• Service members are apparently not getting enough sleep each night to properly do their jobs. A watchdog organization found that service members are consistently getting less than 6 hours of sleep. Military personnel say they fall asleep on the job, which Government Accountability Offce said creates serious safety concerns. The GAO wants the Pentagon to conduct an assessment of DoD's oversight structure for fatigue-related efforts. And the Defense Department recommended that troops get seven hours of sleep each night.
  (Service members don’t get enough sleep, putting their lives at risk - GAO)
• Attention vendors, who provide grants services to the government, this RFI's for you. The Grants Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) is ready to expand its marketplace of service providers. But first, it is taking the pulse of the vendor community to gauge the capabilities of the sector. The QSMO's new Request for Information (RFI) is asking vendors for details about their grants management system, including whether it is set up as a software-as-a-service, whether it integrates with SAM.gov and login.gov and whether it is highly configurable and does not require code changes. Responses to the RFI are due by April 30.
  (Grants shared services office kicks off marketplace expansion - General Services Administration)
• Agencies have likely escaped budget cuts due to sequestration for another year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the fiscal 2024 spending bills and estimated that the discretionary budget authority for defense and non-defense agencies falls under the caps established in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. CBO, however, said the final decision about whether cuts are needed under sequestration will come from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), based on its own estimates of federal spending. OMB told Congress in August it did not think sequestration cuts would be necessary based on current estimates, but it will send another letter to Congress later this year with the final decision.
  (CBO estimates sequestrations cuts not necessary for fiscal 2024 - Congressional Budget Office)
• There is a new artificial intelligence chief at the top U.S. spy agency. John Beieler has been named the chief AI officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He also serves as the top science and technology adviser to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. Beieler now leads a council of chief AI officers across the 18 components of the intelligence community. One of the first tasks for that group is developing an AI directive for the IC. Beieler said it will cover everything from data standards to civil liberties and privacy protections.
  (Intelligence community gets a chief AI officer - Federal News Network)
• The Postal Service may soon ask for a sixth rate increase, since November 2020, that would go into effect this summer. But the Postal Regulatory Commission is taking a closer look at whether this new pricing model is actually helping USPS improve its long-term finances. The regulator is asking for public feedback on whether the current pricing model is working for USPS and its customers — and if not, what modifications to the ratemaking system should be made, or what alternative system should be adopted? The regulator will accept comments through July 9.
  (Postal Regulatory Commission seeks feedback on USPS pricing model - Federal News Network)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is preparing to host its biggest biannual cybersecurity exercise. Dubbed “Cyber Storm,” the event will kick off this month with more than 2,000 participants from government and industry. The weeklong exercise simulates the response to a cyber attack on multiple critical infrastructure sectors. This year’s Cyber Storm comes as CISA rewrites the national plan for responding to major cyber incidents. CISA expects to release the updated plan by the end of 2024.
  (CISA’s ‘Cyber Storm’ will help it update National Cyber Incident Response Plan - Federal News Network)
• The IRS is looking to take the next steps in its most ambitious project under the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRS is letting taxpayers in 12 states test out its “Direct File” platform this filing season, as it gets feedback from earlier users, in the hopes of scaling up the pilot program. In a roundtable discussion with Direct File users, the IRS said all participants said they would recommend Direct File to eligible friends and family. Roundtable participants included college students, military veterans, as well as nonprofit and government employees.
  (IRS' direct file platform receives positive initial feedback - Treasury Department)
• The Air Force wants to bypass governors in seven states and transfer the National Guard space units to the Space Force. Air Force officials are calling for legislation to bypass existing law requiring them to obtain a governor’s consent before making changes to a National Guard unit. It would allow the service to transfer 14 Air National Guard space units located in New York, Florida, Hawaii, Colorado, Alaska, California and Ohio and make them part of the Space Force. Not surprisingly, the idea is facing criticism from governors.
  (Air Force wants to override law in 7 states, transfer Guard units to Space Force - Federal News Network)

The post Feds in fatigues, too fatigued to properly do their jobs, GAO says first appeared on Federal News Network.

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 transition from military to civilian life can be difficult. The Defense Department runs programs to help service members prepare. For those who risk loss of income or housing, DoD offers what it calls “warm handovers,” a type of personalized, one-on-one help. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that thousands of services members slipped through the fingers of warm handovers. For more,  the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with GAO’s Director of Strategic Issues, Dawn Locke.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin Tell us about warm handover. What exactly happens there? And who does the DoD feel that it applies to?

Dawn Locke Sure. So every couple of years, about 500,000 service members transitioned out of the military. And when they do this, they must get the support needed to have healthy, sustainable lives in the civilian world. Warm handovers are supposed to be those extra layers of support for the service members who are most susceptible to challenges when leaving the military. So that warm handover support entails DoD giving the service members, like you said, an in-person contact at an agency that could provide tangible assistance. So, for example, a VA official who can help with disability claims, or a Department of Labor official who can help with finding them a job.

Tom Temin Is this available, by the way, to those with other than honorable discharges?

Dawn Locke This is available to those who are considered at risk if they have an other than honorable discharge. They could potentially, depending on their top counselor, still get a warm handover.

Tom Temin Okay. And do we know roughly of the 500,000 that I believe you said every five years the transition out? It’s a fairly small number that they deem needing the warm handover.

Dawn Locke It could be considered small, I don’t know, depending on what you consider small. So in the two year period that we looked at, there’s about 45,000. There’s more than 45,000 who are considered at risk of challenges when they transition. So for example, they don’t know how they’re going to earn a living. And of these, sadly, more than 4300 who were at risk are slipping through the cracks. So these individuals who are at risk of not potentially having food or shelter or transportation are also not getting the warm handover.

Tom Temin Right. So how did you find that information? You looked at the roles of DoD that they deemed and then the number they actually had a handover for.

Dawn Locke So yes, this is all based on DoD data that we received in their transition assistance data.

Tom Temin And do we know other characteristics of what makes people at risk? Was that part of the study? Do they have mental issues? Do they have post-traumatic stress disorder that kind of thing?

Dawn Locke We did look at the demographics. So they could have have health issues. We did know that the majority, so about 50 to 60% who are at risk are under the age of 24 and typically have four or fewer years of service. And that’s because this particular population tends to struggle more with making informed decisions about finances or housing. But we also saw that those who are having to leave the military quickly. So, for example, for a short term separation or a medical separation may also struggle and could benefit from a warm handover. So for example, they may not have the time they need to prepare for a transition or they’re injured or they’re ill. And a warm handover could help with continued care via the VA.

Tom Temin And warm handovers. Is it just one meeting and goodbye, Charlie, or could the warm handover be a series of meetings or counseling?

Dawn Locke Yeah, hopefully it would be a series and tell that service member gets what they need. So for example, at the VA they could be provided a person who will help with resume writing, a person who will help find them jobs, a person who will help with preparing for an interview, those type of things.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Dawn Locke. She is the director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office. What did you find is the reason so many people, almost 10% of them, are slipping through and not getting that warm handover.

Dawn Locke So unfortunately, DoD does not know the reason that these individuals are slipping through. What we did find is that commanders are struggling to understand their roles and accurately verifying warm handovers. So, for example, only two-thirds of the warm handovers that were given were verified by a commander. And, even more egregious, we found that 77,000 service members were verified as having a warm handover who didn’t actually receive one. In addition to that, we found that DoD doesn’t know whether warm handovers are even helpful because they’re not following up with service members once they become vets, to see if that in-person connection provided tangible help to them.

Tom Temin Yeah, that was my next question you’ve answered is, do they know whether it’s doing any good with respect to people getting jobs and housing and having some stability in their lives?

Dawn Locke Right. And they just don’t, they don’t because they haven’t followed up.

Tom Temin In Veterans Affairs they don’t have much data on that particular piece of it either.

Dawn Locke That is correct. And that is why. So Veterans Affairs is working with DoD to run a pilot to try to collect more information on those warm handovers, but that pilot still is going to provide limited information and will not be able to tell us whether the program is effective.

Tom Temin Wow. So I can imagine what some of your recommendations were. Let’s go over those.

Dawn Locke Yeah, so we did. We made a few recommendations, eight in total. And those boiled down to having DoD better use the data and contact information to ensure a person to person connection happens. We also are, recommending that DoD ensure commanders accurately verify the warm handovers and that they assess and share information on the helpfulness of warm handovers. So that’s key. We need the DoD to determine if these warm handovers are actually helpful. And then we’re also recommending to the DoD Department of Labor and the VA that they identify criteria to determine whether to continue the pilot projects that I spoke of earlier that could help enhance warm handovers.

Tom Temin It sounds like everybody thinks everybody else is responsible for this, and therefore nobody is really taking single ownership of identifying the people, verifying the handovers happen, and then following up to see if they were useful.

Dawn Locke I’m not sure if that is the case. What we did hear from the agencies that they agreed with all of our recommendations, and they each identified steps that they’re going to take to implement the recommendations. So, for example, DoD plans to use the data to better understand the warm handovers while also helping commanders more accurately verify them. And then the VA and DOL did provide statements that they’re committed to making improvements. So, for example, the VA is seeking specific information to determine how to fund its pilot at all the military installations.

Tom Temin In some ways, the biggest beneficiary of this program, potentially besides the service members themselves, is Veterans Affairs, because if people have compounded problems in their lives, it’s going to some way or another end up on the doorstep of VA.

Dawn Locke Correct. They are a huge service provider, as you know, to service members. And it would benefit them greatly to get this right.

Tom Temin And by the way, do we know the percentage of women versus men that are part of the handover program?

Dawn Locke I don’t have the percentage to memory, but there are fewer women who receive a warm handover. Just by the nature of there are fewer women in the military.

