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If copyrights are a measure of women’s long-term rise in economic participation, trends show progress but still a ways to go. A recent study by the U.S. Copyright Office shows that over a 40-year period, women’s share of registrations rose from 28%, to 38% in 2020. Joining the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with analysis, University of Minnesota business school professor Joel Waldfogel, and Copyright Office chief economist Brent Lutes.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Professor Waldfogel, good to have you on.

Joel Waldfogel: Nice to be here.

Tom Temin: And the Copyright Office Chief Economist Brent Lutes. Brent, good to have you back.

Brent Lutes: Hi Tom, great to be back.

Tom Temin: And let’s start with the genesis of this study. What was the purpose of it? And how did it come to be? I guess there was a collaboration here between academia and government, Joel?

Joel Waldfogel: Yes, so I spent the last year at the Copyright Office, but it was virtual because of COVID. But as the Kaminstein Scholar, what that means is that I was working on copyright issues, you know, taking time away from my academic appointment, although I was still in my academic appointment. But most of my research is on copyright. So it fit pretty well with what I do. In any event, the question before me was to update some earlier work examining what share of copyrights have been granted to women authors. Last time this was looked at was around 2012. And there had been progress between 1978, 2012. But what had happened in the ensuing eight years, that was my sort of first task. And the answer is that it continues to rise, it had gone from about 28% in 1978, up to over 38% by 2020. And it varies a lot across categories, but that just general growth reflects an increase in women’s activity in this area.

Tom Temin: And Brent, the summary of the study references a change in copyright law that happened in the late 1970s. And how does that figure into this?

Brent Lutes: So in a practical sense, the change of copyright law is the point at which we started collecting and retaining data in a digital form that allows us to do this sort of research.

Tom Temin: Got it. So you had the database available, therefore, that might not have existed before that, rather, you would have had to go through millions and millions of pieces of paper?

Brent Lutes: That’s exactly right.

Tom Temin: All right. And what can we make of this result, there is a substantial 10% statistically significant rise in the number of copyrights granted to women. But if you look at popular culture, and you look at entertainment, and book writing, and songwriting and all of this, it seems like women and men participate equally. So why the disparity do we think in the rate of issuance of copyrights?

Joel Waldfogel: Well, copyright covers a variety of different kinds of media. And it is different across different groups. So take the one called nondramatic literary works, but we know it as books. That one of the female share has surpassed 50% in the last few years. In other categories, for example, machine readable computer programs, it’s substantially less, although it has risen substantially, it’s risen, like by a factor of three over this period. In the copyright topics related to movies and music. It’s risen more slowly, and it’s on the order of a quarter to a third. But books, I think a big headline result here is that we’ve surpassed 50%, more than half the authors nondramatic literary works are women.

Tom Temin: All right, interesting. And Brent, what does the say then about the copyright process, if anything?

Brent Lutes: So I think it tells us that I think as you mentioned at the beginning, there’s still gender disparities that exist, they’re increasing. But I think it also gives us a good framework to understand why those disparities exist, and what are the factors that may propagate them or mitigate them, which I think is an important second step that we intend to look into in the future that will help us develop some very targeted and evidence-based policy.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Brent Lutes, He’s chief economist of the U.S. Copyright Office, and with Professor Joel Waldfogel, at the University of Minnesota, and the ability to create and get items that are available for copyright, of course, begins downstream of the copyright office itself, or maybe it’s upstream, but it’s not directly in the copyright office. Let’s put it that way. So that’s not anything the federal government can really control. What might some of the policy options be then to make sure that women do get their fair share?

Brent Lutes: Just to clarify one thing, that we may not directly control the creation of works, the underlying reason why copyrights exist is to incentivize the creation of works in the first place, Joel?

Joel Waldfogel: Oh, sure. So let me talk about another kind of headline results of a study. On the one hand, we show that the share of copyright registrations that are to female authors, and that’s growing and so forth. But it’s not absolutely necessary to register your copyright, it would be desirable in some sense to do so. So there’s a different question we asked in this study, which is how does the female share for example of registrations in books relate to the female share of activity in writing books? And same for other these categories? And one of the things that we find it’s a little bit I think, thought provoking for us is that basically the registration share lags the activity share based on occupation data by an average about 20%. So women seem to be very possibly less likely to register conditional on creating stuff. Now we say we have to patch that a little bit because the data on activity aren’t you know, airtight, but still there’s at least a suggestion that there may be some room to go to get more registration, even conditional on having done the work. I should finally mention, though, that that gap, that sort of shortfall has declined over time, it was like 25, 30%, 20 some years ago. Now it’s more like 10, 15%. So it’s shrinking. But there still is a gap that’s worthy of sort of exploration and policy could perhaps encourage registration conditional on having done the creation.

Tom Temin: Right, a parallel comes to mind with the Census Bureau, which has to make sure that every population group is counted. And so they have this elaborate and expensive and well developed program of outreach to very small relative communities, but many, many, many of them to make sure that everyone in those communities is counted. So it sounds like the Copyright Office then could develop outreach programs, maybe look at the application process itself in such a way as to garner more so that the activity share gets closer to the registration share, or vice versa. Brent?

Brent Lutes: I think you’re right there. And we do have substantial outreach, we’re always looking for ways to better target those efforts. And I think this gives us a good source of information and a good way to target those efforts. And to the extent that we can figure out exactly why those registrations are lagging, potentially come up with more targeted policy beyond outreach.

Tom Temin: Sure. And any particular forms that might take in mind yet, or you’re still evaluating?

Brent Lutes: Like I said, depends on figuring out why they lag, you know, if it’s a matter of not understanding the benefits of registering one’s copyright, for example, then I think outreach and education would be an appropriate policy for that. But again, I think, you know, as I previously mentioned, the second step of this research is figuring out the why I think Joel did a really good job of figuring out the what once we figure out the why that we can develop the appropriate policy solutions.

Tom Temin: And relative to say, a patent application where there’s this very elaborate process of verifying that it actually is patentable, you’ve got examiners looking for all the prior art, et cetera, et cetera, with a copyright, if you write a novel or you create a computer program, is there any adjudicative of process to ensure that it deserves a copyright? Or is it you apply, and you get it?

Brent Lutes: So it’s not quite an apply and receive setup, there are examiners who look through it and make sure that it meets the appropriate criteria. And you know, I’m not an examiner, and I don’t know the particulars of what they’re looking at, though my understanding is that it is perhaps less intensive than the patent examination process.

Tom Temin: But if I tried to copyright Moon River, it probably wouldn’t go through?

Brent Lutes: I doubt it would, because I assumed that the examiners would understand.

Tom Temin: Let me ask you this, we have now a good picture and a moving picture over time of women versus men applicants. And I imagine you don’t ask racial or other demographic makeup of those that are applying for copyrights. But is it possible to understand some of the other axes of ratios here, say racial or ethnic and so on, that are not asked?

Joel Waldfogel: I mean, we can study gender relatively easily because the names are on copyright. And names are very highly correlated with gender. So it’s really easy aggregate to say stuff about gender. Race is not there. And there are sort of fancy statistical ways to try to do it. But it’s I think it’s dicey and unclear. Geography is something that I think will be very study-able.

Tom Temin:
Therefore, there’s maybe the opportunity to match geographic against census data. And then perhaps you could have at least a way of extrapolating some potential racial disparities.

Brent Lutes: You’re right. We don’t have that data, currently. You know, we’re exploring ways to potentially get around that fact. But I think as Joel mentioned, some of those ways are a little bit dicey and not credible.

Tom Temin: Right. So you couldn’t get a statistically supportable picture. But you could get a picture that gives you an idea of where you might need to direct policy or outreach?

