Federal Drive

Tuesday morning federal headlines – Aug. 7, 2012

Agencies finally get guidance on fiscal 2014 budgets. And the federal government saw an uptick in retirements last month.

Federal News Network Staff

August 7, 2012 7:30 am

4 min read

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.

Agencies finally have their fiscal 2014 budget preparation guidance. The Office of Management and Budget sent out its annual 778-page, A-11 update Friday giving agencies about six weeks to finalize their budget requests. OMB usually sends agencies this guidance in June. A-11 covers a broad range of budget requirements from updates on agency financial management systems to justification for office rental payments to apportionment planning. OMB also wants to know how agencies are cutting travel and taming credit card spending. The administration is asking agencies to explain how they are moving to the cloud and reinvesting savings into innovative IT. (White House)
Federal retirement claims ticked up slightly in July. But the Office of Personnel Management managed to process more claims than expected, so its backlog went down. Some 8,600 federal employees filed for retirement last month. OPM managed to process more than 12,000 claims. OPM has been using manual processing and added more people to do it after Congress complained about the growing backlog. Since January, it’s managed to meet its processing goals for most most months. The claims backlog stands at just under 45,000, down 27 percent from levels reached in December of last year. (Federal News Radio)
A leading Republican lawmaker wants federal inspectors general to open up to Congress a little more. California’s Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote a letter to 73 IGs. He says they don’t notify Congress often enough when they launch major investigations. Issa asks the IGs to describe their practices for keeping Congress up to date. Issa says he’d like to establish an understanding between Congress and the IGs for faster reporting of agency misdeeds. (Federal News Radio)
The Defense Department has given Montgomery County a $40 million grant to safely link two major federal facilities separated by a six-lane highway. County officials will construct a tunnel under Rockville Pike so people can walk or bike between the National Institutes of Health main campus and the Walter Reed National Medical Center. NIH is on the southbound side of the Pike, where the Metro station is. Walter Reed is on the northbound side. The Metro station will also get new elevators. (Release from Rep. Chris Van Hollen)
The Senate approved four of the five nominees for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board late last week, but not its chairman. Rachel Brand, Elisabeth Cook, Jim Dempsey and Judge Patricia Wald can take their seats on the board and begin work overseeing the privacy and civil liberty impacts of executive branch programs. President Barack Obama’s nominee to be chairman, David Medine, will continue to wait. The President nominated Medine in December. Congress initially created the privacy and civil liberties board in 2004 based on recommendations from the 9/11 Commission. The board has been dormant since 2007. (White House)
Officials from the FDA commissioner on down were aware of a project to monitor email of Food and Drug Administration scientists. The monitoring started in 2010, after officials suspected the scientists of leaking confidential information. The scientists had complained that safety concerns were being ignored. The Wall Street Journal reports, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and medical devices director Jeffrey Suren both knew about the surveillance. It was set in motion by Lori Davis, who at the time was FDA’s chief information officer. The information on who knew what was detailed in a letter to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. (Wall Street Journal)
The Recovery Board will pilot a new approach to grants reporting. The goal is to determine whether a single electronic data collection system for government grants is possible. The Grants Reporting Informational Project will require recipients to report only one time on their grants. This would replace what some call the the burdensome requirement of filing separate reports with each agency involved in the grant. Twenty-three agencies hand out more than $600 billion a year on grants to 1,600 organizations. The Office of Management and Budget also is trying to get a better handle on the grant-making process. OMB controller Danny Werfel told a Senate hearing last month the CFO community is improving the data in USASpending.gov around grants to include who is getting the grants, for what and what the program’s status is. (Recovery Board)