The post Warm handovers leave some transitioning service members out in the cold first appeared on Federal News Network.

Labor-Management Forums in federal agencies come and go, over and over again, depending on which party holds the White House. Now they have returned, but only in the third year of the Biden administration. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with someone about that: former management processor and union president Bob Tobias.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin  I was a little bit surprised that they came only now with the management forums, because, you know, when President Biden took office, he had a stack about a foot and a half high of prettily bounded executive orders all ready to go, clearly written during the transition period. But labor management forum restoration wasn’t there.

Bob Tobias It wasn’t Tom. You know, as you pointed out, the history of labor management forums has come and gone. That started with President Clinton, and then his executive order was revoked by President Bush. And then President Obama issued a new executive order, and that was revoked by President Trump. And this executive order is really, I think, the most comprehensive effort to create labor management forums that’s ever been tried before. And we have to keep in mind that what the goal of these forums is, as President Biden pointed out, “employee satisfaction, manager satisfaction and organizational performance.” So, these are created to increase organizational performance. And what’s interesting in President Biden’s executive order, he includes manager satisfaction. He recognizes that without manager satisfaction, there can’t be the collaboration necessary to improve productivity in agency. So that’s brand new. And I think very, very insightful.

Tom Temin Yeah. The rolling Stone theme comes to mind. I can’t get no satisfaction, but now we can, I guess.

Bob Tobias But the goal is to get that satisfaction. Keep on rolling Tom.

Tom Temin Well, yeah, I think though there’s a good thought in there though. And that is if one side of a negotiation or discussion has its arms folded and its jaw set and the other one is eager, you’re not going to have a good discussion.

Bob Tobias That’s correct. And one of the OPM implementation directives is to create a shared vision for the future of the relationship and asks, well, how can the LMF help the agency meet its mission? How can the LMF harness the ideas of employees who are actually doing the work? How can the LMF create a mutual commitment to build a relationship that resolves disputes more constructively? Now, these are really laudable goals and objectives, and they have been achieved in the past. And so, this order relays that groundwork much more specifically, and requires the agency and union officials to submit what I would describe as a strategic plan, with OPM approving or disapproving that plan in the future.

Tom Temin Well, let me pull on one string there. Union officials, some agencies, the staff is not organized. And in some other places there might be a bargaining unit, but people outside of the bargaining unit might also have something to say with respect to operations. So does it have to be union representatives, or does it have to simply include them.

Bob Tobias In an organized workplace? It consists of managers and employees through their union in an unorganized workplace, management can create forums that include employees from the workplace. The first element that OPM says must be concluded in creating this new plan is to take a look at, well, what’s the current state of the relationship? And OPM says, well, have you implemented all of the other executive orders that President Biden has issued concerning labor management relations? So, let’s look at the current state, because you can’t plan for the future unless you look at the current state. And it mandates in these labor management form that top level agency officials and top-level union officials participate. I mean, that has to be said. It’s never been said before because political appointees, which is what President Biden is talking about, come and accept their jobs to create public policy and to implement public policy. But most people who come to the federal government in that level have no idea about labor management relations in the federal sector and don’t consciously sign up to do it. So, President Biden is saying, you must do it. You must include this as part of your portfolio to. Be an acceptable political appointee, which I think is really significant. And what he says is that these top people have to participate because they have to model the behavior they seek from those they lead, and that’s critical.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Bob Tobias, former professor in the Key executive Leadership program at American University. And my question then is if it is the union representatives that are part of these labor management forums, what is there to discuss that’s not already in the collective bargaining agreement, which may have 50, 60, or 100 clauses to begin with.

Bob Tobias So one of the primary areas to be covered by labor management forums are what are called pre decisional involvement in a normal labor management relationship. Management puts together a proposal, presents it to the union and particularly in the context of a new change that the management wants to implement. So, they put it together. They present it to the union, they bargain over it. This executive order, as have all of the past, require pre decisional involvement, which means that as management is deciding what to do and how to do it, the union is included in involved. And at that phase it’s not bargaining. It’s a collaborative effort to achieve the goal and objective of the proposed change. So, in the federal government, there’s constant change not covered by a collective bargaining agreement. And this provides a process pre decisional involvement to include an involve the people who actually do the work and know what the impact of a change will be on the work and including in involving them up front, saves so much grief and heartache when the implementation is attempted and fails.

Tom Temin And what’s your best advice for the union leadership that might be encountering in a labor management forum? A political appointee who just has no experience in dealing with staff, consulting with staff, whether unionized or not? In other words, how to not boil the frog exactly, but say, hey, listen, this is how this can work.

Bob Tobias Well, OPM recommends that both the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service provide training, joint training to union leaders and managers, and highly recommends that people who do not or never have had a relationship enroll themselves in this kind of a program. And since it’s a joint training, people are learning together about, most importantly, how to create a relationship. You know, we call it labor management relations. And yet we forget that. Indeed, what we’re talking about here is creating and maintaining a stable relationship. And as we all know, creating and maintaining stable relationships ain’t easy.

Tom Temin Do you ever wish they would change the word from labor to maybe staff? Because labor has the connotation of sort of 1920s Samuel Gompers, and here we are avoiding the sparks flying as the steel is poured into the ingot.

Bob Tobias Well, you know, Tom, maybe so, but I think it’s so well enmeshed in law and regulation. We’re stuck with labor and management. But this order seeks to really transform the idea that you just articulated into something where instead of the sparks are flying, collaborative relationships are created and maintained. And I can tell you when that works, Tom, both sides are very proud of what they create. When employees participate in solving problems, they can say to themselves and they can say to their colleagues, man, we’re much more productive. We’re not working harder, but we’re much more productive. And that can be and has been the result of many successful collaborative labor management relationships. And the implementation also requires the labor management forums to create metrics to measure their progress. So, it’s not just words on a paper. You got to keep track of what you do, how you do it, and whether it’s successful.

Tom Temin And what about the timing of this? It’s late in the administration and there are deadlines and timelines in that latest executive order.

Bob Tobias There are Tom. The parties have 180 days to create their plan. OPM has another 60 days to review the plans and provide a response. And if you add up those months, you come to November 1st. And if we have a new President Trump, clearly nothing will happen if we have another Biden administration. This material will be the groundwork for going forward. So, it was late, but it is out, and it can provide a map for the future.

The post Labor-Management Forums arrive late in Biden administration first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Agencies continue to struggle with giving too much money to citizens when doling out benefits. New data from the Government Accountability Office shows 74% of all improper payments in fiscal 2023 resulted from overpayments. These are payments made to people who have died or who are no longer eligible for government programs. GAO found agencies reported about $236 billion in improper payments last year, down about $11 billion, as compared to 2022. The Medicaid program reduced the amount of improper payments it paid out by $30 billion, while the Labor Department's unemployment insurance program saw an increase of $44 billion in payment errors last year.
  (Improper payments dropped by $11B in 2022 - GAO)
• The Education Department is getting pushback over its latest return-to-office plans. All bargaining unit employees at the Education Department will soon be expected to report to work in person at least five days per pay period. Secretary Miguel Cardona made the announcement to employees in an all-staff email Thursday morning. Cardona noted that the changes are subject to bargaining obligations with the agency’s union, the American Federation of Government Employees. But AFGE local president Sheria Smith said the announcement came as a shock to some: “We received at least 100 messages from employees saying, ‘Hey, I want a reasonable accommodation — I moved — am I supposed to come back now?” The change for employees will take effect May 20.
  (Announcement on increasing in-person presence of agency employees - Education Department)
• Top officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs said the latest rollout of a new Electronic Health Record is a step in the right direction. Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal said the VA’s recent go-live at the James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago is the most successful rollout so far. “We’re going to watch this closely, and we’re going to be on top of it, not just in the next few weeks, but in the coming months," Elnahal said. A successful EHR rollout would give the VA the chance to move on from problems that have hampered the project since 2020. A recent inspector general report found a scheduling error with the Oracle-Cerner EHR in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to the death of a veteran in 2022.
  (Recent VA EHR rollout ‘most successful’ so far, but IG outlines recent problems - Federal News Network)
• A new roadmap to improve the cloud security authorization process is out. The first piece of the Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program’s overhaul is out. The program management office released a new roadmap for the cloud security program outlining four primary goals, six initiatives and 28 near-term priorities. FedRAMP will take on several pilots over the next 18 months to lower the cost and to speed up the authorization process. One pilot program will support machine-readable “digital authorization packages” through automation using the Open Security Controls Assessment Language framework. The new roadmap comes before the Office of Management and Budget finalized its updated FedRAMP guidance, released in draft in October. OMB is current reviewing more than 285 comments.
  (FedRAMP’s overhaul begins with 28-near term initiatives - Federal News Network)
• The Defense Department wants its vendors to be more cyber secure, and it already has a lot of tools to help them. But as of now, they are a bit of a scattered mess. That is one of the things DoD wants to fix via a new Defense Industrial Base Cyber Strategy. The Pentagon published the strategy yesterday. DoD also wants to significantly expand the number of companies that can take advantage of its free cyber defense services. That eligibility will expand under a new rule set to take effect in a few weeks.
  (DoD seeks single point of entry, new governance to boost vendors' cyber defenses - Federal News Network)
• Data analytics tools used to fight fraud in COVID-19 emergency programs might be redeployed to look at more government spending. The Government Spending Oversight Act would preserve analytics tools built by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), and would require their use to uncover more fraud in federal spending. The bill would create a Government Spending Oversight Committee to manage those tools. PRAC said its tools have flagged nearly $2 billion dollars in pandemic fraud so far. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) introduced the bill.
  (Peters and Romney introduce bipartisan bill to strengthen oversight of government spending - Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)
• The Army’s Innovation Exchange Lab is up and running. The new lab will allow companies to test their solutions within the Army’s Unified Data Reference Architecture (UDRA). The Army is particularly interested in solutions serving as data catalogs within the framework of UDRA. The lab is accessible to all industry partners. Companies can include a detailed description of their product during registration. The Army is in the midst of the implementation phase of UDRA, an effort that will allow the service to build out a data mesh across all of its programs.
  (Army implementing new data architecture, launching innovation exchange lab next month - Federal News Network)
• The Army has opened a central office to manage the relocation of military families with special needs. It is called the Exceptional Family Member Program, which provides support to soldiers whose family members require special medical or educational assistance. The program is mandatory for all active-duty families with special needs. The program staff works with military and civilian agencies to provide medical, housing and educational services to over 40,000 enrolled families.
  (New Army office will provide centralized support for families with special needs - U.S. Army)
• A bipartisan pair of senators is calling for more oversight of the Federal Employees Health Benefits program (FEHB). Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) introduced the FEHB Protection Act, which would require the Office of Personnel Management to verify eligibility before adding new members to the health care program. If enacted, the bill would also require an audit of FEHB to remove any invalid members who are currently enrolled. The bill comes in response to a recent report showing that ineligible FEHB members are costing the government up to $1 billion each year.
  (FEHB Protection Act - Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.))

