- Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville is holding up the promotion of Lieutenant General Ronald Clark to lead Army forces in the Pacific. Tuberville cites concerns surrounding Clark’s actions during Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization in January as the reason for blocking his promotion. Pentagon Press Secretary Major General Pat Ryder urged the Senate to confirm Clark’s nomination, saying he is “exactly the kind of leader” the Defense Department needs. Clark currently serves as Austin’s top aid. Last year, Tuberville held up military and civilian promotions for nearly ten months as a protest to the Pentagon’s abortion policy.
- After just one day, a discharge petition on a long-time Social Security bill is already more than halfway toward forcing a House floor vote. The petition is on the Social Security Fairness Act, which aims to repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset. WEP and GPO reduce and sometimes eliminate Social Security benefits for certain federal retirees and other public servants. So far, 119 Congress members have signed the bill’s discharge petition. If that petition reaches 218 signatures, it’ll be forced to a floor vote in the House.
- A former IRS employee pled guilty in federal district court to extorting government contractors. The Justice Department says Satbir Thukral was a computer engineer and supervised various IT contracts for the IRS where he threatened a contractor and subcontractor if they didn’t pay him. He extorted one subcontractor for more than 120 thousand dollars between 2018 and 2020. Thukral also extorted prime contractor for a second cash payment for his role in serving on a selection panel for a $200 million contract. Thukral faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison for his guilty plea of accepting bribes by a public official.
- The Senate is finally getting started on of filling the vacancy at the top of the National Guard’s leadership chain. The Senate Armed Services Committee hears testimony today from Lt. Gen. Steven Nordhaus, President Biden’s nominee to lead the National Guard Bureau. Nordhaus currently commands the First Air Force, the Air Force component of U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Space Command. His nomination has been awaiting Senate attention since July. The National Guard Bureau has been led by an acting chief, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs, since a month ago, when Gen. Daniel Hokanson retired.
- The Pentagon’s first-ever assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy will focus on developing better ways to measure cybersecurity progress across the Defense Department. Michael Sulmeyer, who’s been in this role for only a month, says the Defense Department, along with the rest of the federal government, needs to focus on the broader return on investment to measure cybersecurity progress. “One of the things I’ve been talking with my team about and trying to talk with other partners across the government about is, ‘How do we keep score of ourselves?’ It’s one thing to count the number of operations or to count the number of hunt-forwards. There is power in quantity, but increasingly, how we talk about our return on the nation’s investment, not just DoD, but the cyber community, more broadly, private and public sector.” The Senate confirmed Sulmeyer as the Pentagon’s first cyber policy chief last month.
- The House Homeland Security Committee is advancing legislation that would extend the Department of Homeland Security’s other transaction authority through 2027. The ‘‘Producing Advanced Technologies for Homeland Security Act” passed by the committee yesterday would also require DHS to notify Congress when it makes an OTA award involving artificial intelligence. The homeland security panel also approved a bill to reauthorize DHS Joint Task Forces as well as legislation that would require FEMA to improve its outreach for preparedness grants.
- The Social Security Administration says House appropriators’ plans for fiscal 2025 spending would devastate the agency’s workforce. House appropriators are currently looking to cut SSA spending $500 million below the agency’s current 2024 budget. In a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley warned that the agency could lose more than 3,000 employees under the House GOP spending plan for next fiscal year. “And that’s just in the SSA staffing. The [Disability Determination Services] would be cut by 1,500, the IT funding would be barely lights on,” O’Malley said. By comparison, O’Malley says although the Senate’s relatively larger spending plan still falls short of the White House budget request, it would be enough to at least start on some of the modernization work the agency has planned. Congress has until the end of September to reach a stop-gap spending agreement and avoid a government shutdown.
- The Postal Service is putting an end to discounted rates for shipping consolidators, like UPS and DHL, that use USPS to deliver packages for the final leg of delivery. Those shipping consolidators put about two billion packages through the USPS network each year. That’s about a quarter of its annual package volume. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says the move will boost package revenue for USPS.
- House lawmakers are preparing to score agencies on their anti-fraud programs. The scorecard will measure anti-fraud efforts at agencies like the Social Security Administration and the IRS. Lawmakers on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee spent the last year developing the scorecard. But they say Congress still needs more data to measure agency progress on combating fraud and improper payments. Lawmakers are also considering whether to extend the authorities of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. The PRAC expires next September.
- Federal contracting officers will be getting updated standards and specifications for buying sustainable and climate friendly products in more than a dozen new categories. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing adding 14 standards and ecolabels to the current recommendations across three new product categories: healthcare, laboratories and clothing and uniforms as well as expanding the existing food service ware sub-category. These new recommendations come as part of EPA’s first comprehensive review of the
Recommendations of Specifications, Standards and Ecolabels for Federal Purchasing in a decade. EPA is accepting comments on its proposal through early October. - Federal employees are testing out WeWork-style coworking spaces across the country. But how well is the program working? In just over a year, over 900 federal employees visited federal coworking spaces more than 1,800 times. The federal government’s landlord, the General Services Administration, set up six coworking locations across the country where feds could work remotely. But the Government Accountability Office says GSA needs better, more accurate data to determine whether the program is a success, and should scale up. GSA officials say coworking spaces are part of its strategy to cut down on underutilized government office space.
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