Brent Lutes: Yeah, and I think, you know, in some respects, we can get a statistically credible picture. But that picture would be limited, in many ways. So we kind of get perhaps a detailed, significant picture.

Tom Temin: Is it possible legally or under regulation to have a voluntary question for copyright applicants?

Brent Lutes: Let me be careful with that, because I’m not a lawyer. I don’t want to dispense any sort of legal advice. I’ll say that, you know, on the patent side, there’s actually a bill in front of Congress, right now trying to understand whether it’s appropriate and useful to have such a voluntary survey go with a patent application. And, you know, I think it’s worthwhile for the copyright system to also at least start thinking about that. And, you know, at the moment, we don’t have plans to ask that of Congress.

Tom Temin: OK. So in the meantime, then this study on female participation in copyrights will be something that the Copyright Office is looking at, and perhaps developing ways to get at and make more equality there?

Brent Lutes: Yeah. And I think we should think of this as not necessarily all of the answers but a very significant first step towards those answers.

Tom Temin: Brent Lutes is chief economist of the U.S. Copyright Office. Thanks so much for joining me.

Brent Lutes: Great to be here, Tom.

Tom Temin: And Joel Waldfogel is a business professor at the University of Minnesota behind that study. Thank you very much.

Joel Waldfogel: My pleasure. May I add one other thing that I think is also important to mention here?

Tom Temin: Sure.

Joel Waldfogel: In addition to doing this study, I think the Copyright Office has also made public for researchers all of these data from 1978 to 2020. This is a huge step forward in transparency and modernization, and it will allow outside researchers, inside researchers to potentially answer questions we haven’t figured out yet. So I’m pretty excited about that. I think it’s a great accomplishment for the office.

Brent Lutes: It’s the largest it’s most complete data set of copyright ever released anywhere.

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China can’t do anything to prevent Congress from passing a budget on time for 2023. But the China competitiveness bill could do just that. With the year-end just three months away now, legislative arguments over the bill threaten budget talks. For how, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turns to WTOP Capitol Hill correspondent Mitchell Miller.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Mitchell, what is going on with the China bill and the federal budget?

Mitchell Miller: Right, you would think well, what’s this have to do with the final federal budget, but this is a big thunderbolt here that’s entering the budget talks. Late last week. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he does not like the rumblings that Democrats may still come up with a watered down version of Build Back Better. And he’s threatening to hold up the more than $50 billion China Competitiveness Bill, which has been the focus of months of talks in house and senate conference committee. That’s the legislation designed to improve us production of semiconductors streamline production, known as USICA, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. And now this warning came afterward that Democrats had actually made some critical progress on the legislation that would cap the price of prescription drugs separately and deal with energy and climate provisions. This is the legislation that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has held up with a variety of reservations and warnings that caused McConnell’s ears to pick up and say, wait a second, if you’re going to move ahead with this. I’m going to hold back on the China Competitiveness Bill. Now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants to get a reconciliation bill for a vote later this month. But with this major reservation issued by McConnell, it now really puts a lot of this in doubt for July.

Tom Temin: And the schedule is kind of iffy, because they’re just running out of time.

Mitchell Miller: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we only have a few more weeks, obviously, in July after this recent break for lawmakers, and then we’ll go on recess in August, when they come back from that, of course, we’ll be right in the middle of the midterm election ramp up. So all of this, again, is pointing to another continuing resolution, even though as is often the case, everyone says they don’t want a CR. But that does seem the way we’re heading right now.

Tom Temin: All right. And well, we’ll have to see how it all plays out. Because sometimes these things have a way of having sudden breakthroughs too, because of those warnings issued.

Mitchell Miller: Right. And I should add that there has been actual progress on the House side. Late last week, they approved in the House Appropriations Committee, all 12 spending bills, so they are basically ready to go. Obviously, there’s some differences here and there. But there is something positive to report on that front

Tom Temin: And closer to home, Congress is starting to get annoyed with the Thrift Savings Plan of all things, because of a botched rollout of their updated system by which TSP account holders can access it.

Mitchell Miller: Right. This was the one that everybody thought was going to be new and improved, right when it came out about at the start of June, they had a variety of technical improvements, or at least they were supposed to be improvements, including a mobile app. But almost immediately, as you know, after this was rolled out, members started to say we’re having problems logging into the system. And then when they had more problems with the technical side of things, they would try to make a call and try to get somebody to talk to them and get them through. Well, that of course put more pressure on the system. So the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board has said there has been some improvement in connection with that, they’ve actually staffed up the call centers, they’ve added more than 300 people to help take these calls. They just had a public meeting with an update on all of these issues last week. And while they said there’s been some improvements, and they’ve had a decline in wait times for customers, this still is a huge issue for a lot of lawmakers who are really getting a lot of ear fulls of complaints from their constituents who say, you know, I actually didn’t have problems logging in. And I was actually working pretty good before all of this happened. So I think we’re going to see a lot more heat on this in the weeks and months ahead unless they get things resolved.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Mitchell Miller, Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. And the IRS is starting to re-interest Congress in the age of inching up that agency’s budget. But then that report came out a couple of weeks ago showing how little progress they’ve made on customer service.

Mitchell Miller:
Right. And this is really frustrating to members of both parties here in Congress. They keep trying to get answers and trying to figure out exactly what can be done to fix this agency. Now, the agency, the IRS, for its part says lawmakers are part of the problem. And going back to the continuing resolution, this report that came out recently from the Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee. They basically said to lawmakers look, every time you guys approve a CR, it only creates more problems for the IRS because they can’t continually do long term buyouts for example, for the technical issues that they know that they have to address and this report found that the IRS has actually undergone basically more than 100 CRs over the last two decades. So, but basically what they’re saying is, it’s just too hard to do all this long term planning to get this equipment that they know that they need. So they keep doing these patchwork improvements, trying to get through, you know, around the next corner, but they keep building up. And as we’ve talked about in the past, the IRS still has a long backlog of paperwork that they needed to deal with, it goes all the way back through the pandemic and problems beyond that period. So again, another area where lawmakers are really going to be focusing and trying to find some solutions to this.

Tom Temin: And finally, I wanted to ask you about the Jan. 6 hearings. They went on for quite some time, then there was a surprise extension of them all before the cable television cameras. And they have, at least in sudden, some segments of society been quite gripping. And people are watching. Being up on Capitol Hill, what’s the effect been from what you can see?

Mitchell Miller: Politics aside, and everybody has their own view of these hearings, Republicans obviously, don’t agree with them. Many of them say they’re a sham, Democrats say they’re just trying to get this record put out. But I think what’s most interesting, just in terms of how hearings are held here on Capitol Hill, is this may signal a new type of hearing, at least when we have really, really big issues come along, because instead of doing the typical thing, which would be hold a hearing during the day, and then it goes well into the night. And even if you get the attention of the American people during the day, it tends to wander a lot. All of these hearings have been very tightly produced, they actually brought in network television producers to help to get these hearings to be produced so that they’re easily digestible for the American people. And whatever you think of them, they all are very well produced. They last each about two hours or so. And then they move from one topic to another. And I think what you may find, maybe on a more minor level, again, depending on the issue is this may be something of a template for congressional hearings, at least on as I said, major issues moving forward, because they really do concentrate all the information, they integrate both live testimony with earlier depositions. And I think that, again, whatever you think about these hearings, that has been effective, at least in terms of getting what has happened out from the panel.

Tom Temin: So Marshall McLuhan lives on on Capitol Hill.

Mitchell Miller: That’s right, absolutely.

Tom Temin: Look it up kids. Mitchell Miller is Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. Hey, thanks so much.

Mitchell Miller: You bet.

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You might have heard in nearly every locale in the nation home prices have soared. Many houses get multiple offers and sell for way more than the posted price. The Veterans Benefits Administration has been tinkering with the 75-year old home loan program to ensure it gives veterans a shot at the house they want. For an update, VA’s Executive Director of Loan Guaranty John Bell III spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Mr. Bell, good to have you on.

