Federal Drive

Thursday Morning Federal Newscast – April 14th

The Morning Federal Newscast is a daily compilation of the stories you hear Federal Drive hosts Tom Temin and Amy Morris discuss throughout the show each day. T...

Federal News Network Staff

April 14, 2011 9:23 am

4 min read

The Morning Federal Newscast is a daily compilation of the stories you hear Federal Drive hosts Tom Temin and Amy Morris 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 President has outlined his plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. In the half-hour speech, he didn’t directly talk about federal pay and benefits. Obama proposed both spending cuts and higher taxes, saying are essential to his bringing down the deficit. He promised to end to Bush-era tax cuts. While preserving Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as they are structured now. The president calls his approach more balanced than the one proposed last week by Republican House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. The president says his plan borrows from recommendations of his own deficit-reduction commission.
The Labor Department is recommending a less costly approach to government workers compensation. GovExec reports, at a hearing, a spokesman recommended a uniform pay scale of 70 percent of base pay for workers disabled by injury. Current law pays federal employees 66 and two thirds percent of their pay, but 75 percent if they have dependent family members. Most receive the 75 percent level. That’s in addition to medical expenses reimbursement. Florida Republican congressman Mike Ross complains, disability payments too often become a default retirement plan.
The House and Senate are ready to vote on legislation cutting almost $40 billion from the current year’s budget, but President Obama and the GOP are both eager to move on to multiyear fiscal plans that cut trillions instead of billions. Later in the day, House Republicans are launching debate on a 2012-and-beyond plan that promises to cut the long-term budget blueprint President Obama laid out in February by more than $6 trillion.
The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program is finding problems with some professional contracting services used under TARP. Among the findings: They say Treasury paid legal fees to law firm Venable without checking the bills for accuracy. The report released today finds the office of financial stability did not have detailed requirements or instructions on how Venable should prepare their billing. The vague invoicing let to administrative charges not allowed under the contract and may have led to inaccurate payments. This is part of an overall audit of Treasury’s contracting services underway. The SIGTARP lists four recommendations, including, adopting the best practices of other federal entities for reviewing it’s legal fee bills.
The Obama administration plans to shut down more than a hundred of its nearly 2,100 data centers by December. The move is part of a larger effort to shutter 800 centers by 2015. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told a Senate Subcommittee that his office wants to move aggressively to reduce unused federal assets. In that same hearing, David McClure with GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies said they expect to reduce data center costs by two million dollars a year. Federal Times reports that CIOs agree that cultural change is the biggest hurdle.
A senior Republican lawmaker is optimistic the Obama administration’s transparency websites can be kept online. Sites such as data dot gov may shut down because of budget cuts in the 2011 budget. But Darrell Issa, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he’s personally committed to keeping the sites open. One way would be allowing agencies leeway to reprogram the money they do have. Issa says he begged fellow Republicans to fund e-government initiatives at a higher level. Funding was reduced from $34 million in 2010 to $8 million this year.
Treasury Department officials have been meeting with service members and their families to better understand financial challenges in the military community. The head of the Office of Service Member Affairs in the Treasury Department’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been traveling to military posts throughout the country. Holly Petraeus is gathering feedback that should help the office accommodate the needs of the military when it officially opens in July.
The FAA adds overnight staffing to airport control towers. The move follows a spike in reports of sleeping controllers. The latest incident involved an ambulance flight whose pilot couldn’t obtain landing permission at a Nevada airport. Now, overnight operations will be staffed by two controllers, not one. The FAA also suspends four air traffic controllers for dozing off in front of their screens. Administrator Randy Babbit said the agency will review the professionalism of its 15,000 controllers.