of the consistency reviews, VHA classifiers will take a closer look at the qualifications required to perform the work for each occupation, and whether the agency has properly applied OPM’s classification or job-grading standards.

Classifiers cannot compare these six positions to other VA jobs or positions, consider any qualifications the employee has that are not required to perform the job, or account for how well an employee performs the work or the amount of work the employee performs.

“The goal of a classification consistency review is to ensure positions are classified in compliance with OPM classification standards and graded consistently VHA-wide,” the presentation slides state.

VHA is outlining “mitigation strategies” for pay-related staffing challenges. They include supplementing the base pay of these six positions with recruitment and retention incentives — such as critical skills incentives and special salary rates available under the toxic-exposure PACT Act.

“I can appreciate that the HR community at VA is trying to create a soft landing for employees who may be impacted by these downgrades through various recruitment and retention incentives, or ‘mitigation strategies,’ as they call them. But that’s not good enough, Dargon said. “There’s no reason to downgrade these employees, to make these positions harder to fill than they already are.”

Under Secretary for Heath Shereef Elnahal included housekeepers as part of a “Big Seven” list of occupations outlined in the VHA’s top hiring priorities in 2023. Those “Big Seven” positions cover VHA jobs that have a direct impact on patient care — and include physicians, nurses, licensed practical nurses, nursing assistants and food service workers.

Dargon warned that any potential reduction in pay for housekeepers would “be felt very quickly and sharply by folks in that field.” He said VA housekeepers in Pittsburgh, for example, are currently making about $16 an hour.

“These jobs are difficult to fill, and it’s difficult to retain workers,” Dargon said. “We have people who have military backgrounds themselves, who are veterans coming back to the VA, continue giving back, who believe in the mission, who are making just over $15, $16, $17 an hour — and you’ve got VA considering a downgrade.”

Dargon said the VA, by sending these letters to impacted employees, puts them in a position of “feeling undervalued or not seen.”

“Housekeeping aids are very much the backbone of health care institutions. You do not need to be a nurse or a doctor to be considered a vitally important part of the healthcare system that is VA,” he said. “Telling those employees who are working, in some instances, in really difficult environments, every hour of the day, to keep the VA clean and safe, that their position is actually compensated too highly — I can’t imagine what that feels like.”

Dargon said that if VA were to downgrade any of these occupations, it would probably lead to the department contracting out more of this work, “because the positions have become so unattractive through pay or other working conditions.”

VA saw record hiring last year, but is now looking to manage the size of its largest-ever health care workforce.

VA in its fiscal 2025 budget request plans to reduce its total workforce headcount by 10,000 positions. Most of the workforce reduction would come from VHA.

VHA Chief Financial Officer Laura Duke told reporters last month that the workforce reduction is necessary, because the agency far exceeded its hiring goals last year, and because it’s seeing higher-than-expected retention rates.

VHA earlier this year rescinded some temporary and final job offers to prospective hires. But the agency later issued a memo, telling leadership and HR officials to only rescind job offers as an “action of last resort.”

AFGE and VA finalized a new labor agreement last August, updating the terms of their labor contract for the first time in more than a decade.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough, at the signing ceremony, said the new contract would help with “easing the process by which we can fill vacancies,” and will allow the department to make new hires more quickly.

Dargon, however, said recent events suggest the VA is no longer making an effective pitch to prospective hires.

“I was on the negotiating team for the master agreement, and sat at the bargaining table with department officials who insisted that the reason they could not quickly hire employees was because of the provisions in the collective bargaining agreement — that it took too long that these were hurdles or impediments to quick hiring. We knew that was never the case, but we agreed to certain revisions in our contract to allow for more streamlined hiring procedures,” Dargon said. “Now they’re telling us they’ve hired too many people, maybe they’re not going to hire as quickly, they’re not going to fill vacancies through attrition. And now we’re looking at existing positions, and the idea of downgrading them.”

The post VA reviewing 4,000 positions at risk of pay downgrade first appeared on Federal News Network.

Earlier this spring, several House lawmakers introduced a new bill to address a burgeoning post-pandemic trend: the use of employee monitoring technologies.

The “Stop Spying Bosses Act” would create new rules around the use of worker surveillance technologies. It would also establish a new division at the Labor Department to regulate workplace surveillance.

The legislation comes in response to an explosion in the use of everything from video surveillance to keylogging software to keep tabs on employees. A 2023 survey of 1,000 companies with remote or hybrid workforces found the vast majority use some form of employee monitoring. There’s even a new term for tech that enables this kind of continuous activity tracking: “bossware.”

As the country’s largest employer, where does the federal government stand? To date, there’s little evidence that federal agencies and their managers are taking up the more intrusive employee monitoring practices being embraced in the private sector.

But the unions that represent feds are also guarding against the potential as the technology evolves. National Federation of Federal Employees Executive Director Steve Lenkart said the issue is intertwined with the evolution of telework.

“As our technology improves, and we have more capabilities for people not to be in a centralized place, we’re going to have to invest in technologies that make it easier for that employee to function,” Lenkart said in an interview. “And there’s always going to be questions of supervision. And then it leads to questions of surveillance.”

SSA watchdog monitors employee computers

There is at least one instance where federal employees working remotely have had their computers monitored for performance.

In 2021, employees at the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General were subject to a survey of computer logs and telephone records to measure time online. Some employees were subject to disciplinary action or terminated.

While the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) — which represents more than 90% of SSA OIG agents – pushed back on that practice, SSA Inspector General Gale Ennis argued it was necessary “as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to hold employees accountable, when appropriate.”

“Failing to do so would be detrimental to public service, the OIG mission, and the morale of the many employees who go above and beyond in their contributions every day,” Ennis wrote in a September 2021 letter to the union.

Later that month, the FLEOA took a vote in which 98% of responding employees said they had “no confidence” in Ennis’s leadership. The use of computer logs for employee monitoring was among the issues cited by the union in its statement on the vote.

More than two years later, an FLEOA spokeswoman said the issue around the computer monitoring has yet to be resolved. “To our knowledge, the data analytics from employee monitoring are not being used for disciplinary actions as they were before, but they could be using it for other reasons,” the spokeswoman told Federal News Network.

In a statement for this story, FLEOA President Mat Silverman said SSA OIG employees were terminated “based on computer logs often without any corroborating or mitigating evidence from an employee’s immediate supervisor, raising serious doubts about the legitimacy of the terminations.”

“As agencies become increasingly skeptical about the benefits of remote work, we do fear the trend of remote monitoring will continue; however, we hope the strong criticism, high attrition, and decreased morale SSA OIG experienced will send a strong message to other agencies that this is neither an effective nor appropriate workplace policy,” Silverman said. “Ultimately, a workplace is successful when there is mutual trust, transparency, and confidence between employees and their leadership. Conversely, remote monitoring is demeaning to employees and undermines these important workplace values.”

In response to questions about the use of computer monitoring, an SSA OIG spokeswoman said, “Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General supervisors measure productivity and performance of their employees using performance plans.”

‘No rulebook’ on employee monitoring

As the telework era continues to evolve, Lenkart said it will take time to strike the balance between supervision and surveillance.

“I think there’s going to be a little bit of operational uncomfortableness,” he said. “If you don’t trust your employee enough where you have to watch them minute-by-minute, then that’s probably not a good candidate to be working home or the supervisor has trust issues that need to be addressed. There’s no rulebook written on this yet.”

While workplace collaboration technologies, like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, are key to remote work, some unions are keeping a close eye on how those technologies are used by management. The National Treasury Employees Union, for instance, said it “opposes the use of technology for anything other than its intended purpose.”

In a statement, NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said the union negotiates language in contracts that any “new or upgraded workplace technology cannot be used to track and monitor employees, measure productivity or replace existing official methods for tracking time and attendance.”

“For example, monitoring an employee’s colored-dot status on Microsoft Teams is not an indicator of productivity or attendance, and we would enforce our contracts to contest agency managers trying to use it as the basis of discipline or an adverse action against an employee,” Greenwald continued.

On its “Telework FAQ” page, the Office of Personnel Management encourages supervisors to focus on what an employee is accomplishing, rather than what it “looks like” an individual is doing.