John Bell III: Thank you, Tom.

Tom Temin: And just give us a sense of the scope of the program. How much money do you have under guarantee and what’s your entitlement from Congress to be able to offer? How big is this program?

John Bell III: If you put things in perspective of 27 million loans since 1944, that’s totaling over $3.4 trillion. Last year, we set an all-time record for purchases: 444,000 loans. We are about 12-13% market share of any mortgage product out there. So we’ve grown that over the past 10 years from 1% of the mortgage market to, again over 12% of the mortgage market as we stand today. So VA’s had a lot of growth, over 380% over that time period. And we credit a lot of that to changing the processes and procedures that we’ve had, the technology modernization advancements that we’ve had for the program, trying to get the word out about just how strong our veteran borrowers are. And one key characteristic that we change is the mindset. The mindset of this is not just a program that is available as a soft landing for veterans, this should be their product of choice. And by choosing VA over all the other home loan products out there, we’ve been able to really capture you know, a lot of that market share back.

Tom Temin: And just to be accurate, the Veterans Benefits Administration doesn’t loan money, you back loans, correct? That are made by regular commercial lenders?

John Bell III: That’s 100% correct. We have a 25% guarantee. And what that does is it entices lenders, because we carry 25% of the risk for them. So lenders will make mortgage loans. Then they will sell those mortgage loans called mortgage-backed securities. They will sell those in the open market. But this gives an assurity to the entire industry that the government backing of that 25% is going to stave off the faults, which is again, our default ratio is in line with conventional and much less than other agency programs out there.

Tom Temin: So a given borrower with VA backing, then if they had a risk rating to a lender of X, after they are backed by VA, then their rating would drop 2.75 risk or something?

John Bell III: That’s a great way to think about it. That’s pretty much what we do to try to limit cost to the veteran and to the lender that’s lending that money. And then on the back end of it, it’s from the default space. If that loan is going bad, VA is there to help mitigate between the borrower and the servicer so that we can figure out the best option available at that time. So servicers aren’t they’re doing it on their own. They also have the backing of VA to help our veterans make sure that they can stave off some of that financial impact.

Tom Temin: And then rolling up the mortgage portfolios into those securities, do you have any connection to the markets that are controlled by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae?

John Bell III: I think from a total market share that is correct. From a collaborative space, which is, if you take COVID for instance, we all had to work together to make sure that we stood up the mortgage industry while we went through COVID. So we had to ensure that we could still lend money, even if appraisers couldn’t make it into homes, right, we had to make sure that lenders still felt comfortable, and that they still had the government backing and originating those files. And then also keeping costs down, we were still able to break origination records through 2020-21 and now on to ’22.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with John Bell, he’s executive director of Loan Guaranty at the Veterans Benefits Administration. And you mentioned that you made some process changes and some back-end information technology updates to make the program, I guess, easier to use for veterans. Tell us about some of those.

John Bell III: Yeah, some exciting things. If you think about VA 10 years ago, and how we would review files, a lender would mail in this file that was probably 300-400 pages thick. And we couldn’t glean any data from those files. We couldn’t share that nationally. So if Wells Fargo was doing a loan in the state of Oregon, and also doing a loan in the state of Washington, we couldn’t compare and contrast what that experience was like. Now we’re able to glean 237 pieces of information, data, from each one of those files we review and then we’re able to scorecard performance of our lenders so that they understand how they’re competing and benchmarking against other lenders. It has improved the overall health of the program, because they’re not only able to see how they’re performing against others, but they’re also able to see why they aren’t performing as well against the rest of the country.

Tom Temin: And what is performance for a lender? I would think, I guess, I presumed you were more worried about the performance of the borrower. But what are some of the parameters of lender performance that you need to track?

John Bell III: So what we require are lenders to at least follow our guidelines. And then lenders because they own 75% of the risk, they can establish or put on additional guidelines on top of ours. And so what we’re trying to understand is, is that additional requirement worth the value of preventing a veteran into the home? And so as we’re able to benchmark what those differences are, and the additional requirements that they have, were able to teach the lender, that value isn’t necessarily getting you the right result. And so that’s the piece that we were missing in the puzzle is being able to go back to the lenders and say, Okay, fine, you want to put a six-month reserve requirement on a loan that’s over $600,000. But the value of performance in that loan versus a loan that doesn’t have that requirement is the same, equal or better. And so while they’re missing out on all of those originations, they’re doing it for the wrong reason.

Tom Temin: And you were able to glean this information from these paper packets, in what manner? Scanning them or digitizing them, or –

John Bell III: No, it’s a wonderful question. So we started with electronic uploads. So they would be able to upload their packages directly from their what’s called the their loan origination system. And then we just switched earlier this year to a true electronic system-to-system transfer of that data. So they no longer have to download a package and upload it. It’s all done electronically. And then at the end of the year, we’re actually moving into our API tech, API’s application programming interface. And it gives us a lot of opportunities from an analytics shareability that we just didn’t have before.

Tom Temin: And what about the aspect of the program that faces the veteran borrowers?

John Bell III: So one of the big key changes are actually two of them, real quick. One is we improve the eligibility timelines. Ten years ago, we averaged about 20 business days in determining what the eligibility of the borrower was just to participate in the program, just to be benefit-eligible. Now, because we do those electronically and instantaneously. Now, 95% of applicants that apply for eligibility are approved in less than three business days. So it has really been a game changer for us in reducing the time that it takes in that process to get a borrower from an applicant to an eligible applicant for lenders. We also have improved our appraisal process. And in November, I actually testified in a hearing in December, but through November, we had 1,500 unassigned appraisals at that time. We just had a huge need for recruiting more appraisers, in particular areas. We had an impending volume of loans coming in. And so we’re at about 1,500 in unassigned appraisals, we’re now down to zero. But we’ve also reduced the time it takes to deliver an appraisal from 11.8 business days down to eight business days, which is honestly in line or better than most other markets out there and loan products. So by fixing those few things, we’ve decreased the timeline that takes to get into a loan, which then allows veterans to compete better when they go to bid.

Tom Temin: Yeah, my question then, has all of this helped veterans in this crazy market where sometimes you have to act fast, or go above the asking price, and not have any baggage associated with your bid for a house in the eyes of the seller?

John Bell III: So last year, we did 444,000 purchases. Wwe’re about 4% off that mark right now. And what we’re seeing is while rates are increasing, and prices in certain areas are stagnating, we’re seeing fewer bids, which are enabling more veterans to be able to take advantage of this time. What veterans were competing against six months ago, eight months ago were cash offers. Most of those offers were from investors that were flooding the market. Now that investor activity has constricted and it’s allowed veterans to compete better. Are we at a spot where we’re saying that we’re done? Of course not. We’ve got to get the message out. The message is mostly being lost to those sellers and the listing agents that really aren’t even accepting agency contracts to begin with. So when they go to list the property, they’re not marking list property available to submit from an agency. And so they’re not even seeing our veteran loan. So we’re hoping to reduce that by working with the National Association of Realtors. We’ve done a couple of videos with them. And then also, we talked to them again this week about getting the message out. And then for us getting lenders and we’re building out a training team to help with establish more materials so that we can combat those issues.

Tom Temin: John Bell is executive director of Loan Guaranty at the Veterans Benefits Administration. Thanks so much for joining me.

John Bell III: Tom, thank you so much for having me. And look, I want to leave you with one thing: If you know a veteran, they haven’t used their benefit, or they haven’t been able to use it because someone tells them they can’t, you’re costing them money. Tell them they’re leaving money on the table.

