Agency Oversight

  • The Pentagon will begin tracking how much time its acquisition managers spend performing and responding to oversight in an effort to remove "non-value-added" processes from the procurement system.

    May 28, 2013
  • On this week's Capital Impact show, Bloomberg Government analysts discuss the billions of dollars spent on intelligence operations by the federal government, and the latest jobs report. May 23, 2013

    May 23, 2013
  • President Barack Obama will nominate Dan Tangherlini, the acting administrator of the General Services Administration, to officially fill that position. Tangherlini stepped into that post amid the April 2012 conference spending scandal at the agency.

    May 22, 2013
  • Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and the GSA inspector general released separate, but related, reports that show GSA abused its authority to give Senior Executive Service (SES) members bonuses between 2009 and 2011. GSA official said they have since fixed these problems. McCaskill also found that on average the Labor Department, the Navy and the National Science Foundation handed out more than one bonus per SES employee.

    May 17, 2013
  • The Obama administration's proposed fiscal 2014 budget called for consolidating or eliminating 116 of the government's 226 STEM initiatives and centralizing the coordination of STEM programs under just three agencies: the Education Department, the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. The administration's STEM proposal is one of the government's first visible steps in reversing some of the duplication that riddles the federal landscape and which some lawmakers have seized on as examples of government waste.

    May 17, 2013
  • The Office of Personnel Management has made steady progress chipping away at a longstanding backlog of retirement claims. But Oversight Committee lawmakers and other government watchdogs remain concerned that the absence of a long-term plan to overhaul the mostly paper-based process combined with across-the-board budget cuts and a lack of strong leadership within OPM could stall or derail the progress the agency has made.

    May 09, 2013
  • Two senators from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee want to change Senate rules in an attempt to make sure new federal programs or initiatives in proposed legislation don't overlap with existing efforts. Earlier this month, two House members introduced a measure that would require House committees of jurisdiction to hold oversight hearings on an annual report from the Government Accountability Office detailing government duplication.

    April 29, 2013
  • The agency also puts former Region 8 Commissioner of the Public Building Service on administrative leave until the MSPB Board makes a decision on the appeal.

    April 15, 2013
  • Congress approved a bill Friday to eliminate expanded financial-disclosure reporting requirements for Senior Executive Service members, just days before the new requirements were to go into effect. Both the House and Senate approved the measure by unanimous consent. The expanded reporting requirements were set to go into effect Monday.

    April 12, 2013
  • The Office of Personnel Management told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the 50-year-old law creating the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) has hurt its ability to keep the FEHBP up-to-date. The agency estimates billions in savings over the next decade should Congress approve the White House's proposals in the 2014 budget request.

    April 11, 2013
  • A new report says a law requiring the online posting of senior federal executives' financial information would likely impinge on employees' privacy and wouldn't do much to deter conflicts of interest. The National Academy of Public Administration was tasked by Congress with studying the STOCK Act — short for "Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge" — in response to concerns about privacy and identify theft.

    March 28, 2013
  • The Office of Special Counsel is "deeply concerned" about the implications of a federal court ruling that stripped low-level Defense Department employees of their ability to appeal suspensions and demotions outside the agency. OSC, which filed an amicus brief earlier this month with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, is worried the ruling could have a chilling effect on whistleblowers.

    March 25, 2013
  • Paul Prouty, the former GSA Region 8 commissioner, won his appeal of the agency's decision to fire him in the wake of the Western Regions Conference scandal last April. The Merit Systems Protection Board's administrative judge found "no evidence" of wrongdoing by Prouty.

    March 13, 2013
  • In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen's conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

    March 06, 2013