“By focusing on the work product instead of the work activity, many supervisors find they are better able to communicate clear expectations to their employees,” OPM writes. “The resulting agreement on job expectations often leads to increases in employee productivity and job satisfaction.”

OPM did not respond to questions about the potential use of employee monitoring technology within the federal government.

In a 2021 blog, the Government Accountability Office underlined how first-line supervisors are key to reporting whether they think an employee is abusing time and attendance requirements. While agencies are increasingly using automated timekeeping systems and other internal controls to detect misconduct, managers are “still the most important internal control for managing time and attendance,” GAO wrote.

That’s a sentiment Lenkart reiterated in highlighting the disparate nature of many federal jobs and the difficulty of measuring performance from time spent on a computer.

“In the end, it’s always going to come back to the local supervisor to determine whether you have a good employee or not,” he said.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

Close to 80% of employers use monitoring software to track employee performance and online activity.

Source: CNBC

The post With ‘spying bosses’ on the rise, where do federal agencies stand on employee monitoring? first appeared on Federal News Network.

Congress recently approved a $56.7 billion budget for the State Department for the rest of this year.

That’s a nearly 6% cut compared to spending levels in 2023 — but a less severe cut than the 15% reduction House Republicans had proposed.

Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Richard Verma said Wednesday that this belt-tightening puts the department’s workforce in a tough position, as it responds to a growing set of diplomatic challenges.

“The department will have to make tradeoffs. The dollars are simply unable to stretch as far as we need to meet the moment. And budget cycles do not always align with global realities and crises,” Verma said Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Verma said lawmakers reaching a 2024 spending deal midway through the fiscal year constrains the department’s ability to respond to emerging challenges in real time.

“None of this is intended to suggest government agencies can’t be innovative and find efficiencies we have, and we will always strive to do so. But I do, however, want to be candid about our reality and the challenges and the constraints we face,” he said.

Verma said the State Department faces an average 13% staff gap, and 15% of ambassador nominees remain unconfirmed.

While the department is looking to rebuild its staffing after a Trump administration hiring freeze and budget cuts, he said the department still doesn’t have the workforce it needs to meet its mission.

“Can you imagine if United Airlines, or Microsoft, or Google, or the University of Virginia had 13% of its positions unfilled? What happens is you end up with incredible workload burdens. You end up shifting certain duties.  You end up with posts that don’t have enough people,” Verma said. “We’re in this race to catch up, but you can’t catch up if your budget, like this past year, has been cut by nearly 6%.”

The department currently has about 77,000 employees stationed across nearly 300 embassies, consulates, and domestic operations. Americans in its workforce come from every U.S. state and nearly 20% of employees are veterans.

Among its challenges, the State Department is leading the U.S. response to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. It’s also managing a portfolio of emerging threats — including cyberattacks, climate change, global health challenges, the rise of extremist groups and the spread of artificial intelligence tools.

“We can acknowledge that these challenges have stretched the State Department in unprecedented ways. They’ve met working in more places on more issues and problem sets than ever before,” Verma said.

Verma said a national security supplemental proposed by the White House to respond to Ukraine, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific is “critically needed” for the State Department to respond to these worldwide conflicts.

Over the past year, the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs cleared out a pandemic-era passport backlog, and processed more than 24 million passport applications and issued over 10 million visas.

About 48% of Americans now have a passport — up from 20% in 2006.

Meanwhile, the department is still coordinating Special Immigrant Visa processing for Afghan allies at over 60 posts worldwide.

Verma said U.S. consular teams in 2023 also assisted 70,000 Americans across the world in times of crisis, “and frankly, personal emergencies that are never on the front pages of any newspaper.”

That includes helping Americans living overseas leave Israel following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, and helping Americans evacuate Haiti following the ouster of its president.

Verma said the State Department is doing all of this, and “continues to deliver a tremendous value to the American people” at a cost of approximately 1% of annual federal spending.

Verma said the State Department’s base budget grew by about $36 billion since 2000 — but the Defense Department’s budget grew by nearly $600 billion over the same period.

In his first year on the job, Verma has visited more than 30 U.S. overseas missions and about a dozen domestic facilities across the United States.

“At the end of the day, we are a national security agency, with people serving bravely from Ukraine, to Somalia and South Sudan, to Iraq and Port Au Prince, and in so many other conflict zones,” Verma said. “In an age of increased competition, of global interconnectedness of growing authoritarianism, it is vitally important for American diplomats and development professionals to show up everywhere we can to lead, to build, to grow and to deepen cooperation.”

The department, as part of Secretary Antony Blinken’s modernization strategy released last fall, is staffing up its Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy and its Center for Analytics, as well as bringing onboard more subject-matter experts on climate and global health.

The department under this agenda is also reinvesting in its workforce.

“Across all hiring types, we’ve diversified hiring pathways — through paid internships and new authorities —redefined our approach to training and professional development,” Verma said.

The State Department has also launched a retention unit, to pinpoint why Foreign Service members leave the agency midway through their careers, and to make improvements that might encourage them to stay.

The post State Dept workforce in ‘tough position’ with 13% staffing gap, says deputy secretary first appeared on Federal News Network.

Few workforces have been studied and dissected as much as that of the two million-strong executive branch of the federal government. There’s another smaller, if no less crucial workforce. It belongs to Congress. The latest research shows wide-and-deep dissatisfaction among congressional staff members. For details, the Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the President and CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, Brad Fitch.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And you have surveyed members of the congressional staff. What is it? About 30,000 plus or minus. Tell us about the survey and what you were asking and what you found out.

Brad Fitch Well, we wanted to explore their attitudes about the functionality, civility and the capacity of the U.S. Congress to do its job as a Democratic legislature. Probably the main finding was not positive, but not shockingly, that only two out of ten staffers would say that Congress is functioning as a legislature should. And this was equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Generally speaking, I have that view. They also had differing views on staying in the Congress. Nearly half of them said they were going to leave the Congress or thinking of leaving the Congress, especially on the Republican side. Six out of ten staffers on the Republican side said they were thinking of leaving the Congress due to heated rhetoric within their own party. So clearly, the Partisan divide that has been affecting a lot of things in our nation is also affecting the congressional staff workforce.

Tom Temin So it sounds like the acrimony that seems real, you know, among members flows down to the people that are actually doing the day-to-day work of crafting bills, or do they still kind of get along with the people from the other party?

Brad Fitch I’d have to say yes and no. One of the unknown sort of secrets of Washington is that there is a great deal of bipartisan collaboration, especially in the Senate, between parties of staff members and senior staff members. And we actually saw that that there was great agreement among Democrats and Republicans when we asked whether or not civility was very important to a functioning legislature. 85% of Republican staff and 70% of Democratic staff said civility was very important. 60% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats said encouraging bipartisanship was very important and a huge degree. 96% of Democrats and 98% of Republicans agree with this statement. It is necessary for senators and representatives to collaborate across party lines. So, on one level, you’re right. There is certainly a degree of partisanship that exists even at the staff levels. But there’s also and you saw this in the open-ended answers, a rich desire among staff members from members of Congress to collaborate in a bipartisan way to address the needs of the American public.

Tom Temin And one of the findings I found, well, maybe not so surprising, given the state of affairs in Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas, but there actually is some level of anxiety about safety, physical safety of people working on the Hill.

Brad Fitch Yeah. In fact, both Democrats and Republicans said that they are experiencing threatening messages at least somewhat frequently. And these are high numbers, like 73% of Republicans, 68% of Democrats. And it’s kind of terrible to think about where you work, and you have to go to an environment where you’re going to be receiving death threats. And we all know that since 2016, the Capitol Police have reported there’s been an increase in death threats of 5 to 10 times in magnitude coming in to the Capitol Hill switchboard. Unfortunately, the other finding and there was a bit of a divide between Democrats and Republicans. When asked whether members of staff feel safe doing their jobs. Only 21% of Democratic staff were satisfied with that, compared to 61% of Republican staff. And in the open-ended answers to the questions we posed, we just have to accept that, especially for Democrats, we still live in a post January 6th world. I’m a Washingtonian. I’ve been here for four decades. And you don’t go a few days without another article being in the news about a January 6th rioter. An insurrection is either being arrested or convicted or going on trial. And that’s just a recurring, you know, nightmare for many staffers. And clearly the data shows that it’s having an effect on Democratic staff, especially.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Brad Fitch. He’s president and CEO of the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation. This is the second of this type of survey you’ve done. And sort of like the Fed’s survey that is done in the executive branch by OMB every year. Do you think you’ll do this regularly?

