Thursday Morning Federal Newscast – June 9th

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...

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 Government Printing Office wants to reduce staffing by 15 percent, and is offering buyouts as a way of getting there. This makes it the first legislative branch agency this year, to offer employees the chance to take regular or early retirement and receive a buyout worth $25,000, before deductions. It has 2,200 employees, mostly in the DC area, and wants to eliminate 330 positions. Senior Correspondent Mike Causey notes it is a sign of the times and an indicator that more buyouts (called VSIPs) are coming to more federal operations.
  • The Federal Emergency Management Agency is about to beef up staffing in its anti-fraud division. GovExec reports, the move comes in response to an inspector general report. The IG found, FEMA’s fraud prevention and investigation branch was understaffed to deal with the string of natural disasters the agency has responded to. Staffing for FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Reserve Employees, or CORE, will double between now and fiscal 2012. Last year, the unit was authorized to have nine full-time equivalent workers, but only six are on board.
  • Everyone Osama bin Laden ever wrote to, spoke to or even mentioned is under new scrutiny, U.S. officials say. Material seized from his Pakistan compound has yielded a treasure trove of information about the slain terrorist’s methods and contacts. Sources tell the Associated Press that the job of translating the information is 95 percent finished. Items taken by the SEALs from bin Laden’s office included a handwritten journal, five computers, 10 hard drives and 110 thumb drives. FBI Director Robert Mueller tells a congressional hearing, it’s clear al Qaida hoped to continue attacks on the United States.
  • The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and the impact of the deficit on defense spending, top the agenda for Leon Panetta. Panetta is President Obama’s pick to replace Robert Gates as Pentagon chief. The current CIA director will testify today before the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing. Weeks after the CIA’s success in killing al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, Panetta is expected to sail toward Senate approval. Then comes the hard work for Panetta, who was a budget-cutter at the White House and as a California congressman. First up is Obama’s decision on how many of the 100,000 U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan in July. The president will weigh advice from military leaders before he decides.
  • Lawmakers say the departments of State and Defense lack major oversight over $1.8 billion in counternarcotics contracts. Both departments reportedly are failing to produce basic information on those contracts and that’s creating problems in how they track the use of tax dollars and gauge success of their efforts to stop drug traffic from Latin America. The report was released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight.
  • NASA may be cutting $1 billion from its space operations budget, but that money is going to other science and technology. Federal Computer Week reports a new study shows NASA’s mission is evolving as budgets tighten and priorities shift. The study, done by Euroconsult North America and Omnis Inc. shows the Science Mission Directorate saw an 11 percent bump in 2011 and will have a $5 billion boost through 2016, the new Space Technology Directorate will get $1 billion a year from 2012 to 2016, Goddard Space Flight Center and Langley Research Center will benefit because of the work on Earth science projects, and predicts that NASA’s will have to shift from cost-plus contracting to more fixed-price contracting.
  • The Obama administration wants $10 million to expand a website that lets agencies know who should receive federal funds, and who shouldn’t. The site is called VerifyPayment.gov. It combines several databases to ensure that payments aren’t going to people who have died, are in prison or to businesses and contractors barred from working with the federal government. Federal Times reports the project is slated to go government-wide next year.
  • Four independent agencies are finding that cloud computing may give, but it also takes away. The Interior Department’s National Business Center will stop supporting CGI Momentum, the financial management software they’ve been using. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already decided to switch to Oracle Federal Financials. The Federal Labor Relations Board, National Transportation Safety Board, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are deciding what to do. Andrew Jackson, Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for technology information and business services, tells Federal News Radio it’s getting too expensive to support two financial products.
  • A new federal initiative has awarded $5 million to health information technology groups. It’s part of a growing effort to make the research field more competitive. The Investing in Innovations Initiative was created by the Health and Human Services Department and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. They hope it will ramp up competition for research and development in the health IT field by awarding prizes for creative problem-solving.
  • World IPv6 Day has come and gone. One of the brain-children behind the test of the new internet protocol says it went off without a hitch. ComputerWorld reports, Donn Lee, a network engineer with FaceBook, said the social networking site didn’t notice anything going wrong yesterday as it ran both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously. Several hundred organizations, including federal agencies, participated in the interoperability test. Lee said, the Internet did not break. But now participants get down to the task of analyzing all the data.

More news links

Delta bag fees for soldiers ignites backlash

Citigroup says hackers accessed credit card data

THIS AFTERNOON ON FEDERAL NEWS RADIO

Coming up today on In Depth with Francis Rose:

–Cutting hiring time and getting better people at your agency. Reginald Wells, Deputy Commissioner for Human Resources and Chief Human Capital Officer, tells you how he’s doing at the Social Security Administration.

–Not everyone agrees President Obama should keep Robert Mueller as FBI Director. A former high-level Justice Department lawyer pleads his case.

Join Francis from 3 to 7 pm on 1500 AM or on your computer.

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