The post Agencies continue to struggle with overspending when doling out benefits first appeared on Federal News Network.

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) are introducing the “Strengthening the Federal Records Act of 2024” today.

The bill would tighten disclosure requirements for “non-official messaging accounts” used to carry out government business, while also strengthening the ability of the National Archives and Records Administration to hold agencies accountable for complying with record-keeping rules.

“Federal agencies must maintain adequate records so that the American public can hold officials accountable, access critical benefits and services, and have a clear picture of how the government is spending taxpayer dollars,” Peters said in a statement. “We must also update the law to keep pace with rapidly changing technology and ensure that we are not sacrificing transparency as we embrace new forms of communication.”

The bill would prohibit federal employees from using “non-official” messaging applications to carry out government business unless the messages are backed up or otherwise saved in an official account.

Beyond texting, government officials have also increasingly turned to platforms like WhatsApp and Signal in recent years. Those “ephemeral” messaging applications allow users to permanently delete messages after a set amount of time.

“American taxpayers deserve a full accounting of federal records, including across all forms of digital communication,” Cornyn said. “This legislation would help make sure technological advancements do not hamstring the government’s ability to provide greater accountability and transparency for federal records.”

The proposed FRA reforms do not address record-keeping at the White House. Those practices are governed by a separate statute, the Presidential Records Act.

But the legislation comes after numerous federal record-keeping controversies at the agency-level in recent years. For instance, the Secret Service lost key text messages from the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, reportedly due to an IT system update.

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general, who had been investigating the missing Secret Service texts, more recently admitted to lawmakers he routinely deletes texts off his government-issued phone.

And during a hearing held by the homeland security committee earlier this month, Republicans pointed to a National Institutes of Health official who had told colleagues he used his personal email account to avoid having his records pulled under a Freedom of Information Act request.

“Records are the currency of democracy,” Anne Weismann, a former Justice Department official and law professor at George Washington University, said during the hearing. “They are the way we hold government actors accountable. And we have seen too many examples, whether it’s at NIH, whether it’s at DHS, whether it’s the Secret Service, where federal employees are either willfully or unwittingly avoiding or contravening their record keeping responsibilities. And as a result, the historical record of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, is incomplete.”

Certification requirements

Under the legislation, federal employees would also have to certify their compliance record-keeping requirements before leaving an agency. Weismann pointed to reports that senior officials in the Trump administration may have deleted crucial messages regarding Jan. 6 before leaving government.

“If they had been required to certify upon leaving government that they had complied with their record keeping responsibilities, that might not have happened, or there would have been some ability to hold them accountable for what they did,” Weismann said during a hearing held by the homeland security committee earlier this month.

The legislation would expand a NARA program that automatically captures the email messages of senior agency officials.

The “Capstone” program would be expanded to automatically capture other forms of electronic messages, including through the “culling” of transitory messages and personal messages “as appropriate,” per the legislation.

Justice Department referral

Peters’ and Cornyn’s bill would also require NARA to refer repeated violations of the FRA to the Justice Department, including cases where employees unlawfully remove or destroy records.

Weismann had told lawmakers that NARA has been reticent to refer violations of records laws to DOJ, especially in cases where records were allegedly destroyed. She said that’s despite the fact that the Archives admits it doesn’t have the resources or authorities to investigate and punish record-keeping violations on its own.

“[NARA] is not well equipped, they don’t have the investigative resources, for example, that the Department of Justice has, which is precisely why we think it’s so critical that the obligation to make that referral be made clear,” Weismann said.

The bill comes as federal agencies and NARA manage an increasing amount of electronic records. NARA will stop accepting permanent paper records from agencies starting this summer.

Numerous advisory committees and advocacy groups have warned that agencies have largely been unprepared to handle the growing influx of digital data over the past two decades, impacting everything from classified information sharing to FOIA processing.

The Peters-Cornyn legislation would also set up an “Advisory Committee on Records Automation” at NARA. The committee would be responsible for encouraging and recommending ways that agencies can take advantage of automation to ingest and manage their electronic records.

The bill has garnered the support of multiple advocacy groups, according to statements provided by the Homeland Security Committee. They include the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Americans for Prosperity, Protect Democracy, Government Information Watch, and the Association of Research Libraries.

“Government records are ultimately the property of the American people and agencies are responsible for maintaining the emails, texts, and documents they create,” Debra Perlin, policy director for CREW, said in a statement. “The Strengthening Oversight of Federal Records Act would update and bolster our federal recordkeeping laws to account for changes in technology, and make it easier for organizations like ours to ensure that records are created and preserved during any administration.”

The post Senate bill aims to bring federal records law into the age of ‘WhatsApp’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests keep rising every year. Some agencies have trouble responding to them on time, leading to growing backlogs. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Justice Department bureau that oversees FOIA activity could improve its guidance on how to get out from under backlogs. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with GAO’s Director of Strategic Issues, Jay McTigue.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin Give us a sense of FOIA activity. Has it been on the rise? And tell us more about the level of backlogs some agencies, anyhow, are seeing?

Jay McTigue Sure. We looked back over the last decade looking at data from 2013 up through 2022, and we found that backlogs government wide have nearly doubled to a little bit over 200,000 at the end of fiscal year 2022. This reflects a long term trend, a persistent challenge for federal agencies.

Tom Temin And simply the public wants this information.

Jay McTigue Absolutely. As you said, FOIA is our nation’s most important government transparency, it gives the American public the statutory right to request government records. All Americans have the right to know what their government is doing. So FOIA is central to government transparency.

Tom Temin And where do the backlogs tend to accumulate? These are not across the board evenly at all agencies, is it?

Jay McTigue No, that’s exactly right. So the Department of Homeland Security by far received the largest number of FOIA requests, accounting for about 60% of the government wide total in fiscal year 2022. The Department of Homeland Security, together with the Departments of Justice, Defense, State, and Health and Human Services, together accounted for about 80% of all new requests. And as you said, the backlogs vary across the government depending upon the agency. But overall, it’s a big and growing problem.

Tom Temin And by backlog, that means those cases that have not been answered after 20 days, I think is the statutory requirement.

Jay McTigue That’s right. FOIA generally requires agencies to respond to a request within 20 working days. And in their response, agencies should include a determination of the scope of the documents that they will provide and any exemptions that they claim, due to national security, personnel issues or other information that they cannot provide to the public. Sometimes, if there are unusual circumstances, an agency can extend that 20 day time frame for up to ten working days, and the agency must also offer a request or the opportunity to limit the scope of the request, or otherwise modify the request again, to try to be responsive to the request.

Tom Temin And there’s a few outlier cases sometimes that lay around for I think the longest I ever heard of was 10 or 15 years. Sometimes they end up at the bottom of a pile.

Jay McTigue Yeah, there are certainly cases like that. Most are not that bad. We didn’t look in great detail at specific requests during this audit. We were focused mainly on what agencies and what the Department of Justice is doing. First, to identify what the problems are with backlogs. What are the root causes, and then what are agencies and DOJ doing to try to address the growing backlog. It’s clearly a problem.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Jay McTigue. He is the director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office. And before we get to the root causes, tell us what justice, that particular unit of justice, what its job is in the whole FOIA area?

Jay McTigue The Department of Justice oversees compliance with FOIA. Its Office of Information Policy helps agencies administer for you by providing guidance, training and other resources to agencies. DOJ also oversees agency’s annual FOIA reporting requirements, which include plans for reducing backlogs, as well as information about the size of backlog and how long it takes to process requests. And then finally, I should mention that OIP also manages the FOIA.gov website, which makes the agency’s data available, the reports, and also provides information to the public about the FOIA process.

Tom Temin All right. And what did you find then, with respect to the responsiveness to doing this and their knowledge of the actual causes? I think it might be staffing, it could be funding that they get for FOIA. It could be the complexity of the cases. There’s a lot of variables.

Jay McTigue There are a lot of variables, a lot of factors that go into this. And so what we did is, I mentioned the annual chief FOIA officer reports that are on the FOIA.gov website. We looked at the last five years of those reports and teased out what the key issues were. We also had focus groups with the 24 CFO act agencies, to get a little bit more granular detail about what’s going on in the FOIA process. And so, yes, as you mentioned, staffing was one that came up quite often, as well as the increased scope and complexity of FOIA requests. And then other frequently cited issues included coordination across agencies, different offices and other units. For some of the very broad requests, litigation is something that has come up quite a bit lately. And then finally, technology. A lot of agencies are struggling acquiring technology to search records, but also technology has kind of made the retention and types of communication bigger and a little bit more challenging to deal with. Back in the day, when FOIA was enacted into law, a lot of information was on paper. Nowadays you have all kinds of electronic communication. You have emails, you have instant messaging, you have text messaging and so on and so forth. And that has generated just massive volumes of information that has to be searched. And it can take time, especially without the proper technology tools.