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• The Pentagon wants input from industry as part of a new study on the financial health of the Defense industrial base. Among other things, the Office of Defense Pricing and Contracting is looking for input on obstacles companies have faced in getting financing, whether small firms are getting prompt payments from prime contractors, and the overall health of the Defense industry. The study was prompted by a GAO report that found DoD hasn’t analyzed how its policies affect the industry since 1985. Comments are due July 18.

• The Army takes an important initial step to consolidating five business systems. The Army kicked off an initiative to consolidate and merge five separate business systems. The Army Contracting Command released a request for information, a prototype project opportunity notice and a statement of need seeking industry feedback. The Army wants to use another transaction agreement to hire a lead systems integrator to design, develop and demonstrate a prototype enterprise resource planning or ERP system that pulls in the capabilities of all five systems, including the General Fund Enterprise Business System and the Logistics Modernization program. Army CIO Raj Iyer said in June that the service spends $1.4 billion on these systems and many are more than 20-years-old. Comments on the RFI are due by July 18. The Army says it will hold an industry day later this year after reviewing feedback.

• The Defense Department’s inspector general says the Pentagon is inconsistent in how it applies classification rules. A new IG report found DoD components largely failed to maintain their security classification guides in accordance with federal guidance. The IG says DoD runs the risk of misclassifying information and accidentally disclosing sensitive data to U.S. adversaries. The report recommends DoD direct components to account for their security classification standards and ensure they conform with the latest guidance.

• Here’s one you may not have heard about for awhile, auditors give the Office of Personnel Management high marks on how it’s securing a key system for retirees. The Annuity Roll System, which contains records on annuitants and their survivors and forms the basic pay records for disbursing benefits, met nine different cybersecurity requirements under the Federal Information Security Management Act or FISMA. The OPM inspector general says ARS’s security systems plan is update; it has a recent authority to operate and has an updated plan of action and milestones. The IG says these and other documents provide a good foundation to security, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee the data and systems are secure.

• The lead U.S. cyber agency is about to get its own contracting powers. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will get procurement authority starting this month. CISA currently relies on Department of Homeland Security headquarters and other agencies for its contracting activities. It’s another step up for one of the newest standalone federal agencies. CISA was established in 2018. The new contracting authority comes as CISA takes on more responsibility for the cybersecurity of agencies and critical infrastructure. (Federal News Network)

• The Air Force is strengthening its separation policy to crack down on sexual assaulters. The Air Force will no longer consider an airman or guardian’s character, financial situation or mental health when deciding if a sexual assaulter should leave the service. The change is an effort to root out those in the military who commit sex crimes. The service will no longer grant exceptions to those who assault children or those who have previous convictions for sex related crimes. The Defense Department is beginning a concentrated effort to purge sexual assault from its ranks. Last year, it announced a handful of new measures to better handle sexual assaults, including taking sex crimes out of the chain of command and referring them to independent agencies. (Federal News Network)

• The Air Force’s Air Mobility Command is shifting to a new model it hopes will increase readiness and improve predictability. AMC’s previous force generation model has been in effect for 20 years. After a deep dive assessment, AMC will reconstitute manpower, aircraft and equipment that train, deploy and recover as cohesive units. That will happen through four specific phases that prioritize what each unit needs depending on its recent training and deployments.

• The Census Bureau is making its data easier to find, use and understand. The bureau redesigned its data webpage. It now features interactive text, ways to build customized maps based on their data, a new search tool to explore data tables and access to microdata files. It also includes search ideas for guests. With the new look, the website still has education, employment, health, housing and more data on over 100,000 American locations like states, counties, places, tribal areas, ZIP codes and congressional districts.

• Agencies have made progress in how they use data, but the Partnership for Public Service says some are looking to improve their data workforces. The way agencies recruit and develop their data and digital workforces scored poorly in a recent Partnership survey. Involving data and digital specialists in ongoing agency projects was one of the lowest scoring categories. But agencies who took the survey say they plan to dramatically improve their data workforce’s effectiveness over the next five years.

• A standard for the sustainability of federal buildings is coming soon. The Biden administration expects the first-ever Federal Building Performance Standards will put agencies on a realistic path to meeting some of President Joe Biden’s green government goals. The standards will establish metrics, targets and tracking methods to reach federal carbon emissions goals. Federal Chief Sustainability Officer Andrew Mayock says the standards will be publicly released in two or three months and will raise the bar on sustainability for more than 300,000 federal buildings. “We’re not getting where we need to go unless we focus on how we scale and how we scale is through technology.” (Federal News Network)

• The General Services Administration and National LGBT Chamber of Commerce are extending pride month by collaborating to expand support for LGBTQI owned small-businesses. The collaboration will provide owners of these companies greater access to GSA contracting opportunities. It also will focus on creating awareness of GSA’s programs among LGBTQI small business owners. The partnership will also provide information to local LGBTQI affiliate chambers of commerce around the country about GSA’s programs, services and events that help small businesses learn about contracting and subcontracting. There are an estimated 1.4 million LGBTQ business owners.

• There’s a new way to help federal employees affected by severe weather in Montana. Federal employees can donate unused paid time off to some of their colleagues. The Office of Personnel Management established an emergency leave transfer program for Montana’s federal workers, after severe storms and flooding hit the state in June. If you’re looking to either donate or receive unused paid leave, OPM says you should contact your agency. The paid leave will first be transferred among workers within the same agency, but OPM says it can be transferred across agencies, if needed.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs faces a 23% vacancy rate for Licensed Professional Mental Health Counselors, as well as Marriage and Family Therapists. Senate VA Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) are seeking an update from VA and the Office of Personnel Management on steps to bring more of these personnel onboard. The senators specifically seek an update under the 2020 Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act, which requires the agencies to create a new federal occupational series for these specialists.

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In an agency as large as Veterans Affairs, with a third of a million employees, there is no shortage of things to go wrong. Often it’s whistleblowers that point them out, often to the Office of Inspector General. Now a bipartisan bill that passed the House would ensure continuance of a policy that every VA employee received training by the OIG to learn how to report alleged wrongdoing. For more on the VA Office of Inspector General Training Act, one of its original sponsors, Illinois Democrat Lauren Underwood spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Rep. Underwood, good to have you with us.

Lauren Underwood: Thank you so much for having me here today.

Tom Temin: And looking at this bill with respect to Veterans Affairs and the Office of Inspector General, it seems to have provisions for both employees and for the OIG. Let’s talk about Veterans Affairs employees for a moment, what would it do with them?

Lauren Underwood: So I introduced this bipartisan bill. It’s called the VA OIG Training Act, with Congressman McKinley last year, to codify the OIG training requirements to protect the VA employees who report wrongdoing and obviously honor our veterans. So for the VA employees, there’s currently a requirement that they complete OIG training, but it hasn’t been codified into law. So that means that the next administration could reverse the policy. And we want to make sure that staff are equipped with the knowledge and skills that they need to spot and report fraud and abuse happening within VA program.

Tom Temin: And does it say anything about the nature and content of the training itself?

Lauren Underwood: So the training is already being deployed, and we are not changing that training requirement. So what we’re doing is just ensuring that the training includes information about, again, the mechanisms for reporting fraud, waste, abuse, and other wrongdoing at the VA. It offers protections for the VA employees who report the wrongdoing to the Office of the Inspector General. And then the training includes information on how to strengthen the Office of the Inspector General programs, Operations and Services, to ensure that the OIG provides effective oversight. It reduces fraud and protects taxpayer dollars.

Tom Temin: And just a question on the protection for VA employees. There are statutory protections for all federal employees at this point. What would it add here for Veterans Affairs employees, if anything?