Brad Fitch I hope to. We believe that this is a better benchmark for how the Congress is performing as a legislature than some of the other, we’ll call it popular media tools that have been used, such as the number of days in session or the number of bills introduced or passed. This is a survey of senior congressional staff. More than half of the respondents had ten years experience or more. So, you’re really dealing with a very seasoned, very intelligent workforce, very dedicated workforce is public servants much in the way the executive branch is. But the difference is, of course, is they do have to deal with this highly partisan difficult work environment. And clearly the research is showing it’s taking a toll on many of them.

Tom Temin And we’ve been primarily talking about people who work on the committee and personal staffs of the members. What about those in the Congressional Research Service? The congressional? Budget Office. Is there a sense that the Partisanship has pretty much stayed out of those which are considered the reference points for both sides in research and data about what it is they’re doing?

Brad Fitch We didn’t survey the institutional support agencies you referenced. We focused on, as you noted, personnel, staff, committee staff and leadership staff. I will add one thing, though, in the area of institutional support, we did find a ray of good hope in the survey research in that the satisfaction levels of congressional staff with some of the more we’ll call it institutional capacity areas, H.R. professional development. It all improved in a matter of two years, and this is likely a direct result of the work of the Select Committee on Modernization and the Subcommittee on Modernization, which is now been around for a year and a half. And the members of Congress who engaged in that effort starting in 2019, did it in a completely bipartisan way. It was an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. The same is true of the new subcommittee chaired by Stephanie Bice, congresswoman from Oklahoma. And it’s a real testament that if members of Congress decide to roll up sleeves, collaborate in a bipartisan way, work constructively to solve problems, it can work. And that was really, in some respects, the positive highlight of the report, that in a matter of less than two years, staff satisfaction in all the areas related to capacity had gone up. It’s still very low, but we saw improvement in every metric.

Tom Temin Yes, because the technology basis of Congress was pretty primitive. They still published 2000-page bills that aren’t even searchable PDFs, let alone, you know, HTML. And so, I think for people coming in that might be idealistic about the nature of the work they would expect to work environment that seems 21st century and Congress is inching that way, you might say.

Brad Fitch I would say they’re going in more than inches. They’re going in yards these days. And they’ve actually made some significant progress in the digitalization of some of their work. I was just talking to a staff member just yesterday. And, you know, even the simple act of getting a co-sponsor for a bill required very much an 18-minute process that involved producing PDFs and signatures and all this stuff. And now they can all do it electronically. And she said, it takes about a minute now. So, there’s very good progress happening, especially in the House of Representatives. The professional development offerings in the House have just skyrocketed. It’s really terrific what they’re offering new staff members in the area of professional growth that research shows in the HR community should lead to more job engagement, should lead to more job retention, and that results in a better workforce for the American people, because ultimately, this is designed and all these efforts are designed to improve services that the American people take advantage of.

Tom Temin All right. I wish they’d modernize flag ordering. That would make things a lot easier because they.

Brad Fitch Are actually doing their job. And believe it or not, they actually started to move that to an electronic format. Most people don’t realize you can buy an American flag that was flown over the U.S. Capitol. It’s a business that’s run out of each individual congressional office, and it’s now gotten a lot more efficient as a result of some of the reforms they’ve done in the last five years.

Tom Temin Well, I’ve got three of them so far. So, they’re good things to own. And just finally, I want to return to that question of the importance of civility and constructive dialog. These are not merely academic or social niceties, but they actually improve. Well, not to be dramatic, but the performance of the Republic.

Brad Fitch In the end, it all leads to compromise, which we sometimes forget our eighth-grade social studies classes and reminding us that America was founded on the grand compromise, the Sherman compromise, the idea of a bicameral legislature. We don’t live in a direct democracy or a parliament. We live in a republic. And compromise is essential to the functioning of our legislatures. And to get compromise, you have to have collaboration and civility. And this report shows that senior Democratic and Republican staff agree that’s the path to improving our national legislature.

The post Dysfunction in Congress spoils the work life of congressional staff first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The Biden administration's final rule to block Schedule F is in place, but the push still continues in Congress. Many advocates say the new regulations securing job protections for career feds are a step in the right direction. But some are concerned it will not be enough to stop Schedule F's resurrection in a future administration. Democratic lawmakers are urging the passage of the Saving the Civil Service Act. The bill aims to prevent career civil servants from being made at-will and easier to fire. The legislation has not seen much action, but the new final rule spurred lawmakers, like Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), to press harder and call for its passage.
  (Saving the Civil Service Act - Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.))
• New guidance is out to improve the management of more than a trillion dollars in federal grants. The Office of Management and Budget released the 2024 revisions to the Uniform Grants Guidance. This is the first update in four years. OMB's Deputy Director for Management Jason Miller said among the major changes is improving NoFos, the notice of funding opportunities. "The Uniformed Grants Guidance includes a streamlined NoFo template for agencies to use to help with shortening and simplifying their grants announcements," Miller said. This is one of several substantial revisions to the guidance, which seeks to clarify and reduce the burden on grantees. OMB received more than 3,200 comments to the draft.
  (OMB updates governmentwide grant management guidance - White House)
• The Biden administration is working on hiring tools to help agencies compete for AI talent. The White House is planning to hire 100 AI professionals into the federal workforce by this summer. Some of those hires will come from a “Tech to Gov” virtual hiring fair on April 18. Participating federal and state agencies are looking to fill AI and AI-enabling positions. Kyleigh Russ, a senior adviser at the Office of Personnel Management, said her agency is also working on an AI and Tech Talent Playbook to show how agencies can effectively onboard these in-demand hires. “We know that this talent is very sought-after and that there will be constant competition, both across government and the private sector," Russ said.
  (Biden administration working on hiring tools to help agencies compete for AI talent - Federal News Network)
• The 2024 Vital Signs report from the National Defense Industrial Association provides a look into the challenges facing the defense industrial base. The Vital Signs 2024 Survey asked the industry to identify areas of improvement for the DoD when working with private companies. Some 65% of respondents want to see a clear and consistent demand signal through contract vehicles. More than 40% of respondents would like the DoD to provide specific points-of-contact in program offices. The report also recommends that the Office of the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment to engage with industry before finalizing the classified implementation plan for the National Defense Industrial strategy.
  (DoD needs to send stronger demand signal, increase investment in critical supply base - National Defense Industrial Association)
• Agencies and federal unions have marching orders from the Biden administration to re-establish labor-management forums. In some cases, it is possible for these forums to be met with resistance from either party, or even employees themselves. The Office of Personnel Management is offering advice on how to wade through any trouble spots in implementation. For one, OPM encourages management to have discussions with union leaders before making any top-down decisions.
  (OPM outlines how agencies, unions can recreate labor-management forums - Federal News Network)
• The Postal Service is missing more than half its service targets for mail products on which it has a monopoly. Its regulator told USPS it did not meet service performance targets for 15 out of 27 market-dominant products in 2023. The regulator is calling on USPS to take corrective action and to come up with a plan to improve its performance. USPS said 98% of households are getting their mail and packages within three days and that 50% of mail and packages arrive a day ahead of their service standard.
  (PRC issues report evaluating USPS service levels and rates - Postal Regulatory Commission )
• The Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to make permitting for environmental projects easier. EPA said its new website not only fulfills its commitment under the Biden administration's Permitting Action Plan, but also makes its information and process more transparent. Through the new site, EPA is posting information about the permitting process, such as permit applications and public meetings. The goal is to improve the timelines, predictability and transparency of federal environmental review and authorization processes for covered infrastructure projects, which include offshore wind energy under the renewable energy production sector.
  (EPA launches new permitting site - EPA)
• The public can now track defueling and decommissioning operations of the Red Hill fuel facility in Hawaii. A new app will provide the latest developments on tank cleaning, the decommissioning plan, environmental clean-up and regulatory approvals. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a full closure of the facility after jet fuel leaked into the Navy’s water distribution system. The app to track the closure efforts is available for download at Apple's App Store and the Google Play store.
  (New app will track Red Hill fuel facility closure - Navy Closure Task Force)

The post Some lawmakers offer more teeth to Biden’s Schedule F takedown first appeared on Federal News Network.