Tom Temin And you had a list of recommendations for the Justice Department and the Office of Information Policy. Highlight them for us.

Jay McTigue As I mentioned, backlogs have become a persistent and growing problem. The Department of Justice has taken steps to require certain agencies, those agencies with over a thousand backlog requests to develop, actionable plans to reduce the backlogs. But what we found is that OIP could improve the guidance to agencies in regard to these plans, because currently in its guidance, it doesn’t specify elements that should be included in these plans. And these are pretty basic elements. But really the cornerstone of effective plans such as goals, performance measures, timeframes for implementing specific actions and including that kind of information could really help make plans much more robust and actionable. We did look at the 14 agencies that were directed by OIP to come up with plans, and only two of those agencies included specific goals and only one included any kind of performance metric. And very few, actually, none included timelines for implementing the actions that they were going to take. So we had two recommendations to improve guidance on plans. And we also had two additional recommendations focused on the information that is reported to OIP on backlogs and the time it takes for agencies to respond to requests. And there was some confusion in how agencies calculated some of that information. And, you know, without good data, it’s hard to get a good handle on the issues. So OIP, the Department of Justice agreed with all four of our recommendations and has already started drafting new guidance to include the information that we suggested and clarify both the information and training on providing some of the data in the foyer reports that I mentioned.

The post What to do about those ever-rising FOIA request backlogs first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Justice Department recently said it would test a new rewards program for whistleblowers, who report “significant corporate misconduct.” Payments will come from assets forfeited by defendants in both civil and criminal cases. For an assessment of the program, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with whistleblower attorney Stephen Kohn of Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin Does this program break ground with respect to coverage of whistleblowers, do you think?

Stephen Kohn We don’t know. It has potential. Some of the statements made are, I would say, wrong-headed. There are like five really good whistleblower laws, and they all follow a similar, procedure. So, this one, which is discretionary, which means the Justice Department is kind of making it up. They’re proposing ideas that are completely counter to the best practices, but nothing’s written in stone. We hope they’re going to listen, and we can make it work.

Tom Temin And what right now does in the proposal run counter to best practice.

Stephen Kohn Also going all the way back to the Civil War, the original False Claims Act, and every single powerful whistleblower law since. It’s known that in white collar crime and corruption, your best sources are often participants. They’re not the kingpin. They didn’t plan and initiate it. But like, for example, in a Swiss banking case and we’ve done many, a banker is your best source yet. Swiss bankers have all violated U.S. law. So, under her proposal, they want to exclude all participants. Which means if you’re a secretary, you put a stamp on a letter that has some, you know, false claim in it. You’re disqualified. It makes no sense. And it’s counter to all the other laws. Let’s hope they fix it.

Tom Temin Yeah. And how has justice been otherwise in terms of getting whistleblowers paid in the qui tam situations?

Stephen Kohn Well, justice is now lagging behind that. The SEC and the CFTC under Dodd-Frank that they regularly pay awards at 25, 30%. They have a program in the Securities and Exchange Commission that if you’re a smaller whistleblower, you get automatic 30%. Whereas in the Justice Department, you have to fight just to get them up 1 or 2 percentages above the minimum. We just have a case now to get them. The minimum is 15% there. Just to get them up to 18% is like banging your head. They don’t understand that the paying of the awards incentivizes whistleblowers and deters misconduct, because the corporate criminals realize that their own employees can have an incentive to turn them in. So, when the SEC Dodd-Frank, it’s working really well, and they have officially acknowledged through empirical evidence that the paying of these awards has tremendous beneficial impact. Justice just isn’t there. The other thing is, Justice doesn’t understand that prosecuting a whistleblower for a minor offense is completely counterproductive. So, you have, from time to time, like a line prosecutor and a whistleblower can come in and give them the kings to the keys to the kingdom lay out the whole fraud. But instead of understanding the importance of that source that they never would have known about fully voluntary, they say, oh, you violated this small technical law. Let’s go after you. I can, you know, on my performance indicator, I can get an easy conviction. You know, so these type of not exploiting the whistleblower. The other thing that’s really bad is for three years now, the Justice Department was required by law to accept anonymous whistleblowers. And they have not implemented that law. They’re resistant to anonymous whistleblowers. They’re resistant to confidential whistleblowers. And as I said, they’ve they’re in violation of the law. Now, three years, my whistleblowers can’t go. Sure. And get the confidentiality that Congress demanded.

Tom Temin We are speaking with Stephen Kohn. He’s a whistleblower attorney with Kohn, Kohn Colapinto. And yes, you mentioned Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general that proposed this program? Yes. Whistleblowers may not be anonymous that she says under there, and they kind of get swept up into DOJ’s corporate enforcement policies. Do you get the sense that they’re listening in this 90-day period that we’re in the midst of for it’s almost like commenting on rulemaking in some sense.

Stephen Kohn We hope they are. So, they’ve said they’re going to accept input and we are kind of give it to them. A lot of input. And we’re going to see if they respond properly. So, the problem with justice is that they haven’t really looked at the other successful programs and try to evaluate, like, why are they doing so well? Why did 18,000 whistleblowers in 2023 go into the SEC program when there’s maybe 901 into false claims? Why? Well, there’s very objective empirical reasons why? So, they got to understand that they have to adopt. They have to change. They have to modernize. Let’s hope they’re listening.

Tom Temin So summarize for us, what are the three top things that you would tell justice as they try to design this latest program?

Stephen Kohn So sure the first is they must implement anonymous and confidential filings. It works great in other programs. They’re legally required to do it. Second, they have to establish a whistleblower office. SEC has one. Other agencies have one. They coordinate the cases. They get the whistleblowers information to the proper field agents they monitor. They give coaching to prosecutors or investigators who’ve never dealt with the whistleblower. The Justice Department has no whistleblower office, yet numerous components from the Drug Enforcement Agency, foreign corruption, civil fraud, criminal division, the U.S. Attorney’s office is all interact with whistleblowers. No coherent program, no coordination, no uniform policies. So, they need an office. Third, the deputy attorney general understood that under some laws, she has tremendous discretion. She can exercise that discretion in a good or a bad way. And that’s what we’re hoping. She can exercise her discretion to have the DOJ program work as effectively as the Dodd-Frank programs.

The post Justice Department’s new whistleblower program first appeared on Federal News Network.

You might not have heard of the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA), which was enacted a decade ago, but it requires the Justice Department to collect and manage reports on people who die while in government custody.  The Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with David Janovsky, a senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), who said the DoJ has a long history of not quite living up to the law.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And this law then, has been around again a while. What specifically is Justice supposed to do here?

David Janovsky So there are three main components to the Death and Custody Reporting Act. First, Justice is supposed to be collecting data on deaths in custody from local, state and federal law enforcement and corrections agencies. And it’s important to note that the definition of in custody is broader than people might initially assume. It covers any circumstance from the moment someone is interacting with law enforcement and not free to leave. So it could be a traffic stop, not even necessarily an arrest all the way through incarceration in a prison, jail or immigration detention.

Tom Temin So it’s incumbent then on all of these agencies to generate reports in the first place.

David Janovsky That’s correct. The way it works technically is DOJ sends out sort of a list of questions that these agencies are supposed to answer, and it’s a little different on the state level and the federal level. But each agency is then responsible for filling these out and sending them back.

Tom Temin And in the research you’ve done over the years, do they actually make the reports and send them to the Justice Department?

David Janovsky It is a decidedly mixed bag. We have gotten to the point where we think most federal agencies that are responsible for reporting are doing so, though, it’s very open question whether or not they’re doing so accurately and completely. So far, the track record on the state and local side, which is lumped together, is much worse. Some of the most recent data we saw was a GAO audit done back in 2022 that found that DOJ numbers for 2021 were missing nearly 1,000 deaths that were publicly reported elsewhere. And we haven’t gotten any updated numbers since then to see whether that’s improved.

Tom Temin Well, is the issue that if they’re known publicly, that means that they might have been published or somehow reported locally by the agencies that caused it, or are they news reports? I guess, I’m asking, where is the break in communication happening, do you think?

David Janovsky I think that’s one of the things that we are pushing the Justice Department to really suss out. So far, the best sources of information on deaths in custody are from news reports like the Washington Post. And that’s a problem. It’s great that there are third party researchers that are able to uncover so much of this data, but without sort of the authoritative stream, there’s no way to be certain that anyone’s collecting the full picture.

Tom Temin Well, does justice have an apparatus in place to collect and manage the reports, presuming people would then go ahead and report them up to justice?

David Janovsky It took them a long time to get there. Over the last year, the sense that I’ve gotten is that they have finally beefed up the apparatus. But for the first five years of this law’s existence, there was really a sort of bureaucratic game of ping pong going on among some components within the Justice Department, to see who was going to get left holding the bag.

Tom Temin And which part of justice actually is the belly button to push under the DCRA, under the law.

David Janovsky It’s been split into two pieces. So the Office of Justice Programs is the umbrella where all of this is happening. But federal data goes to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which, as the name implies, has much more of track record collecting statistical data. The state and local data goes to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which is primarily a grantmaking entity. And I think one of the main problems we’ve seen is when you give a major data collection program to a grantmaking entity, there’s going to be a certain amount of friction getting the program up and running.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with David Janovsky. He is senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. What levers does Justice have to try to maybe get some more oomph behind its desire or its request to these local and state law enforcement agencies to send in the reports? And I guess the corollary question is, is it easy to do is the reporting apparatus in the formats required and so on doable by even small police departments, for example.