Lauren Underwood: Oh, it doesn’t. So this is just a training so that every VA employee understands the current law and the protections that are in place. What we don’t want to have happen is that this training requirement be removed by a different administration who has a different posture towards federal employees. And then those individuals who are interested in reporting fraud, waste and abuse, no longer have the knowledge on how to properly do so, right, and then that opens them up to retaliation, and, other kinds of harmful actions in response.

Tom Temin: Right. So it would reinforce their knowledge of the protections they do have.

Lauren Underwood: That’s right.

Tom Temin: And is there any evidence that say, during the Trump administration, which was a little different, maybe than the current administration, there was any reduction or suppression of that training? Do we know that?

Lauren Underwood: I don’t know that. But I believe that federal employees offer a great service to the American people and certainly to our veterans. And as we do the work to make sure that the federal employees have an excellent workplace, we want to make sure that they are trained and skilled and empowered to be able to fully do their work and offering the federal services and benefits to our veterans. And I think that this kind of knowledge is really important, particularly in an environment that can become very politically charged.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Illinois Congresswoman Lauren Underwood. And you mentioned that the bill also has provisions to strengthen the Office of Inspector General itself. And my experience with VA OIG is they’re not bad right now.

Lauren Underwood: That’s right. And so the requirement is that the VA provides the training to their employees. And obviously, then there’s a benefit for the patients that are receiving care from the VA. Because we know that accurate reporting, and certainly early reporting of issues can save patients lives. It protects their colleagues, and ensures this Veterans actually get their needed benefits and services. We also know that it helps the VA because we’re saving taxpayer dollars. Every dollar that is spent on oversight initiatives, through the Office of Inspector General at the VA yields approximately $21 in return. And so, with those extra resources, if you will, the oversight initiatives ensure that every veteran gets this world class care that they’ve earned.

Tom Temin: And the status of this bill then is passed in the House and introduced a version of the Senate?

Lauren Underwood: That’s right.

Tom Temin: So you do have that senatorial kind of side and any chance in your sense of the situation of that being enacted in this current session?

Lauren Underwood: So Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and John Boozman (R) from Arkansas introduced the Senate companion bill last summer. And so because we were able to get such a strong bipartisan vote in the House, we are really optimistic that there is a path forward for prompt Senate consideration before the end of this calendar year.

Tom Temin: And while we have you if you’ve got a moment, there are a couple of other bills that have your fingerprints on them.

Lauren Underwood: Well the Veterans Rapid Retraining [Assistance Program] was signed into law in June, which we’re very excited about. I was at the signing ceremony. I introduced that legislation with Congressman Danny Davis (D-Ill.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). And so that one has been signed into law. And then we’re obviously working hard on the honoring our pact Act, which has passed the Senate and we look forward to coming back to the house this summer, or passage, so then we can get that signed into law as well. That’s to help veterans living with the effects of toxic exposures.

Tom Temin: Right, yes. And getting back to the one on education, so if people got an unsuccessful education under VA benefits from a for-profit, or unaccredited institution, they can still have that benefit for a proper institution.

Lauren Underwood: That’s right. We know that there has been a lot of students who have been defrauded by institutions that have lost their accreditation or had improperly presented their credentials. And so there’s, throughout my time in Congress, we have been working to help people be able to move forward with their careers and the credentials. And so we are very excited about this Rapid Retraining Assistance [Program] Restoration and Recovery Act, so that these education benefits can be restored. If a veteran has been ripped off by an unaccredited institution. This mirrors some of the activity that you’ve been seeing from the Department of Education, where they announced a big student debt relief for those individuals who had received degrees from unaccredited institutions like we’re talking about really the same general population, but this specific bill apply for veterans whereas that executive action was for the entire universe of affected individuals across the country.

Tom Temin: And given your interest in Veterans Affairs affairs in general, are you watching what’s going on with respect to the electronic health record, and what’s your assessment so far of Secretary McDonough this far in?

Lauren Underwood: Well, I’ve been really pleased to work with Secretary McDonough. We’ve had an opportunity to have several conversations, I’ve been over to the VA for meetings. I’m a nurse. And so I focus a lot of my work on the Veterans Affairs committee on health care issues and making sure that we have high quality gender-specific care on the health care issues in particular, we have been strongly supportive of ensuring that we have full ability for advanced practice nurses to practice to the full extent of their education and training. And making sure that the certified registered nurse and ethicist can be able to practice to the full extent of their education and training. As you may know, Tom, that the VA at the end of the Obama administration allowed nurse practitioners and nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists to practice without that kind of physician oversight. But the nurse and ethicist were left out. And so we have really been pushing VA to take action. They have all the authorities that they need to expand access to care and make sure that veterans are not having to wait for procedures. And that’s what this is about. And so we’re making progress on that front. And then also, I was very proud that my VA physician assistant and nurse RAISE Act was signed into law as part of the fiscal year 22 budget deal. So the federal funding law that was signed in March, which allows physician assistants and advanced practice nurses to get a raise. So we’re firing on all cylinders here.

Tom Temin: Illinois Congresswoman Lauren Underwood is co-sponsor of the VA Office of Inspector General Training Act. Thanks so much for joining me.

Lauren Underwood: Thank you so much.

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The United States is helping Ukraine militarily, but only indirectly. When it comes to health care for the besieged Ukrainians, the aid and cooperation are more direct. Much of the work falls to the Health and Human Services Department. Joining the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with an update, the HHS assistant secretary for global affairs, Loyce Pace.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Ms. Pace, good to have you with us.

Loyce Pace: It’s great being here. Tom, thanks very much for having me.

Tom Temin: And what is going on with respect to Health and Human Services in Ukraine? And who are some of the partners that you’re working with? And what are some of the components of HHS that are doing the work?

Loyce Pace: Well, first off the war in Ukraine and Russia’s aggression there is really unconscionable. One of the things that we noticed really early on was that our friends and partners in Ukraine would really have to keep track of who required and health services not only sort of acute needs, such as trauma care, and the life resulting from the war and conflict, but even tracking diseases, particularly infectious diseases, like Polio, like COVID, like tuberculosis and HIV.

Tom Temin: So you’re dealing with a country where people are being injured in great numbers because of the war. But also, it sounds like a country that is in the first place not quite up to world class standards, in terms of health care tracking, and systems delivery.

Loyce Pace: Well, they’ve been able to do a lot on their own, and with the support of our Centers for Disease Control with the support of European partners, so we have to, obviously give the government in Ukraine a lot of credit, especially for continuing that work during the war. But yes, Ukraine, for example, has some of the higher rates of HIV in Europe. And unfortunately, that means that people living with HIV might not have access to those treatments and other services that they require in the midst of a conflict.

Tom Temin: Sure. And so the conflict, I guess it might be obvious, but it has done a lot to interrupt what they had in place as a health care delivery system.

Loyce Pace: That’s right. That’s right.

Tom Temin: And what are some of the specific activities HHS has going on in Ukraine?

Loyce Pace: Well, one of the things our Centers for Disease Control is doing is they are working with staff that continue to be on the ground, at least remaining in the region on shoring up the public health network. So CDC has been active in Ukraine, for a number of years, we have a director who was posted in Ukraine is from the region. And we also have other locally employed staff. And so they remain active, even if they’re, unfortunately displaced themselves because of what’s happening there. They continue to work with the Ministry of Health in Ukraine, and other national public health institutes or partners to ensure those disease surveillance activities are ongoing, and also assist Ukraine in preparing for the worst, whether that, again, is around traumatic injuries in care, or more broadly, around other potential events that could affect the health care of their people.

Tom Temin: And what is the staff there reporting back? I didn’t realize we had actual U.S. federal employees in harm’s way in Ukraine, on the civilian side, and what are they telling you the conditions are like?

