Thursday morning federal headlines – July 19, 2012

The Morning Federal Newscast is a daily compilation of the stories you hear Federal Drive hosts Tom Temin and Emily Kopp discuss throughout the show each day. The Newscast is designed to give FederalNewsRadio.com users more information about the stories you hear on the air.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs is promising an automated system to process disability claims will be up and running by the end of next year. Sixteen regional offices will have the system by the end of September. That’s what Allison Hickey, VA’s undersecretary for Benefits, told a House panel. She explained how VA hoped to tackle its growing backlog of claims. She blamed stacks of paper that slow down examiners. Hickey said, even though VA was processing more claims than ever, the number coming in was even bigger. VA has 843,000 claims waiting to process. Two thirds of them have been sitting for more than four months. (Federal News Radio)
• An influential Republican and the government’s top contractor both went to Capitol Hill this week to urge action against sequestration. Former Vice President and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told Senate Republicans the automatic cuts would devastate technology development and readiness. Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens testified before a House panel. He said Lockheed would lose 10,000 jobs if sequestration were to occur, and in a memo to staff, he said employees may get notices of possible layoffs or plant closings later this year. An aerospace industry report released earlier this week estimated the across-the-board cuts would cost more than 2 million jobs nationwide. By some estimates, it would raise unemployment by 1.5 percent. (Federal News Radio)
• Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) plans to introduce a new version of federal spending transparency legislation. It would do away with the independent Government Accountability and Transparency Board, reported NextGov. The current bill would require agencies to report their spending to the GAT Board. The board would post spending data on a public website.The White House has argued, that adds too much expense and complexity to financial reporting. (NextGov)
• Federal employees in New York are planning their return to Ground Zero. The General Services Administration is renting six floors at One World Trade Center in Manhattan, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. GSA said the deal showed the government’s commitment to reviving the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The agency’s lease will begin in 2015. Construction is supposed to finish the year before. A little more than half of the office space already has been leased. Magazine publisher Conde Nast is moving its headquarters into 25 floors there. (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
• The House easily passed a bill requiring the Obama administration to provide details on how it would implement sequestration. The automatic budget cuts would occur Jan. 3 unless Congress comes up with a better budget plan. The Sequestration Transparency Act passed with only two members voting no. The Office of Management and Budget has resisted coming up with a plan for how it would deal with $1.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years. The House already passed an alternative deficit-reduction plan. But the Senate hasn’t taken it up. (Federal News Radio)
• The FBI was so concerned about political correctness, it failed to fully investigate an Army psychiatrist. That’s what a new study said, describing how the FBI was aware Maj. Nidal Hasan had terrorist sympathies. That doctor is now on trial for killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. But agents were afraid of backlash if they investigated a Muslim American soldier. Former FBI director William Webster studied the incident at the request of Robert Mueller, the current director. An unclassified version is due out this week. (Federal News Radio)
• Consolidating data centers may not save much money or energy. That’s the bottom line of a new report to Congress on the federal initiative to make computing more cost-effective and green. The Congressional Research Service said the use of federal data centers would grow. In the short term, energy use might decrease because of consolidation. But then it could plateau before rising again. The report said it was hard to know whether the upfront costs of consolidating data centers would save money in the long run. It said most federal data centers do not keep good records of their energy use. (Congressional Research Service)
• The National Guard can keep sponsoring Dale Earnhardt Jr. The House rejected a proposed ban on military sponsorship of professional sports, according to the ban would have saved $72 million. But lawmakers from Southern states spoke out against the idea after heavy campaigning by both the Guard and NASCAR. The National Guard Association’s Gus Hargett told us yesterday: the marketing is a branding tool that instills pride in the Guard. It’s not the only military service to recruit this way. The Marine Corps sponsors ultimate fighting championships and bass fishing. The Army sponsors drag racing. (Federal News Radio)

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