Ahead of a September deadline for agencies and unions to finalize their plans for recreating labor-management forums, the Office of Personnel Management is offering guidance on how federal leaders can best meet the new expectations.

Alongside a push to improve apprenticeship opportunities, a March 6 executive order from President Joe Biden called on agencies and federal unions to recreate the relatively informal forums. If implemented effectively, labor-management forums can improve employee satisfaction, engagement and organizational performance, while also mitigating possible disputes between the two parties, OPM said in March 13 guidance.

“We’ve seen examples where labor-management forums have worked on improving safety policies particularly for employees that work in hazardous jobs. There are many opportunities for them to tackle some tough issues that happen every day in every workplace,” OPM Deputy Associate Director for Accountability and Workforce Relations Tim Curry said in an interview. “We think that agencies and unions should see this as an opportunity to improve how agency operations work.”

As part of the executive order earlier this month, agencies now have until Sept. 3 to create and submit implementation plans to OPM on how they’ll reestablish labor-management forums. They’re a way for representatives from both management and a union to collaborate on personnel matters. The forums, usually outside the scope collective bargaining agreements, are meant to provide opportunities to come to agreements on any concerns or questions before personnel issues escalate.

Under the new executive order, and the subsequent OPM guidance, agencies and unions will also have to show through metrics and data how the forums are impacting engagement, satisfaction and organizational performance.

Agencies and federal unions have used labor-management forums for years as a tool to address employee concerns and aim to improve the workplace. In many cases, they can lead to savings in both time and costs.

“They work together to identify issues in the workplace,” Curry said. “They propose ideas and solutions to address these issues in a way to better serve the public and actually accomplish the agency mission in a better way.”

Labor-management forums had been around for years, up until a 2017 executive order during the Trump administration disbanded them.

In 2021, under the Biden administration, OPM once again green-lit labor-management forums. But the use of the forums was not required until Biden signed the new executive order, officially rescinding the 2017 order from Trump in the process.

Now with the new executive order, “some agencies might already be ahead of the game, and others may have some catching up to do,” Curry said.

Of course, each agency will have a somewhat different approach the executive order’s requirements. Labor-management forums, OPM said, are not one-size-fits-all. But the guidance still offers some broad strategies agencies can consider, such as developing a shared vision for what the forum should aim to achieve, and what issues it will cover.

“We would recommend that they focus on addressing each other’s interests and working together on developing mutually agreeable solutions that address those interests,” Curry said. “But also, agency leadership needs to show support for the forums from the top down, as well as the union leadership. We would want them to model the behavior that they would like to see lower-level managers and union representatives show.”

In that work, Curry said agencies will also have to evaluate and address any remaining obstacles in labor-management relations that stem from a series of now-rescinded executive orders from the Trump administration, which previously limited the scope of collective bargaining.

“We want to confirm with agencies that there are no more outstanding issues, which might be obstacles to moving forward on other issues for the forums to address,” Curry said.

Trying to get plans set up by September could cause agencies or unions to run into a few trouble spots. For example, OPM said in its guidance that there may be some resistance from either party, or even agency employees themselves.

In those instances, Curry said it’s important to keep in mind how the forums are meant to be structured, and what their real purpose is.

“Forums are not co-management arrangements, as some may believe, and we advise forums to address this early on,” Curry said. “Management is encouraged to have discussions with unions about issues before they make a management decision, and on the other hand, unions aren’t waiving their collective bargaining rights on matters discussed in the forums.”

Federal Labor Relations Authority Chairman Susan Tsui Grundmann said although the work to reach agreements in labor-management may at times be challenging, the results can be tremendous.

“One recent example in the wake of all our budgetary issues and to avoid furloughing our own employees, we actually gave up a whole floor in our headquarters, consolidating two floors into one. And I told our union vice president that this just had the makings of a disaster,” Grundmann said during a March 27 FLRA town hall. “But his remark was, ‘it makes it a whole lot easier when you get along.’ So whatever the future holds, we commit to have our internal union beside us to guide us and to allow us to lead by example.”

Both leading up to the September deadline and after it passes, agencies can lean on resources from OPM to address any concerns or questions. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service also offers guidance and advice on setting up and using the forums.

“These forums provide frontline employees with a more meaningful voice in agency operations and foster discussions about improving the effectiveness of government services,” National Treasury Employees Union National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement earlier this month. “It is our experience that pre-decisional input inherent in conversations between labor and management is a productive means to give employees a say in agency decisions, solve problems in a non-adversarial way, address workplace issues that hinder efficiency and improve services to the American people.”

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That, as you might have guessed, constitues the status of work life for staff members of the Congress of the United States. This finding comes from the Congressional Management Foundation, which surveyed 138 senior staff members. Only 5 percent of the people surveyed answered, but the foundation’s president, Brad Fitch, said the results show clear trends; principally, that the staff of the Congress labors under a peculiar group of people.

I”ll spare you yet another take on the principal issues impeding the car wreck that is Congress. Congressional staff occupy a galaxy less visible to the public, and even to much of the executive branch bureaucracy. Even in my own 32 years of covering government, I’ve spoken to only a handful congressional staff members, fewer even than members themselves. Staff learn early the value of self-attenuation in the shadows of their often egotistical bosses.

But don’t think they’re diffident. In fact, traipsing through the brick tunnels of the Capitol complex are some of the most informed and practically-minded people you’ll find anywere. Name the issue, and you can find members of the congressional staff that possess expert knowledge. And since politics often has the surface grace of ballet but the tactics of a prison yard, staff of one party sometimes know better than their members how to devise compromises with those of the opposite party.

When first-elected members come to town with perhaps green personal staffs, you can bet they learn lot from the committee staffs.

I say this only because the staffs of members of Congress constitute a sometimes underappreciated contributor to the nation’s well-being. If the Congress itself is semi-functional, the blame goes to many factors. Staff isn’t one of them. So it’s good to see at least a sampling survey of the health of this workforce. By contrast, the executive branch workforce is the object of intense, detailed and never-ending study. The annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey provides rich data and insight.

Here is a bit of what the Foundation survey found:

• Only 19% of the staff members thinks Congress “correctly functions as a democratic legislature should.” That breaks down to 31% of Republican respondents, 12% of Democratic.
• Only 20% agree that Congress provides “an effective forum” for debating the important questions.
• 81% of Republicans and long serving staff members tend to disagree that “current procedures” give members of Congress the information they need from the executive branch to do their congressional duties. Sure, there’s a Democratic administration. But 46% of Democrats also find information from the executive branch wanting.
• Two thirds of Democratic and Republican staff members would like elected leadership to “enforce the rules and norms of civility and decorum in Congress.” At least they don’t march into the chambers and whack one another with canes.

I spoke with Brad Fitch, the president of the foundation that surveyed congressional staff. A longtime watcher of Congress, Fitch said he doesn’t think the acrimony among members seeps down into staff relations. Otherwise, literally no bill might get written, much less ones the members reject anyway.

Fitch said — and the survey shows this — that the congressional staff sees positive movement in the technology, the workplace tools that have arrived in recent years. The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress helped here. It sunsetted last year, but now there’s a follow-on caucus. Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Washington) ably chaired the remarkably bipartisan committee. It came up with a couple of hundred recommendations, a couple of dozen of which Congress implemented. Senior staff are better paid now, and they have somewhat better IT systems.

It seems bizarre that an institution as important as the United States Congress engenders agreement about its own brokenness among its own members, the citizenry, historians and just about everyone else. Just don’t blame the staff.

The post Understatement: Congress doesn’t function properly first appeared on Federal News Network.

The top U.S. spy office has tapped a research official to spearhead the intelligence community’s work on AI.

John Beieler, who serves as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ top science and technology advisor, has been named chief artificial intelligence officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Beieler confirmed his additional role during a speech today at an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance in Arlington, Va.

Beieler now leads a council of chief AI officers from the 18 elements of the intelligence community, including the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He said the council, which reports directly to Haines, has been meeting every two weeks for the last two months.

“What we’re focusing on as a group is AI governance,” Beieler said.

He said the group is writing the first IC-wide directive on AI. It will describe what intelligence agencies need to do to deploy AI and machine learning.