Loyce Pace: I think it’s been tough. I mean, these people, these are people who have really, we’ve lived through a lot. And I have to give credit to particularly our government employees who serve all over the world, including at the Department of Health, they work in many different settings, whether that’s in the midst of a disease outbreak in the midst of an environmental disaster, or in this case, in conflict and war. And I think they’ve reported that while their partners and collaborative agencies and individuals are resilient, it’s still quite tough to manage it all, obviously. And I think they are, you know, keeping up their spirits and momentum as much as possible. And certainly they appreciate the relationship that they have with agencies across the U.S. government, but also with other partners like WHO (World Health Organization), UNICEF and nonprofit organizations.

Tom Temin: And is CDC, the only agency of HHS, are there other parts working there?

Loyce Pace: That’s our main boots on the ground. But our Office of Global Affairs is playing a pretty significant role as well, particularly with regards to understanding not only from the ministry, but from the WHO regional office in Europe, again, what the needs are today and what they could be tomorrow. And naturally, there are other parts of the U.S. government who are definitely playing a lead role in Ukraine, including our Department of State and our U.S. Agency for International Development. So it’s an all of government effort along with and guided by the leadership within the White House.

Tom Temin: We are speaking with Loyce Pace. She’s the assistant secretary for Global Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. And while we have you there has been an ongoing effort of HHS to ensure pandemic relief around the world through the distribution of vaccines and so forth. Maybe update us on what is going on there. I understand that some of the antiviral medicines are starting to run out, you know, supplies in the United States?

Loyce Pace: Well, certainly HHS continues to be focused on the domestic COVID response. Internationally, we are doing so as well. And alongside some of those U.S. government partners that I mentioned already, the reality is, we still need everyone to be vaccinated and boosted against this disease, we know that the vaccines work and they’re helpful, especially at this phase of the virus, which is still ongoing as a pandemic. And as a global crisis, particularly in other parts of the world. We are hovering under 70% here in the U.S., and in some cases, those percentages are low. But when you look around the world, particularly on the African continent, they still have vaccination rates in the teens and 20s. And so it’s much lower than what we see here, significantly lower than what’s been achieved in parts of Europe, and even in parts of Asia and Latin America. And the reality is, unless and until we can get the world vaccinated, the more we’ll be sort of flying back from or fighting against the virus as it stands today.

Tom Temin: All right. And while we have you also, then we should maybe just talk about the Secretariat for Global Affairs within HHS, give us a sense of the scope, is it a discrete office, or that function really does overall?

Loyce Pace: Well, we sit within the Office of the Secretary, it’s an office that has existed in some form for several decades, actually. But it’s taken a few different iterations. And it’s evolved over time. It’s current structure has been in place, maybe for the past 20 years. And essentially, we have two functions. We are representing the secretary and HHS divisions and offices globally, and we’re ensuring that our interests and those of the American people are reflected in those programs and services worldwide. We’re even bringing back from those international engagements, ideas or interest in how we work together with countries around the world on really important public health problems, whether that’s around cancer research, or other outbreak surveillance and prevention, or plenty of other issues in the public health space. But another important role that we play is we also try and drive the agenda globally. And so our secretary of Health is an important representative when it comes to sitting with other health ministers who are members of the G7, or the G20. He also sits around the table with health ministers or secretaries at the World Health Organization and their annual convenings. And so we at our Office of Global Affairs also work with other divisions across the department to really inform those discussions and global priorities.

Tom Temin: And you mentioned HIV, which is still maybe more prevalent in places like Ukraine. And you mentioned also USAID in the State Department. And they have programs because I think it’s understood that we have mostly licked HIV AIDS with respect to growth, Ebola, Polio, and a host of other viral types of things in the United States. And I think we sometimes forget, these are still prevalent and growing in some cases, and dangerous in other parts of the world. So sounds like you’re kind of in arms with USAID and state on a number of issues.

Loyce Pace: Yeah, to some degree. I mean, it’s really important to keep in mind how many fights are happening at once and credit to our various divisions for keeping that in mind themselves. And, frankly, you know, not always getting credit for the disasters, they prevent, in the fact that we haven’t seen it. A major resurgence of Polio is credited to our CDC. The fact that we’ve been able to stamp out Ebola outbreaks in the African region and other potential outbreaks is again credit to our colleagues here at HHS. And so oftentimes, we don’t know or don’t have the best sense of our success, but it’s certainly a matter of juggling a number of balls, knowing how important it is to focus on public health. And I’m really grateful to work in a department that understands that and is really leading the way around the world.

Tom Temin: Sometimes it’s hard to prove a negative. Loyce Pace is the assistant secretary for Global Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Thanks so much for joining me.

Loyce Pace: Thanks very much, Tom. I appreciate it.

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• The Justice Department is blocking the merger of two federal contractors because it threatens imminent competition for a government contract to provide operational modeling and simulation services to the National Security Agency. Justice says Booz Allen Hamilton’s move to buy Everwatch, an IT services company, would violate federal anti-trust law. U.S. Attorneys claim Booz Allen and EverWatch competed head-to-head to provide these operational modeling and simulation services. But just before NSA issued the solicitation, Booz Allen decided to buy its only rival, potentially creating a monopoly.

• Delta Air Lines agreed to a more than $10 million settlement over claims it falsified international mail delivery times in a contract with the Postal Service. The Justice Department says the USPS contract to Delta included delivering U.S. mail to soldiers overseas, as well as delivering mail to and from Defense and State Department posts. The settlement resolves claims that Delta falsely reported the times it delivered this mail. The USPS contract specifies penalties for mail that was delivered late or to the wrong location.

• GSA removed the “stop sign” in front of the POLARIS small business contract vehicle. Small businesses sharpen your pencils, the POLARIS GWAC is back in play. After pausing the solicitation for this mega small business IT services contract in April, the General Services Administration released the updated contract terms and conditions yesterday. One of the major changes is requiring the small business of a mentor protégé team to provide at least one example of relevant experience. GSA also limits the mentor to three examples of relevant experience. The previous solicitation placed no limits on what the mentor could provide. GSA says bids now are due Aug. 10.

• The General Services Administration is looking to reach 100 million users on Login.gov by the end of the year. GSA would more than double the number of Login.gov users if it meets its year-end goal. GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan says in a recent interview that Login.gov has about 40 million users right now across 27 agencies. “This digital identity area is one that is in in serious need of attention by the government.” Carnahan said about 60,000 veterans currently use Login.gov for VA services online. GSA is also in talks with the IRS as it plans its own rollout of Login.gov. (Federal News Network)

• The Coast Guard is taking steps to increase access to on-base child care for families. A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds the service will build four new child development centers and increase funding for off-base childcare subsidies. Compared to the rest of the DoD, the Coast Guard operates proportionally fewer on-base childcare centers. The Coast Guard serves 82% of children through community-based providers while the DoD serves 77% of children in on-base development centers. Therefore, most eligible Coast Guard families rely on subsidies to pay for childcare in the community. As of March, Coast Guard child development centers had 361 children on waitlists.

• The Defense Department says it is working to ensure abortion care for service members, but it is hamstrung in some situations. Federal law only allows abortions at military treatment facilities in instances of medical harm, rape or incest. That care won’t change for service members even if they live in states where abortion is banned. However, troops seeking an abortion that doesn’t fit into those categories may not get much support from the Pentagon. Per federal law, Defense Department is unable to reimburse service members who may have to travel hundreds of miles for care. Pregnant service members must also request leave from their commanding officers to take time off and travel to get a procedure. (Federal News Network)

• The Navy is taking measures to keep more sailors in uniform as it continues to have issues with recruitment. The service is changing its policy to allow sailors to serve longer by delaying separation or retirement. The Navy says the goal of the policy is to keep the service fully manned and operationally ready. The Navy recently announced it would increase recruitment bonuses to lure in more sailors.