David Janovsky Let me take that last piece first. Well, obviously any data program is going to require a little bit of work. Someone’s going to have to fill out the form. It’s important to remember that we’re talking about deaths in custody here. First of all, those should be incredibly rare if these agencies are doing their jobs correctly. And second of all, if someone dies in your custody and you’re a law enforcement or corrections agency with the responsibility to keep people in your custody alive, that should be sort of an earthshaking event. It should not be hard to fill out. At the moment, it’s six questions that the Justice Department is asking, and one of them is the name of the person who dies. These are serious events that people should already be aware of if they’re happening, so it’s hard to give too much credit to the administrative burden in question. In terms of what justice can do to get this information, it’s got a carrot and it’s got, in terms of the law, a stick. The law says that if agencies don’t report, then this is tied to a grant program. The Burden Justice Assistance Grants, which is one of the handful of major grant programs to state and local law enforcement. And if folks don’t comply, then they could be subject to a 10% cut in that grant allocation. So far, Justice has shown no appetite to even put that penalty on the table. So at the moment they’re using the carrot approach, which is rolling out technical assistance and hoping that people comply.

Tom Temin And adding all of this up then does anyone or do you have a sense of how many deaths of this nature actually occur every year, and how many are in the justice database? What’s the delta? Is that known?

David Janovsky That’s the problem. We’re doing this without any real sense of what the ultimate denominator is. Like I said, we haven’t gotten any further readout on the quality of the state data since that GAO ordered a couple of years ago where they were missing a thousand deaths. I’m not aware of any sort of authoritative counterpoint to the federal DCRA data to make us aware of how accurate that is, but we do know from past programs and from the work other folks are doing. It’s thousands of people a year.

Tom Temin And do we even know where the majority of those happen, which would at least give the Justice Department and other agencies some idea of where to begin corrective programs, for example. Do most of them happen in prisons, or do they happen between the arrest and prison or something?

David Janovsky Again, without this program working, we can’t really say for sure. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that state prisons, just because of the size of the population, are going to have the most people dying in custody. But it’s impossible to say until this program works the way it should.

Tom Temin Yeah. So what has to happen, do you think, for the program to work as it should at this point?

David Janovsky Well, we’re a decade into the existence of the law now, and we’re focusing our own advocacy on three main things. First of all, we need to get that report compliance up to 100%. That ideally would involve both the carrot and at least a plausible threat of the stick. A penalty is no good if you say up front that you’re never going to use it. So we would like to see justice get a little more serious about that. In addition to the technical assistance it’s rolling out. The second piece is we need to make sure they’re asking the right questions. So far the problems we know are that folks haven’t been answering the questions they’re being asked. But it’s important to note, even if everyone was filling out these forms 100% of the time, they wouldn’t tell us very much because of the way the Justice Department is asking for these questions. An overwhelming amount of the important information that you would need to look at this data and think about how you could prevent these deaths, comes into question that basically says, tell us what we need to know, which is not a great way to run a nationwide data program. And the third piece is this data needs to be made public in some way. And so far, there’s no real plan for how to make the state data accessible. And the federal data that does get some top line numbers released, you can’t learn very much from.

The post Little-known law needs Justice Department attention first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Farm Credit Administration has had a new operations associate director for several months now. Byron Adkins moved over from the Interior Department’s Business Center late last year. He was also a recipient of a Presidential Rank Award in the most recent cohort. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked to Bryon Adkins about his federal career and his current position.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And we never did talk about your Presidential Rank Award, and that was for work done before coming over to USDA. And the Rank Awards. Never state why someone got one. So, what did they tell you? Why, you got it.

Byron Adkins So it’s been a series of events. I’ve been a senior executive for about ten years, and so it was a combination of all of the accomplishments over that ten years that was highlighted, particularly when I worked at the Department of Commerce and partnership with GSA in renovating the headquarters facility and what we called at that time, the 21st century workforce model, which basically is opening up to open workplace, bringing more light into the build and make it a more modern touch and feel. But also, my work, you know, with the transition back from Covid 19 and how we handled that at the department, as well as the presidential transition team, which we’re up again here soon. We partner with GSA to house all of the presidential transition political when they were going through that process. So that was very interesting part of being at Commerce, but also most recently at the Interior Business Center, the work that we’ve done, highlighting, you know, the Orphan Wells work and the grants that my organization was able to award some 560 million. And then we also have one of my associate directors that received a Fed 100 award for our work with transitioning the effective Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board to their new financial system in ERP, in which we partnered with them on that. And so that was significant and a great effort that I was able to be a part of. And then last but not least, particularly in this administration, the difference, that I was able to champion was also a part of that packet as well. And so, I was very fortunate and very humbled to be a recipient of that award. And it really was a highlight over a long career as a senior executive. So very thankful.

Tom Temin And just getting back to the Commerce Department, this will test your knowledge of the history there, what is now occupying the space that used to be the aquarium.

Byron Adkins Okay. That is now a piece of space that’s currently under renovation. We were able to actually start work with our first consolidated security operations center, which is a piece of it. The other half of it is still under renovation, to my knowledge, so we won’t be able to find anything in the aquarium. You have to go up to Baltimore, where those fish were shipped to.

Tom Temin Well, now that it’s the SoC, it gives new meaning to phishing attacks. I guess you might say. And sorry about that. All right, so now, you have moved from a kind of a big, visible multi-service agency, the interior Business center, and you are in a very focused organization. Just give us the short version of what the Farm Credit Administration actually does.

Byron Adkins Happy to do so because I had to educate myself as well once I came on board. So, the Farm Credit Administration essentially provides oversight and regulation to what they call the farm credit system. And these are a group of institutions that provide funding to all of our farmers, ranchers, farm own cooperatives, rural home buyers as well, and Ag business to ensure that we are able to feed the world. And the Farm Credit Administration ensures that they’re safe and sound dependable sources of credit. Also is more important. And I think this is in partnership with USDA as well, supporting the next generations of farmers, making sure we’re serving that next generation, by ensuring that they’re safe lending for young and new farmers that are up and coming and ranchers as well. And so, it’s a really interesting mission. You know, we go out and examine those farm credit system and institutions, and make sure that they’re doing all the things they need to do, but very small as well, like you mentioned, about 350 employees. So, it’s been a quite a culture shift for me, but it’s been a good shift.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Byron Adkins. He is now the associate director for operations at the Farm Credit Administration. What does it mean? Operations, since it’s basically a kind of a white-collar operation, if you will. There’s no real mechanics there.

Byron Adkins Yeah. So, it’s very similar to the work that I was doing in Interior Business Center. When you think of. So, the mission is to make sure that we regulate the farm credit system, and we have examiners and regulators that do that. But every organization, every mission requires mission enabling functions. And so, I work in the Office of Agency Service, and we help support those things. Everything from H.R., our back office, H.R., and all of those suites of systems to operational things such as security, personnel security, cyber security, making sure folks has transportation of fleet. Despite being a small agency, we still have to provide those infrastructure and operational things. I, I’m over the facility as well. So, kind of going back to my roots within the Department of Commerce, having an opportunity to really make sure I’m creating a space where folks want to come to. And operationally, they can get the things they need to get done to accomplish your mission.

Tom Temin And are you now a user of shared services after having been a provider of them at interior.

Byron Adkins I’m happy to say that the Farm Credit Administration is a user of shared services. Both ARC and IVC provide service to us, so we are believers of it, and I think we’re examples of good government. By using shared services.

Tom Temin And a lot of small agencies, the independent agencies or the smaller bureaus was in large departments such as USDA have a cloud strategy. But it’s most of what the FCA doing cloud based at this point.

Byron Adkins We’re working towards it. Right. And so, it’s a process. You can’t turn the Titanic in a day. And so that is part of the long-term strategy that we’re looking towards. And one of the top priorities of our chairman as well is looking at how we can innovate, but also comply with some of the IT executive orders associated with that. And so, we’re doing it internally for FCA and we’re slowly working on that. But I definitely say our partners I mean I mentioned, you know, ARC, IBC NFCs, our payroll. They are all moving towards cloud-based solutions and their support to us. So, we’re kind of doing tangentially, more aggressively and then in-house within FCA is top of our list to make sure that we’re moving in that direction.

Tom Temin And in some ways, you exemplify what the Senior Executive Service was supposed to be all about originally. That is, a cadre of people who could move into any department or any function and kind of help it operationally, leadership wise, regardless of the specific mission, hasn’t always worked out that way. Some people are very mission focused and senior executives stay in the same kind of channel. You’ve moved around a lot. What’s the first thing when you move in as a senior executive to a place that had somebody else and probably thought they were doing just fine, thank you. And you’re the new guy there.

Byron Adkins You know, one of the first things I do is listen and observe, and I call it the, you know, the first hundred days of learning, making sure I understand, exactly how things operate, being immersed in understanding the culture of how to get things done is very important. And so, I spent a significant amount of time doing informational interviews and understanding the dynamics and challenges associated with the organization. I will tell you, there are 1 or 2 things that I walked in the door that were on my plate that I had to most immediately work on and handle, and I did that judiciously. But I will tell you, that’s where I spent a lot of time at. And I can also tell you, I was very fortunate. It was not a situation where the house is on fire. And, you know, I walked in, and I had to quickly change things. So, I was very fortunate about that. Not saying it was cruise control, but, I did have an opportunity to kind of get to know the agency, get to know the players in the mission and figure out how I can best serve then. So, I think that’s what I would carry to any organization and what I’ve done in the past as well to be successful. And then once you understand that you can figure out how you can best add value to the organization.