“Things like documentation, standards, [application programing interfaces], what sort of data documentation needs to happen, how all these things fit together, the responsible adoption, ongoing monitoring,” Beieler said, describing what goes into the directive. “The responsibility of an individual developer, the responsibility of management and leadership. We’re really focusing on that responsible, ethical adoption.”

He added that the directive will also lay out civil liberties and privacy protections that need to be included in the algorithms developed by the intelligence community.

The new AI council is also leading an update to ODNI’s AI strategy.

“We want to make sure that we have that one consolidated viewpoint of, what do we think is important for AI and the IC, to drive some of those resource conversations,” Beieler said.

Concerned with rapid advances in AI by China and other countries, lawmakers have also urged the intelligence community to prioritize the adoption of AI, with safeguards.

The Fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act directs the DNI to establish new policies “for the acquisition, adoption, development, use, coordination, and maintenance of artificial intelligence capabilities,” including minimum guidelines for the performance of AI models used by spy agencies.

Beieler has a background in data science and machine learning. Prior to joining ODNI in 2019, he led research programs on human language technology, machine learning and vulnerabilities in AI at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

At ODNI, he has also helped lead the intelligence community’s Augmenting Intelligence using Machines or “AIM” strategy. With many intel agencies dealing with a deluge of data, the goal of AIM has been to coordinate the adoption of AI and automation across spy agencies.

While spy agencies have used forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning for decades, the emergence of widely available large language models like ChatGPT has added both new considerations and renewed urgency to the AI race.

“A lot of this is focused on making sure that folks that are using these tools understand them,” Beieler said.

ODNI has already funded various training and upskilling programs across intelligence agencies. And he acknowledged the challenges with generative AI and other large language models, such as hallucination errors, copyright issues, and privacy concerns.

“Getting analysts, collectors and the broad base of the IC workforce familiar with these things, so they understand some of these failure modes, but doing that in such a way that they don’t immediately write off the technology,” Beieler said. “That’s the tricky part in upskilling across the workforce.”

With just a handful of companies — rather than government labs or academia — developing the so-called advanced “frontier AI models,” Beieler acknowledged the intelligence community finds itself in a unique “LLM moment.”

He said it will be crucial to test and evaluate the models for different failure modes. He added that the IC isn’t interested in just “buying a widget” from companies, but partnering with industry and academia test and evaluate how AI will impact the world of intelligence.

“That doesn’t mean that we won’t have humans. In fact, I think it might mean that we have more humans, but again, is what is the role?” Beieler said. “What is that teaming, what is that partnership, and how do we work? And how do we put some of those guardrails in so that analysts understand and collectors understand some of these models that they’re working with.”

The post Intelligence community gets a chief AI officer first appeared on Federal News Network.

After winding up its punch last fall, the Biden administration has delivered a final blow aiming to prevent the resurrection of a controversial Trump-era federal workforce policy, familiarly called Schedule F.

Efforts from the Office of Personnel Management to “reinforce and clarify protections for the nonpartisan career civil service” will tighten up the job security of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of non-political, career federal employees. OPM published its final rule reinforcing those protections to the Federal Register Thursday morning.

“Strong personnel has been at the core of our focus — we’ve been building on this agenda,” Jason Miller, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters during a press conference about the final rule. “The rule that the Biden-Harris administration is finalizing today is one part of that broader effort to ensure we have a strong, nonpartisan civil service that results in delivering results for the American people.”

OPM’s final rule is a direct response to a Trump administration executive order signed in late 2020. The order sought to reclassify career federal employees working in policy-related roles into Schedule F — a new, excepted service classification for government workers.

In practice, any employees reclassified as “Schedule F” would have seen fewer worker protections, making them at-will and easier for agencies to fire. But since the order came near the end of former President Donald Trump’s term, and President Joe Biden quickly revoked it once stepping into office, Schedule F didn’t see much light of day.

For at least a couple years, however, former Trump administration officials have been revisiting plans to revive Schedule F, should the presidential election go in their favor — a key motivation behind the new final rule from OPM.

After reviewing more than 4,000 public comments OPM received on its proposed regulations last fall, the now final rule outlines clearer worker protections for the federal employees the Trump administration had aimed to place into the Schedule F category — in particular, those in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions.

“This rule is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs — no matter their personal political beliefs,” OPM Deputy Director Rob Shriver said during the press conference.

The new final rule aims to ensure career civil servants are hired and fired based on their merit, not political loyalty, OPM said. In particular, the final rule states that employees cannot have their civil service protections removed involuntarily. And in the case that there is a reclassification, the rule also establishes a procedure and appeals process for feds to push back against it.

The regulations specifically state that “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions — the sector of employees that Schedule F originally targeted — are non-career, political positions and are not applicable to career federal employees.

In essence, the final rule aims to ensure worker protections for thousands of civil servants whose careers transcend presidential administrations.

“Career civil servants have a level of institutional experience, subject matter expertise and technical knowledge that incoming political appointees have found to be useful and may lack themselves,” the OPM final rule states. “Such civil servants’ ability to offer their objective analyses and educated views when carrying out their duties, without fear of reprisal or loss of employment, contribute to the reasoned consideration of policy options and thus the successful functioning of incoming administrations and our democracy. These rights and abilities must continue to be protected and preserved … and expanded and strengthened.”

The final rule will become official 30 days after its publication to the Federal Register, in early May.

The origins and scope of Schedule F

For years, experts estimated Schedule F would have affected around 50,000 career feds across government. But the estimate largely depends on each agency’s plans. A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office showed that although OMB never actually reclassified any positions, approximately 68% of OMB’s workforce would have become at-will.

More recently, the National Treasury Employee Union, digging up Trump-era OMB documents, said the estimates are, in reality, much higher. While initially expected to impact only senior-level roles, the documents showed that OMB was also targeting federal employees in less senior positions, including those in GS-9 and GS-10 roles.

“We now know that the architects of Schedule F wanted to get rid of large numbers of federal employees for reasons that had nothing to do with their job duties or performance, upending 141 years of federal employment based on skills and merit,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement. “We are pleased that President Biden’s administration has taken proactive steps to protect our civil servants and the honorable tradition of public service.”

At the time of the 2020 order, Trump administration officials said Schedule F was a way to ensure accountability of federal employees, and to allow more flexibility over whom a president can have working in policymaking roles. Former President Donald Trump — as well as several other former Republican presidential candidates for 2024 — have pointed to what they view as a “deep state” in the government’s workforce, saying that many federal employees intentionally slow-rolled Trump policies they personally disagreed with.

Though the order has been revoked since early 2021, that sentiment remains alive. In one striking example, during Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign run, he said on the topic of federal bureaucracy that he would “start slitting throats” of federal employees on his first day as president.

But on paper, the Schedule F order was an effort to ensure accountability of federal employees, according to James Sherk, former special assistant to the President on the White House domestic policy council, and the policy lead on the original Schedule F executive order.

“Civil service protections make it very difficult to hold employees in senior policymaking positions accountable for implementing the elected President’s agenda,” Sherk, currently a director at non-profit America First Policy Institute, said in an interview. “Schedule F was designed to allow the president to hold that relatively small subset of the federal workforce accountable, allowing him to replace senior employees who are not getting the job done for the American people. It was similar to reforms adopted by many state governments.”

The executive order quickly gained strong pushback from many federal unions, organizations and other employee advocates who said Schedule F was in reality a politically motivated attempt to return the government’s workforce to a “spoils” or “patronage” system — harkening back to the 1800s when a majority of the federal workforce overturned with each new incoming president.

Many organizations lauded OPM’s final rule this week for its efforts to strengthen merit system principles and other protections for the career civil service.

“Frontline federal employees are not political appointees, and for good reason,” NTEU’s Greenwald said. “By having basic rights such as notice of any adverse action and an opportunity to respond, they are shielded from unlawful and politically motivated firings.”

“The public benefits tremendously from having a career federal workforce hired for their skills and free from political interference to equitably serve all Americans,” President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service Max Stier said in a statement. “OPM’s final rule maintains a commitment to a bedrock principle of our democracy: that civil servants serve their country based on merit, not their political beliefs.”

