Federal Drive

Thursday Morning Federal Newscast – June 2nd

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

June 2, 2011 11:57 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.

This week’s power outages are putting telework to the test for the first time since Snowmageddon. The outages affected work at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the ATF, and GSA yesterday. All three federal buildings are located within about half a mile of each other. NextGov reports about 50 emergency personnel at FERC worked from home or an alternate site yesterday. An agency spokeswoman said “some” of the more than 1,100 nonemergency employees also teleworked, but it isn’t clear yet how many weren’t able to make that happen and will take administrative leave instead. At ATF, a spokesman said a “couple of hundred” employees were telecommuting Wednesday, but wouldn’t know for sure how many until the building re-opens. He DID say some employees had to go into the office in the morning to pick up laptops and other devices that would allow them to telework. GSA said they wouldn’t know how many employees worked from home during the power outage until today at the earliest.
Taxpayer identity theft at the IRS is soaring. Congress wants to know why. A hearing on Capitol Hill today will examine a new Government Accountability Report. It says IRS had nearly 250,000 ID theft incidents in 2010, up from 51,000 in 2008. James White, the director of strategic issues for GAO, is the principal author of the new report. He says many identity thieves don’t get prosecuted. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman counters IRS investigators concentrate on schemes of national scope. Many of the ID thefts originate with stolen Social Security numbers. Thieves use them to file tax returns and obtain refunds before the real holder of the number files.
EPA career official Lisa Schlosser is moving to the White House. She will become deputy administrator for E-Government and Information Technology at the Office of Management and Budget. She replaces Mike Howell, who moved to DOD late last year. In her new role, Schlosser will assist Federal CIO Vivek Kundra on implementing OMB IT policies. She is currently principal deputy associate administrator of EPA’s Office of External Affairs and Environmental Education.
The White House says taxpayers stand to lose $16 billion dollars of the money spent to bail out the car industry. That figure comes from a new report titled, The Resurgence of the American Automotive Industry. It was posted to the White House blog yesterday. Total losses will amount to less than 20 percent of the total handed out to automakers.
Homes may have been leveled by tornadoes, but locals are saying “no” to FEMA-supplied trailers. State and federal emergency management officials say they’ll look for existing rental housing to help residents of Cordova, Alabama. The town was hit by two twisters in late April. Locals are not spooked by tales of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina. At issue is Cordova’s zoning, which bars mobile homes, even if they’re temporary. Still, Mayor Jack Scott is working out of a trailer. The tornadoes also took out town hall.
The Transportation Security Administration is getting better at saying “no” too. TSA has been rejecting more claims for missing items and baggage from screening points – from about half of all submitted in 2005 to three-quarters of them in 2009. The number of claims has gone down in that time also, averaging about 12,000 a year, reports WFAA in Dallas. The TSA points out it only gets about 45 claims from the 2.5 million bags it screens every day. New York’s JFK Airport has the most claims filed, followed by Orlando, and Los Angeles International.
The end of the Space Shuttle Program also means some hard working feds will be out of the job. So, the Office of Personnel Management is stepping up efforts to help NASA find a home for displaced aerospace employees. OPM says it is sponsoring a job fair and job training in Cocoa, Florida this July. OPM says event will educate job seekers on the types of job opportunities available and assist them in applying for open positions in Federal Government.