Tom Temin So those immediate issues, I imagine, must have been personnel related. So, you can’t really give us the details.

Byron Adkins Some of that was that, but other things were just, the timing on impeding deadlines for things that we had to do for the administration at that quickly was able to take care of.

Tom Temin All right. And what about the telework remote work? Where is the FCA actually headquartered? Where are you? Do you go there every day? And what about the rest of the workforce? Is it mostly remote now or what’s going on?

Byron Adkins Sure, we have a hybrid model, and that approach has been informed from feedback from employees about where they best work and how they would like to approach that. And so typically I’ll go in once or twice a week. We’re headquartered in McLean, so that’s where the majority of our workforce is. But we also have for lease locations across the country, where we have our field, what we call our field offices. They have small offices and cadres of FCA employees as well. And they are also, you know, in a hybrid work environment. You also have to understand there’s a significant portion of travel for examiners because they actually physically go out to foreign credit institutions to examine and regulate them as well. And so, they are really traveling on top of having a hybrid work environment. And that’s worked really well. It seems like for FCA. And so, we’re going to continue that until we, you know, see that we need to make a different change.

The post When the government calls, this senior executive makes the move first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Senate got its pound of flesh from the Technology Modernization Fund after all.

Despite the efforts by industry and the Office of Management and Budget over the last six plus months to change the committee’s mind, Senate appropriators rescinded $100 million from the TMF for fiscal 2024.

Senate lawmakers released the remaining 2024 appropriations bill today that detailed the decisions to reduce funding for centralized IT modernization accounts across the board.

The TMF is taking a double hit as the Senate also zeroed out any new funding for this year, possibly leaving the IT modernization effort in a tough spot from a funding perspective.

“The draconian zeroing out and rescinding of these vital funds will only jeopardize the health and safety of veterans, first responders and families that rely on government services every day. We have got to stop treating government IT as a luxury,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), ranking member of the Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on cybersecurity, IT and government innovation, in a statement to Federal News Network. “The TMF is not a slush fund to be raided when budget negotiations get tough. It is a vital part of the federal government’s technology infrastructure and it plays an indispensable role in ensuring government agencies are functioning at their best on behalf of the American people we serve. I am deeply disappointed in the decision to slash this funding, but I will not stop fighting until our government has the resources it needs to keep up with 21st Century technological demands.”

On the bright side, however, the Senate only rescinded $100 million instead of the $290 million it initially wanted to pull back from the $1 billion  the TMF received under the American Rescue Plan Act.

It’s unclear how much of the $1 billion the TMF received from the American Rescue Plan Act remains. President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget request shows about $790 million left in the TMF that is unobligated for 2024, but that also includes money awarded to agencies, but not yet sent out the door.

“The rescission, although less than what was in the Senate bill, is disappointing and damages the U.S. government’s ability to strengthen its cybersecurity and modernize its IT systems,” said a spokesman for Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), in an email to Federal News Network. “Sen. Moran will continue to be a leader for this program and work to ensure that this program is funded next year to get our agencies back on track.”

An email to OMB seeking comment was not immediately returned.

TMF cuts are ‘pound foolish’

Since Congress created the TMF in the Modernizing Government Technology Act in 2018, the board has received $1.2 billion in funding from Congress and handed out $800 million to 51 investments across 29 agencies. The board says 40 of those investments are from ARP funding, but it didn’t say how much money it spent from that $1 billion investment.

The Biden administration requested $200 million for the TMF in its 2024 budget request. The TMF board received $50 million in 2023 from Congress. For fiscal 2025, the White House is asking for $75 million for the TMF.

Kevin Cummins, the former staff member lead in the Senate on the MGT Act, which authorized and advocated for funding the TMF through the ARPA, and now a partner with the Franklin Square Group, said the Senate’s decision is a pennywise and a pound foolish.

“Even worse than the dollar amount is the loss of Congressional support for the TMF this rescission represents. The idea for the TMF was proposed by President [Barack] Obama, implemented by President [Donald] Trump, and finally given a major funding infusion under President Biden. The TMF has always been supposed to be more than just an alternative funding mechanism. It is a better way to fund IT initiatives in the modern, cloud computing era,” Cummins said. “As a working capital fund, the TMF allows agencies to invest in IT and software upgrades more flexibly and closer to the way private companies undertake IT modernization, rather than the increasingly uncertain annual appropriations process.”

OMB recently updated the repayment expectations for agencies receiving TMF money, in part because of pressure from lawmakers, who have been unhappy with the administration’s decision in 2022 to change the repayment requirements.

TMF repayment options changed

An OMB spokesperson said in February that the updated TMF repayment policy will apply to all proposals submitted on and after Feb. 6.

“This policy will establish a consistent repayment floor of 50%, enabling the fund to invest in critical IT and cybersecurity modernization for years to come. Under rare exceptions, the GSA Administrator and OMB Director can approve a repayment rate lower than 50%,” the spokesperson said. “As the TMF Board allocates the last of the ARP funding, we are looking to the future of the TMF in a post-ARP setting – balancing congressional intent and agency flexibility to deliver the most impact for the American people.”

Julie Dunne, a former House Oversight and Accountability staff member and now a principal with the Monument Advocacy leading the federal procurement team, said given outside forces pushing on the budget, it’s not surprising the lawmakers ended up pulling the money back.

“In 2023, we had a $1.5 trillion deficit so it’s not surprising that appropriators went looking for recessions from the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP). There is no doubt that the need for IT modernization in the federal government ecosystem remains and transitioning away from legacy IT was part of the original vision when I worked on the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which established the TMF,” she said. “I think the adjustment of TMF repayment terms after receiving the $1 billion under the ARP was a mistake and based on the 2024 outcome it appears that there may have been a failure of advocacy to make the case on the importance of the TMF and the success stories.”

To some experts, the rescission also signals the continued struggle of OMB to explain to Congress the true impact of TMF.

Mike Hettinger, a former House staff member and now president of Hettinger Strategy Group, said the Senate’s decision is not surprising.

“What this tells me is that congress still needs more proof from GSA that the projects funded by TMF are having the desired impact, despite progress from the TMF PMO in recent months on this front,” he said. “The TMF remains a vital tool in the IT modernization funding toolbox and everyone involved needs to continue to work to get it right. There’s clearly more work to be done.”

Other IT funds also cut

In addition to the TMF, Senate appropriators also rescinded $10 million from the U.S. Digital Service through the IT Oversight and Reform (ITOR) fund and reduced the Federal Citizen Services Fund, run by the General Services Administration, to $75 million in 2024 from $90 million in 2023.

The bill, however, includes $8 million for the ITOR fund in 2024, which is $6 million less than the administration requested and $6 million less than what Congress appropriated in 2023.

Lawmakers also are adding additional oversight to the citizen services fund. The bill includes a provision requiring GSA to “submit a spending plan and explanation for each project to be undertaken to the committees on appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of this act.”

“On the cuts to the Federal Citizen Services Fund, it’s a similar story,” Hettinger said. “Again, this tells me Congress is not yet fully bought in on how these funds are being used.”

One positive outcome of the 2024 spending bill came for the Treasury Department. After asking for permission to set up an IT working capital fund under the MGT Act authority, Congress granted the request.

The bill lets Treasury keep up to 5% of any unobligated appropriation for IT modernization efforts. Treasury’s discretionary budget for 2024 is $287.5 million for salaries and expenses.

Now there are three agencies with specific IT working capital funds authorized under the MGT Act. Treasury joins the Small Business Administration and the Office of Personnel Management in gaining this authority.

Additionally, GSA received $4 million for federal rulemaking modernization from its working capital fund.

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Mary Ellen Callahan, the director of the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) office, said the unit continues to face attrition concerns as Congress has yet to reauthorize the office long-term. The office’s authorization expired last December.

“The threat of termination for the office has created a great deal of uncertainty,” Callahan said during a House Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee on emergency management and technology held today. “It also created a distraction in the office in the fall.”

Between October and February, CWMD lost 24 out of its approximately 240 employees, Callahan testified. The attrition comes as the office attempts to rebound from morale issues that have left it virtually at the bottom of federal employee engagement scores.

“This represents a loss over 300 person years of CWMD/[Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear] experience,” Callahan said of the departures in her written testimony. “Backfilling these critical vacancies should help morale, but a long-term or permanent reauthorization is paramount to attracting and retaining high-quality candidates.”

In December, the House passed a two-year extension for the CWMD office. The Senate has yet to advance a companion measure.

But Callahan said the short-term extension sets up the office for another reauthorization showdown in the near term, complicating efforts to recruit new staff.

“We are working quickly to replace them,” Callahan said. “But it would be difficult to recruit the talented and in demand workforce, to ask them to come and join when we have again, the potential of a threat a threat of termination two years hence.”

Through its “Securing the Cities” program and other initiatives, CWMD office works with state and local governments by providing training to first responders and other resources. Callahan said state and local partners have also expressed “anxiety” about the office being terminated.

“Several of them are working towards the 2026 World Cup, and when I was in Boston and in New York, recently, both of them asked about termination,” she said.

Subcommittee Chairman Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.) said lawmakers initially sought a seven-year extension for the CWMD office, but a score from the Congressional Budget Office forced them to shift to two-year reauthorization.

“We also have to be realistic about what we could actually as a committee and a subcommittee can get onto the floor and pass,” D’Esposito said. “So that’s why we’re at the two year number.”

The uncertainty around the office’s future also comes as Congress has yet to reauthorize a DHS chemical security program. The authority for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program lapsed last July. The program allowed DHS and CISA to regulate the security of more than 3,200 “high-risk” chemical facilities across the country.