A “10:30-in-the-evening” regulation

Of course, OPM’s final rule comes during an election year, as time may be running short to implement policy changes before a possible presidential transition. The next several months will likely bring more efforts to implement policies that have been top of mind for the Biden administration over the last couple years.

“The people who originally proposed Schedule F have been in fear of what often is called a ‘midnight regulation’ — some kind of rule that would come by, that would wipe out their ability to be able to do what they want to do if, in fact, Trump wins,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. “This isn’t so much a midnight regulation as much as maybe a 10:30-in-the-evening kind of regulation. But it’s very clear that the Biden team wants to do all it possibly can to lock down the current system.”

A Biden administration official, speaking on background, said they believe the final rule from OPM will stand the test of time — and protect career federal employees even in the case of a presidential transition.

“This regulation is the strongest action that the Biden-Harris administration can take to promote these important policies. It has gone through the full rulemaking process,” the official said. “If another administration were to disagree with the policies that are reflected in this regulation, first, they would have to follow that full rulemaking process themselves. And then in that rulemaking, among other things, they would have to explain how a different rule would be better than the carefully crafted balance that OPM has struck here, and how their differing interpretation would be consistent with over 140 years of statutory language and congressional intent.”

Some experts, however, said they remain concerned that even a final rule from OPM won’t be enough to prevent Schedule F from returning in a future administration. In fact, in a 2023 outline of his policy plans, Trump said he would, on day one in office, restore the Schedule F executive order and the ability for a president to “fire rogue bureaucrats.”

Ron Sanders, who formerly served as chairman of the Federal Salary Council as an appointee for former President Donald Trump, resigned from his position in 2020 in response to the Schedule F executive order. While expressing appreciation for OPM’s final rule, Sanders — also previously a career federal employee for more than two decades — said he was concerned it wouldn’t completely prevent Schedule F, or something similar, returning in the future.

“It will serve as a speed bump, as opposed to a barrier,” Sanders, currently president and CEO of Publica Virtu, LLC, said in an interview. “It will slow down changes, but it won’t stop them.”

Similarly, former Trump administration official Sherk said OPM’s final rule would not stop an administration’s efforts in the future.

“What can be done through executive action can be undone through executive action. A future administration would have to go through the rulemaking process to roll back this rule, just as the Biden administration went through it to issue the rule,” Sherk said. “But the legal authority for Schedule F is clear. Rolling back this new rule would probably take about as long as OPM took to issue it. It creates some delay, but the rule is not something that’s going to stop a future administration from implementing the policy.”

Kettl said, however, that the Biden administration now establishing more precedent and evidence through the regulatory process will at the very least make the rule more difficult to unwind.

“If not impossible, it just means it might take a little bit longer, require a few more steps, might require navigating and jumping through a few more hoops,” Kettl said. “But there’s no doubt that this is a battle that’s going to be looming.”

Schedule F’s odds on Capitol Hill

Efforts from the Biden administration to prevent Schedule F’s return aren’t an anomaly. For years, many Democrats, and a few Republicans, in Congress have simultaneously been pushing for the passage of legislation to block the Schedule F order’s revival through law.

The Saving the Civil Service Act, reintroduced in early 2023, aims to block presidential administrations from ordering agencies to reclassify federal positions outside merit system principles, unless given congressional approval.

Despite several years of lawmakers’ efforts to enact the legislation, the bill has not yet received much action.

Still, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who introduced the Senate’s version of the bill, said the final rule from OPM would serve as a solid step in the same direction.

“It’s in every American’s best interest that civil servants are hired through a merit-based system, and I welcome the Biden administration’s step today to affirm that principle and protect these workers from politically motivated firings,” Kaine said in a statement. “I will continue to push for my Saving the Civil Service Act so we can etch this progress into federal statute.”

A senior Biden administration official said they would fully support a goal of Congress to strengthen protections further through legislation.

“But we are also confident in the strength of this regulation, and that it is grounded in decades of congressional intent and administration practice,” the official said. “It is the best reading of the law that exists today.”

Other calls for civil service reform

Although the debate over Schedule F is highly contentious, some “good government” organizations have called for more of a middle-ground approach to ensuring better accountability and productivity in the career federal workforce.

“Agencies and the administration should continue to explore ways to make our federal government more responsive, transparent and accountable to the American people,” the Partnership’s Stier said. “Streamlining processes for hiring, performance management and accountability and preparing managers to support the workforce through the talent lifecycle are just some of the ways the federal government can better serve while adhering to merit principles.”

Implementing long-term, meaningful civil service reforms, including addressing challenges in human capital and performance management, may ultimately help restore the public’s declining trust in government, and the vast array of services it provides.

“Making sure that your drinking water is safe, how best to try to manage the cost structure of pills and pharmaceuticals that are being paid for by Medicare and Medicaid, how to try to create a new IT system for Social Security — I mean, these are very, very complex issues on which the performance of government depends,” Kettl said. “Not only are we talking about the big battles between the Schedule F proponents and those who want to try to maintain some version of the status quo, but we’re really talking about what government ought to look like and how accountability ought to work. It would be hard to underestimate how big those stakes are.”

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More than a quarter of the federal workforce is feeling burnout, according to a recent study, making them more likely to leave their agency or feel less engaged in their work.

A recent Gallup study of more than 5,400 survey respondents finds 26% of federal employees say they “very often” or “always” feel burned out at work.

Rob DeSimone, associate principal of workplace initiatives at Gallup, says that level of burnout can lead to high attrition rates.

“When people are burned out, they’re much, much more likely to leave their agency,” DeSimone said.

The study also finds a high attrition rate can also lead to higher labor costs. Gallup estimates that in an agency of 10,000 employees, with an average salary of $50,000, low engagement contributes to $66 million in annual costs.

Gallup bases those figures on research from the Society for Human Resources Management, which shows it costs six-to-nine months of most employees’ salary to replace them — and that the cost is even higher for more senior-level vacancies.

Mike Ritz, executive director of Gallup’s Federal Government Initiative, said these costs also stem from burned-out employees feeling less productive and less engaged with their work.

“When you become actively disengaged, when you’re a person that literally feels miserable at their job, and you are disconnecting from your job, let’s face it, you might even take down the ship, if you had the opportunity — because you have that much contempt for the employer that they’re not meeting your needs,” Ritz said.

No ‘silver bullet’ solutions

The study takes a closer look at some of the federal employee stressors that agencies have anecdotally observed, but not fully quantified.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, is addressing burnout among its health care workforce through its REBOOT task force. The VA, more recently, is looking at artificial intelligence tools to reduce administrative burdens on clinicians — a driver of burnout.

The Partnership for Public Service is also tracking a steady decline in work-life balance scores from federal employees, as measured by its Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings.

Ritz said there are no “silver bullet” solutions to address burnout across the entire federal workforce. But Gallup identified five root causes of these challenges — unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workloads, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and unreasonable time pressure.

“It seems like the more we learn, the more we realize that it’s very individual for each person, and what works for one might not work for another. So, this idea of, ‘Let’s just give everybody time off, that’ll work’ — well, that might work for some, but not for others,” he said.

The study also finds that employees sometimes cope with burnout in ways that only exacerbate the problem.

“[If] you’re a person that really is a high achiever — you like to [be] task-driven, and really achieve your tasks and get things done — a natural coping mechanism, when you’re feeling burned out is, ‘Let me just do more. Let me get to it faster’ … If those executing folks would stop and take their time to think through their situation, stop and pause, think through the situation there, they will reduce their burnout by 48%,” Ritz said.

Role of managers contributing to burnout

Management behavior plays a major role in a federal employee’s workplace experience. Gallup finds managers account for about 70% of their team’s engagement scores. The study also finds managers experience burnout at a higher rate (35%) than the federal employees they oversee (23%).

“If managers are burned out, that’s flowing down to all the employees within the agency,” Ritz said. “It’s the manager that can be the one that can help prevent and reverse burnout among the team, while also increasing productivity —  and that requires a very individualized approach to understand how can we manage workloads. How can we manage prioritization, alongside what the wellbeing of the team is, alongside what some of the pressures are coming from whatever the performance initiatives are? It’s really the manager that has that ability to juggle those three things.”

Jay Hoffman, chief financial officer for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, agreed that managers play a major role in combatting burnout within agencies.

“When managers are engaged, their employees are more likely to be engaged as well,” Hoffman said.