• Lawmakers continue pushing the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board for answers to some major technical issues in the Thrift Savings Plan. D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton spoke with the board’s executive director, who agreed to give her weekly updates on FRTIB’s progress. That comes after the board rolled out a new TSP platform, causing many frustrations for participants, and difficulties reaching TSP’s customer service line. Norton says she may hold a hearing if the board doesn’t make improvements more quickly.

• The agency in charge of the Thrift Savings Plan has a new leader. President Joe Biden appointed Mike Gerber as chairman of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. The Senate confirmed Gerber as a member of FRTIB in early June, for two terms lasting through September 2026. He will take over for Acting Chairman David Jones, who has held the position since July 2020. Gerber will work with the other recently Senate-confirmed board members, including Dana Bilyeu, Leona Bridges and Stacie Olivares, to manage the Thrift Savings Plan.

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mobile app just got its biggest update in a decade. The application now allows people to customize what they see in the app based on their preferences and location. A new section gives users information about federal disaster declarations in their area, and provides answers to common questions about the assistance application process. FEMA says the update is important as the country enters peak hurricane and wildfire season.

• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may be turning a corner on the technology front. USCIS is nearing an “inflection point” when it comes to its digital strategy. That’s the verdict from the USCIS’s ombudsman’s annual report. The agency has digitized more high-volume immigration forms, and it now has a plan for all forms to be submitted and processed digitally by the end of fiscal 2026. The Homeland Security Inspector General has found USCIS’s current backlog can be traced back, in part, to the agency’s failure to fully digitize before the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Ahead of the Freedom of Information Act’s 56th anniversary on Monday, public access to legislative documents could expand, if Congress agreed with the FOIA advisory committee’s new recommendation. The suggestion, in the Office of Government Information Services annual report, asks Congress to expand certain aspects of FOIA to include the legislative branch. Possible information includes procedures governing public requests for records. This is the only recommendation made by the advisory committee halfway through their two-year term. The committee sent the recommendation to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

How great to live in a free country. At the time, former Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler was our representative in Congress. One year, as she passed by in the parade, my father called out, “Cut off funds for the Vietnam War!” She shouted back something to the effect that she had voted for a resolution to do that. I don’t remember the precise words, but I do recall the exchange. No one swore, no one threw anything.

No one went to jail, either. I thought of this in the context of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Hong Kong, on the 25th anniversary of its transfer to China. How tough it must be to see a leader parade through, who has just imposed stifling laws, crushed dissent, jailed opponents, halted unfriendly press and will no doubt impose the all-encompassing surveillance with its command and control system for individuals already in place on the mainland. What would happen to someone who shouts a challenge to Xi, do you suppose?

Our national discourse seems as bad as ever right now. Yet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I went to the local parades, it was pretty tough too. It’s easy to forget the divisiveness of Vietnam and its expansion via the bombing of Cambodia, the original Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court, the campus “unrest” as it was called, the shocking bankruptcy of New York City and a host of other things. It all seemed to culminate in the Watergate affair. Oh my, the vitriol of that roughly 1966-1976 decade!

After Vietnam, though, the military, which had lost much esteem in the public mind, retained enough institutional resilience, and could muster enough political backing, to eventually recover. Now it enjoys a high regard, even if the policies for which it is used are not popular. An important distinction.

Watergate, while exposing the, let’s say, enthusiasm for reelection on the part of some elected, appointed and hired officials, nevertheless ultimately provoked an institutional coming together. For what it’s worth, since the Nixon/Ford administration, Republicans have held the White House for 24 years, Democrats, at the conclusion of President Biden’s current term, 24.

At the moment, the nation’s ears are gripped by the hearings connected to the  Capitol event, variously described as a riot, an insurrection, a break-in and a coup attempt, at the end of the Trump administration. That was not a good day, least of all for the former president. And yet: One theme is how strongly our institutions held. The Electoral College voted. Congress and the then-vice president accomplished their electoral missions, in spite of the dangerous circumstances. What if the nincompoops storming the Capitol had actually gotten their hands on the vote materiel? It’s hard to imagine anything other than that the regular transition of power would nevertheless have occurred. Many of the rioters are in prison.

Federal career employees have taken an oath to the Constitution. With few exceptions, they take it seriously. At least, that’s been my experience in 30 years of covering that workforce and the activities in which it engages.

Government is inherently imperfect because people are imperfect. Still, on the 4th of July, name a country where you’d rather live and claim citizenship. I can’t.

Don’t text while reading this

Fifteen years ago this week, Apple introduced the iPhone. Like the Model T a century earlier, it changed the world. Neither the first smart phone nor the first pocket-sized computer, it nevertheless became a world-changing product in ways the others did not.

The social implications of mobile computing have been thoroughly documented. Many people seemingly can’t live for two seconds without checking their devices.

In the federal environment, the iPhone significantly drove many of the changes it drove in the private sector. Namely, greater demand for mobile-native services, a still-evolving notion of customer experience, and a new idea for how and where employees can work

An irony of the iPhone era is that as a telephone, the iPhone falls short, to be honest. Whether the phone’s own internal electronics, or the limitations of the big wireless networks, but sound remains noisy and scratchy, calls still subject to going kaput. On the other hand, how much business does the average knowledge worker do on the phone any more?

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

Source: Maine Public

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It’s become an unfunny joke. No matter what crucial intellectual property gets developed in the United States, it gets stolen by China or maybe Russia. A special team deep in the Defense Department has been working on one strategy to counteract this. It looks for investments in U.S. companies by suspicious foreigners. For his work collaborating with many other agencies, the team leader is a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals program. The deputy director of the Office of Foreign Investment Review at DoD, David Rader joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Mr. Rader, good to have you on.

David Rader: Hi, thanks so much for having me. Good to be here.

Tom Temin: So tell us about the Office of Foreign Investment Review and what you do on that team how the whole thing works.

David Rader: Yeah, you bet. Foreign Investment Review or FIR as we call it, large part is the CFIUS Office. That’s the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. That’s a very narrow kind of structure, regulatory process. But what we’ve discovered is a lot of things that pose threats to national security fall outside of CFIUS itself. And so I built a team of data scientists and economists, lawyers, former program managers and project officers, if you will, to really look at sticky national security issues in the financial and economic domain, that are kind of non-traditional, but pose a great risk to us.

Tom Temin: And you say financial and economic domain that are non traditional, maybe explain that a little bit more.

David Rader: Yeah, traditionally, the department or national security apparatus is writ large, never look at economics as a function of warfighting or a warfighting domain, or an area of exploitation is generally viewed as something kind of separate. And so taking that approach or using that lens to look at transactions and what that means for national security is a primary focus of ours.

Tom Temin: And do you focus on investments in technology companies or potential suppliers to the Defense Department? Or do you look at the economy in a larger sense?

David Rader: Yeah, it’s an unfair answer, but it’s everything. So we look at macroeconomic data to kind of see where the market’s moving directionally, then we’ll look at specific transactions to your point and emerging critical or disruptive technologies, all the way to core military systems that you’re used to protecting. But the world is shifting and civil and military fusion is occurring around the world, both organically and inorganically. And so semiconductors and thrusters and rockets, and lasers, you know, for cutting in factories, or materials are all playing a role in national security and our defense platforms.

Tom Temin: So you’re looking for transactions, then that would indicate someone that we don’t want investing in one of these companies investing in it?

David Rader: Exactly. And relationships. And you know, some of our adversaries are pretty clever, they use some obfuscated ownership or opaque structures to extract technology and try to replicate it or just take it overseas. So joint ventures, their relationships with academia, there’s a lot of ways to go about it. And so we kind of look at everything.

Tom Temin: Fascinating, and what are your sources of data, you say, transactions and who might be behind them, and so forth? How do you ingest the information you need? And where does it come from to do the analytics?