“The end of CFATS authorization has, in my opinion, affected our chemical readiness with regard to identifying threats that would be in chemical facilities,” Callahan said. “CFATS and CWMD are siblings. And they work together closely and we are missing them in this whole of government thread.”

Meanwhile, the CWMD office is also playing a role in analyzing how artificial intelligence could pose threats to homeland security. Under President Joe Biden’s AI executive order, DHS is working with White House science advisors and the Department of Energy on an evaluation of “CBRN-specific risks of AI and how AI could be applied to mitigating CBRN threats,” Callahan testified.

“CWMD’s centralized role and subject matter expertise enable us to explore ways to leverage AI for our collective benefit while identifying novel CBRN risks to the homeland because of lower barriers to entry for malign actors,” she continued.

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But a new industry report warns USPS is underestimating how much these rate hikes on its monopoly mail — or “market-dominant” — products are driving away some of its biggest customers.

A report from Keep US Posted — a nonprofit group of consumers, nonprofits, newspapers, greeting card publishers, magazines, catalogs and small businesses — finds market-dominant revenue in fiscal 2023 fell $1.8 billion short of the Postal Service’s own forecast, “signaling a potential issue with the model used to defend rate increases.”

“The inability to accurately predict the impact of rate increases on market dominant products threatens the stability of the USPS’ volume and revenue base,” the report states.

The report warns that continued rate increases “put the USPS at risk of accelerating volume decline and losing revenue on these products.”

‘To mail or not to mail’

The report, commissioned by the Greeting Card Association and the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom), and conducted by NDP Analytics, comes just weeks before USPS is expected to ask its regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission, to approve a sixth rate hike.

USPS in January raised the price of a first-class stamp from 66 to 68 cents. The agency is settling into a familiar routine of biannual rate increases for its monopoly mail products each January and July.

Mike Plunkett, former USPS manager for pricing strategy and innovation and manager of retail alliances, now president of PostCom, said the study shows USPS has “underestimated the rate at which they would lose [mail] volume.”

“The size of the [price] increases — and almost as importantly, having two increases a year — has changed mailer behavior, because of the magnitude of the increases, and the fact that now twice a year, mailers have to go to their finance people and say, ‘Hey, rates are going up again.’ Twice a year, you have to have another discussion about how can we possibly get out of the mail for a more affordable channel,” Plunkett said in a recent interview.

Rafe Morrissey, GCA’s vice president of government affairs, said the repeated rate hikes force businesses to ask themselves whether “to mail or not to mail.”

“These volume declines really represent an existential challenge for the Postal Service and the industry that depends on it,” Morrissey said.

The Postal Regulatory Commission in December 2020 gave USPS the flexibility to set monopoly mail prices above the rate of inflation.

USPS expects mail decline to continue, calls study ‘deeply flawed’

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has repeatedly said USPS is making full use of this pricing flexibility, which the agency requested more than 15 years ago, when the agency started reporting major annual net losses.

DeJoy says USPS needs to keep raising higher mail prices at an “uncomfortable rate,” to offset past inflation and correct for 15 years of a defective pricing model.

Meanwhile, USPS sees a continued drop in first-class mail volume, and expects those trends will continue.

DeJoy, in a December 2023 letter to congressional leaders, said total mail volume fell by 42% between 2007 and 2020. Total mail revenue, during that same period, fell from $60.6 billion in 2007 to $38.7 in 2020 —a 36% drop.

“This trend will continue,” DeJoy told lawmakers.

Despite a steady decline in mail volume, it remains a significant source of revenue for the agency’s bottom line. According to the study, market-dominant mail accounts for 56% of its revenue.

The Postal Service’s package business brought in more than $31 billion in revenue last year—more than 40% of its total revenue.

DeJoy says USPS growing its package business is the key to turning around the agency’s long-term financial problems.

USPS spokesperson David Coleman said in a statement that, “as inflationary pressures on operating expenses continue and the effects of a previously defective pricing model are still being felt, price adjustments have provided the Postal Service with much-needed net revenue to achieve the financial stability sought by its Delivering for America 10-year plan.”

Coleman said that to evaluate price elasticity, “the Postal Service continually updates and improves its estimates of how mail volume responds to price changes and other factors, and those estimates have been filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission for decades.”

Coleman added that USPS prices “remain among the most affordable in the world,” and that “NDP’s critique and proposal appear to be deeply flawed.”

Is a ‘short-term’ approach creating ‘long-term’ challenges?

USPS estimates demand for its monopoly mail products through a model that includes 40 custom equations.

However, the report claims USPS is basing its stamp hikes on a demand model that underestimates the elasticity, or price sensitivity, of its consumers.

“Generally speaking, the Postal Service’s market-dominant products are demand-inelastic, meaning when you raise prices, you generally get more revenue and don’t lose as much volume as you would if demand was elastic,” Plunkett said.

The report finds USPS customers are mailing less in response to the rate hikes, and at a higher rate than what the agency expected.

“They’re seeing larger decreases than their models predicted, because of that error,” Plunkett said. “They’ve taken a short-term, aggressive approach that has created some long-term challenges.”

The report also warns that customers who now send less mail because of higher prices are less likely to return to their old habits, even if prices stabilize.

“Ignoring price sensitivity may boost revenue in the short run, but USPS must retain volume to achieve and maintain solvency in the long run,” the report states.

Morrissey said GCA previously worked with USPS over a three-year period to grow greeting card mail volumes through cooperative marketing. But those gains went away when USPS raised prices.

“That immediately reversed those volume gains and took them below the preceding three years where we started,” Morrissey said.

DeJoy recently outlined its plans to Congress to cut costs by $5 billion over the next two years, and grow revenue by roughly the same amount. He told lawmakers these plans are necessary to get USPS back on track to achieving its “break-even” goals.

But Plunkett said those plans to break even are harder to achieve, when mail volume is falling faster than what USPS has predicted.

“When you get a sudden, unexpected decline in volume, the Postal Service is not able to keep up with that,” he said.

Plunkett added that USPS labor costs, which account for about 70% of total USPS costs, haven’t fallen as quickly, in response to a decline in mail volume.

“As a result, they’ve deepened the hole that they’re in, and have made it that much harder for them to get back to break even. In fact, looking at where we’re headed for 2024, it’s hard to see a path back to breakeven anymore,” Plunkett said.

Steve Kearney, executive director of Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, and a former USPS treasurer and vice president of pricing, said volume declines in 2023 and projected for this year are much larger than all previous years, except for the Great Recession in 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Taking out those two years, market-dominant volume dropped an annual average of 2.4% between 2008 and 2022. That’s much less than the 9% decrease USPS saw in 2023, and the 8% drop in volume the agency is projected to see this year.

“The study verifies what many mailers already know in their guts. The Postal Service is damaging its current finances, its long-term solvency, and many of the mailers that fund the agency with market-dominant mail. It would be very irresponsible to continue digging a deeper hole based on flawed information,” Kearney said.

Kearney said another rate hike in July could be an “ugly tipping point” for many mailers.

“It will be a big mistake if postal management and the Governors continue to make and approve rate increase decisions based on flawed models that measure history well but have no track record with the current practice of above-inflation rate hikes at a semi-annual frequency,” Kearney said.

Incentives to grow mail volume ‘not the best success story’

As for the Postal Regulatory Commission, Plunkett said “they’ve been very slow to react to what is an unfolding catastrophe.”

PRC officials, however, say that efforts to incentivize mail volume growth over the past few decades have run into a few challenges.

USPS, since the early 2000s, has entered into specialized contracts, called negotiated service agreements, with mailers and shippers. Under these NSAs, USPS offers a discount to businesses or organizations that commit to sending a large volume of mail or packages.

Congress, in the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, codified the Postal Service’s ability to offer NSAs.

“The idea is to allow some innovation, to encourage mail volume, and keep mailers in the system,” a PRC official said in a recent interview.

The Postal Regulatory Commission, since the 2006 law, has approved only 10 negotiate service agreements for mail, but has approved thousands of NSAs for its competitive package businesses.

PRC officials said half of those mail NSAs didn’t result in a net financial benefit for USPS, and were stopped. Only two of the remaining five NSAs, they added, clearly made money, while the remaining three produced “unclear results.”

“They have not been the best success story,” the PRC official said.

USPS faces a lower bar for its regulator to approve an NSA for packages, compared to offering a similar discount on bulk mail delivery.

The PRC official said an NSA for packages needs to cover the cost of the product offered and contribute to the Postal Service’s institutional costs to get approved.

“There have been a ton of them,” the PRC official said. “The postmaster general is really emphasizing packages. And we’ve seen that with the flow of NSAs, which has been increasing, and the commission has been turning those around very fast.”

However, the regulator needs more evidence to approve an NSA for mail.  The NSA has to cover its own costs, but also improve the net financial position of USPS or improve its performance, and without causing any harm to the overall postal market.

USPS, as part of any mail NSA, also has to ensure that the same deal is available to similarly situated mailers.

“The overall policy goal here is to make sure that these deals with a particular party don’t disadvantage other users of the mail system,” a PRC official said.

The PRC official said most proposed NSAs for monopoly mail products lack evidence of how the deal will improve the Postal Service’s  net financial position.”

“We’re aware of the issues. Is there going to be a magic bullet that solves this issue of mail volume? No. Can this be part of the answer? Absolutely,” the official said.

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Nothing happened over the weekend in Congress, as a Friday deadline is still looming. Departs that need funding include: Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Labor and the Defense. To find out what is ahead for the week, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Bloomberg Government Deputy News Director Loren Duggan.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin  So, what’s ahead for this week? Again, that deadline is Friday at midnight. Here’s Bloomberg Government Deputy News director Loren Duggan. And I guess we were expecting something to happen last Friday or over the weekend. What went wrong? Or did they just go skiing or something?