Effective managers also help employees manage workloads and communicate clear expectations. Gallup found that about 42% of federal employees said they know what’s expected of them at work.

“What that’s really saying is that managers themselves, oftentimes, might lack clarity — not so much about what it is they have to do — they’re usually very clear about that,” DeSimone said. “They might not know, ‘What are the relationships that I need in this organization? Who do I need to be collaborating with in order to achieve our bigger goal?’ And for some organizations, they may not even know what their bigger goal is, or where exactly they fit in.”

Gallup’s research into employee burnout also finds that the way people experience their workloads has a stronger influence on burnout than the number of hours worked.

“In the federal government, there are a lot of empty seats right now. A lot of folks have gone elsewhere, for a variety of different reasons. And of course, talent is at a premium across all sectors and industries,” Ritz said. “So, if you’re already feeling like your workload is tough, and then the guy next to you is no longer there, and the guy to your right is gone … did my workload just get even tougher? Who’s helping me manage that? Who’s the person that is having that strong influence of how I experienced that workload?”

A ‘game-changer’ for burnout? Meaningful conversations

Ritz said managers who have one “meaningful conversation” with an employee who reports to them at least once a week are a “game-changer” for burnout. That conversation can take as little as 15-30 minutes.

“It needs to be a conversation that talks about their goals, their personal development, things that have meaning to that person that is reporting up to that manager. And that can make a massive impact,” Ritz said.

James Egbert, branch chief for human capital strategy at the Department of Health and Human Services, meaningful one-on-one conversations with employees can make a huge difference in employee engagement.

“I’ve learned that if you want to improve employee engagement, you must engage with your people. Listen, ask and listen some more,” Egbert said.

Ritz said employees who strongly agree that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing are three times more engaged, and 71% less likely to report feeling burnout.

DeSimone the most important thing managers can do to address burnout is to provide “meaningful feedback.” That feedback, he added, is valuable for managers to give their supervisors, as well as the employees they oversee.

“Employees don’t want to wait three months or wait 12 months to figure out in their performance review what their mistakes are. They want to know, that minute, if not that day. They want to know, what did I do right? And also, what are my areas for improvement? They want to hear both,” DeSimone said.

The study finds that engaged federal employees are not just more productive — they’re also more likely to stay at their agencies.

“If you have somebody that is fully engaged, then you need 20% more in terms of higher pay, in order for that person to want to leave their current job. But if you have somebody who’s not engaged, then they’ll leave for a 0% increase,” DeSimone said. “They’re just looking for a better environment, and you can send it their way. They’re looking to be alleviated from that burnout situation they find themselves in.”

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Contractors feeling beset by false claims act lawsuits, feel that way for good reason. The number of cases launched by the Justice Department reached an all-time high last year: 500 cases. How come? For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Perkins Coie partner Alexander Canizares.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin You’ve compiled these and 500 cases. What is behind this uptick? What’s going on here?

Alexander Canizares Well, there’s a number of things you could draw from this. I think the uptick in numbers of cases that DOJ initiates on their own reflects, in part, a reliance on data analytics that DOJ is using to identify cases. Remember that False Claims Act a large number of cases every year are driven by lawsuits filed by whistleblowers. So under the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act, and that’s still continues to be the case. The particular metric that you just mentioned, I think is significant, 500 new cases that DOJ is bringing on its own. So these do not originate from a qui tam lawsuit. Looking at those numbers, I think 378 of those numbers come from cases that are not health care or Department of Defense related. And I suspect that reflects a large number of cases related to pandemic fraud. So that is a continuing priority of the Department of Justice to bring these PPP loan fraud types of cases that we’re seeing. Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that DOJ is actively enforcing the False Claims Act.

Tom Temin And if it was pandemic fraud, they could probably have 10,000 cases a month. Is there a floor or a dollar value that they suspect has been going wrong, that set some kind of a bottom limit for what they’ll go after?

Alexander Canizares Well, the PPP loan fraud cases that they’ve been bringing have tended to be low dollar value cases. But there are some larger value cases that DOJ is bringing as well. And I think that just underscores the fact that the False Claims Act can be used for small companies. These cases can be brought against big companies. And I think the PPP loan cases reflect that DOJ is willing to invest in these cases. As a policy matter, regardless of the dollar value, it’s just an important priority for the department.

Tom Temin And how much is the government recovered in the same year that fiscal 2023?

Alexander Canizares In fiscal year 2023, DOJ, the numbers show that they recovered $319 million in other cases. So that’s not DoD, not health care related. And I suspect that a good number of those do relate to these pandemic types of cases.

Tom Temin And health care fraud then is mostly Medicare, Medicaid, that type of thing.

Alexander Canizares Yes. The health care types of cases under the False Claims Act continue to be the driver for a lot of the False Claims Act. The variety of cases involving doctors and physicians and hospitals, pharmaceutical companies is significant. But the numbers this year actually show that the proportion of cases related to health care is a little bit lower. We’ve actually seen more procurement types of cases this year than in prior years. And again, with those pandemic numbers, the dominance of healthcare types of cases has ebbed a little bit.

Tom Temin And what about the DoD cases? Is there any particular quality or characteristic that characterizes them?

Alexander Canizares Yes. So the statistics show that the DoD types of cases increased more than five times in fiscal year 23 from the prior year, so that was $550 million in recoveries. There was a single settlement of about 377 million that really drove that number. But that was the largest recovery in DoD false claims act cases since 2006. So that was a sign that for government contractors, the types of companies that I work with, that the False Claims Act continues to be a very robust enforcement tool for the government.

Tom Temin And what do we know about that 377 million? Who was it?

Alexander Canizares That was a settlement with Booz Allen Hamilton. It was a case that took some time to finally get settled, but it was a case involving allegations related to cost counting.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with attorney Alexander Canizares. He is a partner at Perkins Coie. And I guess my question for the Department of Justice is if they are using data analytics, are they finding things that, for example, the Defense Contract Audit Agency is not finding, because isn’t that also a source of false claims activity?

Alexander Canizares It is. And I’d say the [Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA)] and DCAA and the offices of Inspector General are all entities that tend to identify these kinds of cases. And I think DOJ’s use of statistical analytics is predominantly focused on health care types of cases, from what I can tell. But that’s not to say that these procurement types of cases can’t originate from that type of analysis. I think the biggest area that we’re seeing in terms of enforcement activity for government contractors relates to cybersecurity. And in the same context as announcing these statistics, the head of the civil division for DOJ highlighted the priority for cybersecurity under the DOJ civil cyber fraud initiative, and that remains a very big area of activity.

Tom Temin And as the other parts of the government, the Labor Department, basically the White House, but through the Labor Department’s compliance division and through the White House rulemaking apparatus and the different agencies, there’s a lot more rulemaking. The CMMC program for DoD. There could be a civilian version of that, not far behind, there are so-called climate provisions being laid on contractors and the DEI provisions laid on contractors. It sounds like the potential for false claims is expanding.

Alexander Canizares I think that’s fair to say. Remember, the False Claims Act is a civil fraud statute and it’s basically based on an alleged misrepresentation of some kind. And as you’re seeing these new compliance programs, particularly with cybersecurity, but the others you’ve mentioned as well. Any time a contractor submits a claim and there is an allegation that there is an underlying noncompliance with some material requirement in their contract, that can be a potential basis for false claims act allegation. A large number of these cases can be started by a whistleblower. So somebody inside a company who thinks that this company is doing something wrong can file a lawsuit, and DOJ has an obligation to undertake an investigation in that context. So I agree with you that with these new regulations, there is an increased risk in terms of False Claims Act liability.

Tom Temin Yeah. It sounds like a company could even be wanting to comply. Not that you want to let anybody off the hook for lying to the government, but there could be a big compliance exercise, and a whistleblower could find some minor infraction of one of these things. And next thing you know, you’ve got a case on your hands. So intention does not save you from false claims, does it ever?

Alexander Canizares Well, this was an issue that the Supreme Court actually waded into last year in a case called SuperValu. And what they did is they analyzed the meaning of the term knowledge under the False Claims Act. And this is an area that has been litigated heavily for many years. But finally, the Supreme Court said that knowledge requirement under the False Claims Act has to be looked at using a subjective standard. So what is your subjective intent when you’re preparing a claim and you’re asking the government for money? And I think the takeaway from that case is for many companies in this area, they’re heavily regulated. They need to document their decision making. They need to reflect that they’re making good faith determinations. There is a knowledge requirement to the liability. So a good faith, reasonable interpretation should not run you afoul of the False Claims Act. But there’s a lot of gray area in there in terms of whether you actually are running afoul of the requirement.

