The Morning Federal Newscast is a daily compilation of the stories you hear new message about Government – It’s not all bad. As a candidate, Barack Obama pledged to “make government cool again.” Now, The President appears to be embracing a humbler goal: making the case that government is necessary. In town hall meetings and Democratic National Committee fund raisers the President has begun to make the case for Government saying that there’s a limit to what private companies can do _ and it doesn’t include building roads or paying for public defense.
Threats against members of Congress are on the rise. Washington Post reports, 42 threats occurred in the first three months of the year, compared with 15 in the last three months of 2009. Figures come from the Senate Sergeant at Arms office. Most of the threats appear to be coming from people opposed to the health care reform bill the president signed into law last month. The threats range from vulgar language to death threats.
OPM promises to shave up to three weeks from the federal hiring process. Personnel chief John Berry says the saved time will stem from shared databases for job applicants. OPM will screen certified candidates for agencies against databases that have been set up for 12 of the 14 most common government positions. The entire process will take two to three business days, and all agencies need to do is ask OPM for help.
NASA may not be going to the moon anytime soon and its space shuttles are about to be retired, but it could conceivably increase the number of agency jobs under a new reorganization. According to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden the agency would spend $5.8 billion over five years to open an office at Kennedy Space Center that would oversee development of commercial space taxis to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station. It would also invest $1.9 billion through 2015 to transform the center into a “21st Century Launch Complex and manage among other initiatives.
We hear a lot about money-savings from cloud computing, but could that come at a price for jobs in federal IT shops? Brookings Institution expert Darrell West says that much of the projected savings will come from reductions in federal IT jobs, as agencies outsource and reduce the number of servers they maintain. But NextGov reports not everyone agreed with the study findings. Details were unvieled at a cloud computing forum this week.
Health IT brings about billions of dollars saved for Veterans Affairs. A study published in the journal Health Affairs says VA saved a net $3 billion dollars over the 10-year period beginning in 1997. Federal Computer Week reports most of that came from reductions in duplicate testing and medical errors. The rest is attributed to lighter workloads and operating costs.
Privacy advocates are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate online advertising that gathers information about people and combines it with other sources of data so that ads can be targeted more closely. The groups say data gathering for this form of advertising is a threat to privacy. Yesterday’s complaint by the Center for Digital Democracy, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the World Privacy Forum specifically cites online advertising by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it intends to move forward quickly with key recommendations in its national broadband plan even without the legal authority to regulate high-speed Internet access. FCC lawyers are pondering an appeals court ruling that limits the FCC’s ability to regulate Internet service provides. In a blog post, FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick said the court has not prevented the agency from trying to ensure open Internet access.
** We wrap up our week long series — HR: Reinvented — we’ll talk to former OPM Director Linda Springer about some of the challenges changing the government’s HR systems and processes.
** And there have been a number of stories about how much FEDS make, but what about salaries on Capitol Hill? We’ll take a peek at the salaries of some congressional staffers.
In an April 5, 2010 photo provided by Disney, space shuttle Discovery is seen lifting off over Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The pre-dawn launch with the crew of STS-131 occurred at 6:21 a.m. EDT in nearby Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/Disney, Kent Phillips)