Loren Duggan Well, they were talking most of the weekend, and the holdup will be a familiar one to your listeners. The border and immigration policy has once again come into the debate and slowed down attempts to reach a deal on an important piece of legislation. Last week, there had been talk about maybe punting questions about the Homeland Security Department just doing a continuing resolution for that as part of this larger bill that would fund those agencies that you mentioned. But here we are this morning looking for bill text and not seeing it. And that will complicate efforts to keep the government open past Friday night when that all important midnight deadline hits.

Tom Temin Yes, I guess for the Republicans that want to tie the two together, this is their last chance in a sense. So, they didn’t get it. That’s kind of their version of border control and immigration policy in the first round of deadlines a couple weeks ago. So, this is this is their star they have to hitch to it sounds like.

Loren Duggan At least the next one, because there obviously is another government funding deadline coming at September 30th. And there’s still this open question about what to do with the Ukraine and Israel aid packages. But when it comes to this bill, there is a deadline and there is a request from the Biden administration for some more money. And it sounded like over the weekend it was about a $1.5 billion infusion. They were looking for Republicans have push back on the characterization of their, of their reaction to that. But what we’re talking about here is some more money, really, for the ICE agents and CBP agents that are dealing with this border crisis. And Democrats say if they don’t get more money, it’s not going to make the situation any better. And they have pointed to concerns, their concerns that Republicans are just trying to slow down action and keep things a little chaotic down at the border. But I think we’re going to hear a lot of that rhetoric around this, and we’ll be waiting to see what the final bill actually does whenever we see it.

Tom Temin Right. And the Defense Department is still hanging in the balance here, and there’s no chance they would separate Health and Human services and Defense.

Loren Duggan Right. And that was sort of this idea that maybe we have the bills through September 30th for the other five of the spending measures and then maybe do a stopgap for DHS. But that idea that was floated last week doesn’t seem to have taken hold. But you’re right, Defense Department, it’s the largest single appropriations bill. We already have the defense authorization bill, which sets policy, but this is the actual money. And then there’s the labor HHS education bill, another major one, funding three of the big social agencies that Democrats in particular want to pour a lot of funding into. So, I think we could see five plus a CR, but we’ll have to see how this shakes out as the week continues.

Tom Temin But it’s fair to say this is going to be their top-of-mind thing that they do in this coming week.

Loren Duggan Absolutely. Averting a shutdown before a two-week break is definitely going to be their top priority.

Tom Temin Then what’s kind of strange about this is that the one budget is lapping the other, with the administration having released kind of a talk about a wish list that is in the president’s proposal coming out. When will Congress take that one up? If they will?

Loren Duggan They’re going to do the early part of it this week. They’re having some key hearings with the Energy secretary and the HHS secretary, Treasury secretary, and the OMB director to review this document and go through, I hate to say, go through the motions, but at least go through the tradition of bringing cabinet agencies and department agencies up to defend what the president has proposed. I think we are unlikely to see any fast action on this, especially with the two-week break coming up. But appropriators do have to kind of pivot pretty soon here to start writing the bills and get them through their subcommittees and committees, because they do want to have some sort of progress made before they leave in September for the election. I think we’re definitely heading towards a continuing resolution at some point and maybe dealing with these questions later in the year, but you want to lay down your markers at some point, to kind of guide that process.

Tom Temin Yeah. So with a detailed administration budget proposal out what they’re saying to the American public anyway, and to all of the federal employees that watch this stuff carefully to see if their agencies will be funded or they cannot possibly get 12 appropriations bills hammered out in six months, is what they’re saying, pretty much.

Loren Duggan I mean, we’re sitting here on March 18th and still dealing with the bills that should have been signed by September 30th if the process was followed to the regular order. And clearly it hasn’t been. So, the one thing we have going for us this year is we do have a topline number in effect for fiscal 2025. They had agreed to that last year. The question is, are they going to have a side deal for how much they can spend around that or stick some more money in there? That’ll be the question. But there are some things that point to it being easier. But, you know, past history also has to be taken into account.

Tom Temin And what about the foreign policy aid front? Israel, Ukraine and so forth? Where does that line now that they’re getting this close to the deadline and they’ve got the immigration thing looming.

Loren Duggan That is a separate issue. So, they can deal with the six regular spending bills, whether it’s full year or CR, this week, and then come back to Ukraine and Israel. There is pressure to get that done, leaving for a two-week break, given the conditions of war that are going on in both those places, is making some people uncomfortable. There are these discharge petitions to try to force action. Neither one of those has enough support yet. So, we’ll see if there’s any movement on the part of the speaker who on Friday sounded like maybe he was open to a vote at some point. I don’t know if we’ll see that before the spring break, but that will be, I think, the next issue down for, for lawmakers certainly is dealing with that.

Tom Temin And it’s hard to tell which is worse climate wise or weather wise, winter or summer. And the House is looking at energy and energy policy this week.

Loren Duggan That’s right. They came out of their GOP policy retreat at the Greenbrier with this energy agenda. And it’s about stopping Biden from imposing a fracking ban, repealing some of the programs that Democrats put in place last year around emissions, also saying a carbon tax would be a bad idea. So, it’s kind of this package of GOP anti Biden energy policies that they’re going to advance over the course of the week while they wait to vote on that spending bill and get that done. But it’s certainly when you’re heading to spring break and travel is on people’s minds. It’s one of those things they’re trying to ring the bell on before they head for the hills.

Tom Temin In the Senate. There are some nominees going on to.

Loren Duggan Yeah, they’re continuing to process in particular right now judicial nominees trying to get those through, continue to, you know, tally up the numbers of Biden nominees that get through. And then committees will also be looking at some nominees, including for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. There’s a trio of nominees going for their hearing this week. So, behind the scenes that nominations, sausage making continues to happen as people are brought before committees and then sent to the floor.

Tom Temin Yes. Because, you know, this is the time when pretty soon, some of the first term appointees, whether there’s a second term or not, nobody knows this is when there’s could be a lot of turnovers at that level. So, we could see some vacancies at the top because of the nomination process. And then the confirmation process. That could be a year of agencies having no confirmed head.

Loren Duggan That’s right. And we have the Labor Department, which has had an acting secretary for a long time, Julie Sue, who was nominated to be the secretary. But it hasn’t advanced. And then Marcia Fudge, who’s at HUD, said last week that she would be stepping down. So, you’re beginning to see that churn start of people who’ve been here three years and change and are maybe ready to move on before the election.

Tom Temin And by the way, I’ve lost count. But there are still a couple of recent resignations. What is the balance? Democrats and Republicans right now in the House look like it’s.

Loren Duggan 219 to 212. I want to say it’ll be 218 Republicans at the end of the week because Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican who had already retired, he’s stepping away. But now we’re seeing special elections happen that will fill some of those gaps. But it’s just up and down that will be continuing to watch. Because when you get very narrow, any two people or three people can band together with Democrats and stop what Republicans want to do. So that margin is very important.

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Even though FOIA backlogs have been on the rise since 2012, many agencies lack detailed goals and milestones for addressing the logjam of requests, according to a Government Accountability Office report released this week. Agencies are generally required to process FOIA requests within 20 days, and a request is considered backlog when it takes longer than the required time.

Out of 14 agencies directed to develop plans in 2023, only two includes goals and none included any timelines for carrying out their actions, GAO’s report found. The auditors noted the backlogs have led to extended wait times for public records requests. The governmentwide FOIA backlog sits at more than 200,000 cases.

“FOIA is a critical tool for members of the public to access information about the federal government’s actions and decisions,” the report states. “However, the persistent and growing government-wide request backlog undermines transparency and accountability.”

The auditor recommended DoJ’s Office of Information Policy (OIP), which oversees FOIA across government, develop new guidance to ensure FOIA backlog reduction plans include clear goals, milestones and timelines.

“Including such information in backlog reduction plans along with, as necessary, planned actions to allocate staff with needed skills, could help ensure that backlogs are addressed,” GAO’s report states.

In response to the report, OIP staff told the auditors they recently directed select DoJ components develop plans that outline new actions they will take to reduce backlogs to fiscal 2018 levels.

Now, OIP staff is developing guidance for all agencies in 2024 on “how to develop and implement an effective backlog reduction plan,” GAO’s report states.

Staffing FOIA offices has been a particular challenge for many agencies. The FOIA Advisory Committee is advancing new recommendations that would suggest the Office of Personnel Management grant agencies direct-hire authority to quickly fill FOIA positions.

The GAO report noted the staffing issues as well, and suggested OIP ensure agencies are detailing personnel needs in their backlog reduction plans.

“Advising agencies to conduct a similar evaluation to identify the staff resources needed to support backlog reduction efforts outlined in their plans could help ensure agencies allocate the staff needed to implement such efforts,” GAO’s report states.

FOIA data reliability issues

GAO’s report also found issues with the reliability of average FOIA processing times reported by some agencies. In some cases, agencies were reporting an unweighted average when they were required to report a weighted average.

“For one agency, doing so understated the number of days it took to process its complex requests by about 10 percent,” GAO’s report states. “For the other two agencies, reporting the unweighted average overstated the number of days it took to process their complex requests by about 40 percent.”

Several lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, responded to GAO’s recent FOIA report. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said the report “not only outlines the key challenges that agencies face in their efforts to process FOIA requests in a timely manner, but it also highlights a pathway to transparency and regaining public trust in our institutions.”

“Congress must ensure agencies have the resources needed to live up to FOIA’s promise,” Raskin added.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said report “should serve as a starting point to reduce the backlog of FOIA requests so Americans can continue to hold those who represent them accountable.”

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