Tom Temin And the big companies, you would think, Booz Allen and the big aerospace contractors, etc. They have compliance departments. They have senior counsel for compliance. What’s your sense of whether smaller and mid-sized companies have the compliance capacity, even if they want to do business with the federal government?

Alexander Canizares A lot of smaller companies do not have the same resources for compliance. And in some cases that increases the risk. They really need to be sensitive to the False Claims Act and anything they do if they’re taking government money. And for many of the companies that we work with, it’s a matter of really prioritizing how you allocate your resources. Again, I mentioned cybersecurity because the risk for cybersecurity is specifically targeted at the small companies in the supply chain. And yet those are the ones who maybe have fewer resources to allocate towards it.

Tom Temin So it’s a rocky world out there.

Alexander Canizares I think it’s fair to say it’s a rocky world for the foreseeable future.

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A pair of bipartisan senators is now looking to up the ante with a new bill, calling on agencies to report more detailed, timely information on their federal telework policies.

The Telework Transparency Act, which Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced Wednesday morning, aims to provide up-to-date information on federal telework, while also assessing factors like productivity, office space, and recruitment and retention.

The telework data currently available from agencies has been a major sticking point for Congress in the return-to-office debate. The lawmakers said although the Office of Personnel Management publishes an annual report to Congress on federal telework, that data is more than a year old by the time it makes the rounds. In OPM’s yearly report, agencies often use different types of data to determine how many and how often federal employees are teleworking. Some agencies face limitations on their ability to collect accurate or complete information, according to the latest report from December 2023.

In an effort to make the telework information more consistent and reliable, the new bill from Ernst and Peters, if enacted, would set more reporting requirements for agencies. They would have to closely monitor the effects of telework on customer experience, backlogs and wait times, costs to operations, security, property management, technology investments, and recruitment and retention.

And to assist agencies with the bill’s proposed requirements, OPM would also have to set clearer data standards and protocols for agencies as they track employees’ participation in telework. Within two years of the bill’s enactment, OPM would be required to create and maintain an online tool showing agencies’ data on teleworking employees.

Under the legislation, agencies would also have to go through periodic audits of what locality-based pay rates teleworking employees receive, as well as the utilization rates of office space — both of which have remained concerns for lawmakers in the return-to-office debate.

In terms of office space, the Telework Transparency Act aims to create more consistent benchmarks for measuring utilization, something that the Government Accountability Office has said can be difficult to determine.

Ernst has long been pushing agencies for information on the costs and impacts of federal telework following the COVID-19 pandemic. Just last week, Ernst wrote a letter to Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su seeking details about a return-to-office protest of Labor Department employees.

“Since ‘temporary’ telework policies went into effect over four years ago, the remote lifestyle comes at the expense of the people federal agencies are meant to serve,” Ernst said in a statement to Federal News Network. “My bipartisan bill will provide full transparency into the inefficiencies of telework, so taxpayers are no longer on the hook for expensive wasted space at federal headquarters and misspent locality pay.”

Peters, the Democrat cosponsor for the bipartisan Telework Transparency Act, did not immediately respond to Federal News Network’s request for comment.

The federal return-to-office debate has been in full swing since the White House began pressing agencies to set higher requirements for in-office work of federal employees.

The new bill from Peters and Ernst dovetails with other efforts from Congress to get more information on federal telework. Part of the fiscal 2024 Financial Services and General Government bill set a 90-day deadline for agencies to give Congress their return-to-office “action plans” outlined earlier this year.

The action plans, initially required in an Office of Management and Budget memo from April 2023, outline agencies’ federal telework and in-office requirements, as well as measurements for workforce factors like productivity and employee engagement.

For the better part of a year, Republican lawmakers on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee have also been pushing for more details from agencies on their telework policies and return-to-office plans.

The post Senate bill aims to set more federal telework reporting requirements first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The State Department has named a new chief diversity and inclusion officer (CDIO), filling a position that has been vacant for 10 months. The job is going to Zakiya Carr Johnson, a former White House official and former director of the department’s Race, Ethnicity and Social Inclusion Unit. Secretary of State Antony Blinken created the CDIO position at the start of his tenure. He said the job is critical to attracting and retaining State Department employees.
  (Appointment of Zakiya Carr Johnson as the Department’s chief diversity and inclusion officer - State Department)
• A Homeland Security board has some major security concerns about one of the government’s biggest technology suppliers. The Cyber Safety Review Board said Microsoft’s security culture needs an overhaul. The board’s latest report found the tech giant had inadequate security practices when suspected Chinese hackers broke into the email accounts of multiple high-level government officials. The report recommends the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency regularly review the security practices of all cloud service providers. And it recommends the government periodically re-evaluate the security of cloud services widely used across agencies.
  (CSRB castigates Microsoft, urges federal cloud security updates in pending - Federal News Network)
• More than a quarter of federal employees are feeling burnout, according to a recent study. A recent Gallup survey of federal employees finds 26% of them feel burned out “very often” or “always” at work. Rob DeSimone, the associate principal of workplace initiatives at Gallup, said that level of burnout can lead to high attrition rates. “When people are burned out, they're much, much more likely to leave their agency," DeSimone said. Gallup identifies five root causes of burnout. Those include unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workloads, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and unreasonable time pressure.
  (One-quarter of federal workforce feeling burnout, with no ‘silver bullet’ fix, study finds - Federal News Network)
• Health care employees at the Defense Health Agency are getting closer to seeing union representation. After winning a union election in 2022, the American Federation of Government Employees said it is still working through some key steps to set up the new council for DHA. That council will represent up to 45,000 agency workers. The employees are mostly transfers from the Army, Navy and Air Force who were reshuffled into the new agency. Once everything is finalized, DHA will have a national-level collective bargaining agreement along with some smaller chapters to address local issues.
  (Forming DHA council to represent DoD health care workers - American Federation of Government Employees)
• The office of the Defense Department’s chief information officer will automate the review of zero trust implementation plans. Last year, the DoD CIO’s office received 39 zero trust implementation plans from the military services, defense agencies and combatant commands. It took four months and 35 full-time employees to review the plans. Randy Resnick, the director of the Zero Trust Architecture Program Management Office, said the process needs to be automated this year. The DoD CIO’s office mandated all defense components to submit updated zero trust implementation plans every October.
  (DoD to streamline review of zero trust implementation plans - Federal News Network)
• The Pentagon’s first-of-its-kind Commercial Space Integration Strategy synchronizes the department’s efforts to integrate commercial space technologies into its operations. The long-awaited strategy, released by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb, signals the Defense Department's willingness to take military action to protect commercial satellites. The document also calls for integration of commercial space technologies before conflict arises. The new strategy is aligned with the Space Force commercial space strategy, which is set to be released this week.
  (New space strategy calls for better protection of commercial space technology - DoD)
• A new bill in the Senate would extend the Department of Homeland Security’s use of a special procurement tool. The BEST Technology for the Homeland Act would extend DHS’ other transaction authority through fiscal 2031. It is currently set to expire at the end of this September. Other transaction agreements are considered more flexible than traditional contracts. The lawmakers behind the legislation want to see DHS use OTAs to acquire more innovative technologies.
  (Peters and Daines introduce bipartisan bill to ensure DHS can procure advanced technologies to strengthen national security - HSGAC )
• What is the best way candidates can prepare for a federal interview? The Office of Personnel Management is offering some guidance. OPM will share tips and an in-depth, inside look during a webinar on April 10. The free session is targeting federal job applicants and anyone else who might be interested in joining the federal workforce. During the webinar, experts at OPM will cover different types of federal interviews, common questions and other advice for preparing.
  (Federal interview process webinar - Office of Personnel Management)

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Federal News Network wants to hear directly from current federal employees about their thoughts and experiences after either returning to the office more often, or seeing others do so. This anonymous survey will take about 15 minutes to complete. We will publish the results in the coming weeks.

Create your own user feedback survey

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