David Rader: Yeah. And so we’re really an aggregator in that sense. So we use our commercial sources, the typical subscription kind of products, news, open source, or OSINT, the intelligence community is a great ally, and partner, the interagency partners, so other governments, you know, will call and say, hey, we heard about this, or have you seen this. And then lastly, is commercial partners. We even have commercial partners, and we do a lot of industry engagement. And that’s one of the best sources for us to understand where the market is going, who’s creating what and with whom they’re interacting.

Tom Temin: And what happens when you find something suspicious, say someone via a shell company in Great Britain, who’s actually Russian invests in Hypersonics-R-Us, for example, that’s doing work with AFWERX?

David Rader: Yeah, so that’s where the secret sauce is made up of various methods, but we tried to pull them into the CFIUS framework, that’s probably the easiest and most well structured, we have some cool authorities and capabilities elsewhere within government that allow us to really, you know, have a meaningful conversation and address the threat.

Tom Temin: Do you find that sometimes the companies themselves don’t realize that they’ve been invested in by people with bad intent?

David Rader: You know, I’d argue that’s probably 50% of the time, I think, you know, companies are really focused on developing their product making money, they might not understand that to your point that Canadian or British shell is actually something else. And then a lot of them don’t understand how they fit into something like made in China 2025. China does a very good job of telegraphing, or, you know, explaining to its people what it’s going after. And so they might say biotech or hypersonics. And so companies, you understand that, you know, we might make a widget and biotech that we don’t think matters for national security. But if China or Russia is looking for it, you’re in our orbit, you’re part of the game now.

Tom Temin: So basically, you’re looking for people that would take our property from the front door and not the back door.

David Rader: Yeah, I mean, we do look at the whole value chain, if you will, but I think that’s a good way to frame it. I mean, it seems like we’re doing all the work. We’re spending the money. We’re doing the research, development, test evaluation, you know, commercializing the product, and then the bad guy show up the last day, take it and get to steal all of our hard work and we’re getting pretty tired of it, I think.

Tom Temin:
Right. What I’m driving at is that they could become a board member or an investor and just simply have access to the information that way, as opposed to hacking in.

David Rader: Oh, absolutely. Yep, board membership, investor relations, accessing data rooms through what seems like normal business transactions or a joint venture. So yeah, they’ll come through the front door 100%.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with David Rader. He’s deputy director of the Office of Foreign Investment Review at the Defense Department, and a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals Program. And the category in which you’re a finalist is emerging leaders, which is to say, younger people coming into government, you’re in your mid-30s. What in your background got you to this point, and what attracted you to federal service?

David Rader: I used to be in the Army in a previous life as an infantry man, and you know, had a great experience, all my best friends remained in the business. And so when I stepped away, I went to investment banking at JP Morgan. And I was a M&A consultant at Ernst and Young. And so I enjoyed learning the commercial skills necessary. But I really missed that mission to service. When the opportunity presented itself, I was quick to jump on it because we’re at a critical time right now, where we need to better understand the commercial side and have better relationships and training. But also the Defense Department and national security in general in the U.S. government need really good dedicated public servants who are trying to bring in that next generation, and I was happy to be part of the team.

Tom Temin: Did you get to the Army via enlistment? Or were you a ROTC? Or what was that path?

David Rader: Enlisted right out of high school.

Tom Temin: I’ll be darned. So you’ve had JP Morgan and Ernst and Young level salaries in your short career, and now you’ve got a decent, but it’s a pentagon salary. What effect is that had?

David Rader: There’s some personal adjustments that had to be made.

Tom Temin: But you’re committed to it, it sounds like?

David Rader: Yeah, absolutely. It’s the best place I’ve ever worked. Seen such a diverse group of people from all over the country, you know, kind of all over the world come here to solve really meaningful problems to watch over, you know, America, or investors or innovators, our people. It’s a cliche, but it’s one it’s like, it gets you out of bed in the morning. I really enjoy it. And I have the best boss in the world and great colleagues. So that even makes it easier.

Tom Temin: Yes. And are there any examples of things you’ve uncovered that you might be able to tell us about?

David Rader: Well, sadly, we weren’t quite on the quiet side of the business. There’s quite a few. But I mean, everything that you can imagine where maybe sometimes deals don’t go through or some of the things you’ll read in the headlines. Some, one of us is around there poking around.

Tom Temin: Got it. By the way, you mentioned some of the other DoD and intelligence community elements that you collaborate with. What about the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, or some of the civil side of government? Is that also part of the CFIUS apparatus?

David Rader: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve expanded the scope, because we’ve realized, you know, if you’re looking at economics, it’s ridiculous to not involve the Securities Exchange Commission. I mean, they’re their regulators for the markets, if you will, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FCC, communication, I mean, kind of the whole panacea of government. We’ve had just excellent partners every time we pick up the phone and say, we have an issue, you know, we think it kind of fits into your authority bucket. But you know, we’d like to collaborate and find a solution for our country. They’ve always said, yeah, come on over. Or, you know, we’ll be there on Monday, and it’s gone really well.

Tom Temin: David Rader is deputy director of the Office of Foreign Investment Review at the Defense Department, and a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals Program. Thanks so much for joining me.

David Rader: Hey, thanks for having me. Great to see you, Tom.

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Just because you apply doesn’t guarantee you’ll get federal security clearance. Lots of people make basic errors in their clearance and suitability forms and that can make things take longer than they should or maybe deny altogether. Here with some tried and true advice on the mistakes to avoid, Shaw Bransford & Roth attorney James Heelan spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin: Mr. Heelan, good to have you on.

James Heelan: Hi, morning Tom, thanks for having me.

Tom Temin: Let’s begin with the process itself. This is that one where I think I read that form once, it’s something like 52 pages, or is it Form 52? Or tell us about some of the details.

James Heelan: I think you’re talking about the SF 86. It’s the standard application that all civilians and military personnel, contractors fill out, anyone who wants to get access to classified information. They fill out the SF 86. It’s about 125-some pages, and it is a thorough examination of a person’s life, history, really their whole adult experience. And it asks all sorts of questions that the government thinks are relevant to whether that person is trustworthy. To protect national secrets.

Tom Temin: How long does it typically take someone, say the first time around, to get through all of this form filling?

James Heelan: I have to give you that standard lawyer answer: It depends. If I’m a 22-year-old intern, and I’m on a congressional committee, and I’m applying for my first clearance, I don’t have a whole lot of life experience to report. Maybe I have some juvenile arrests that I would be compelled to disclose on the SF 86. Potentially, I’ve moved around a bit. But it’s a pretty simple application if you’re a young person applying for the first time, and you might go through the investigation within six to eight months, or could be even quicker. But let’s say you’re a full grown adult, and it’s your first time filling out that Sf 86. You have a lot of things to report. You may have many foreign contacts, perhaps you’ve lived abroad, perhaps you’ve been married before, and the government may be interested to understand the circumstances of the divorce and separation. So it all depends on how much life experience you have behind you, and how much the government has to examine.

Tom Temin: Well, at 125 pages, I guess it’s easy to have typos and so forth, of things you left out. So what mistakes do people make, do you find, that they should avoid and kind of have top of mind before they start?

James Heelan: At our firm we see five top mistakes, things that come across our desks most often. Most often we see people miss reporting or failing to report drug use and involvement. The SF 86 asks about seven years of drug use and involvement. Nowadays, involvement is so broad to mean things including investment in marijuana activities. So several years ago, when pot stocks hit the market, I got several calls from potential new clients asking me about their investments, whether they had to divest before filling out the SF 86. And the answer is that they do, they should be aware of their investments and divest of them before they try to obtain a national security clearance.

Tom Temin: And that even includes, say mutual funds or managed funds where there could be scores, dozens, hundreds of individual stocks within that fund.

James Heelan: Actually, it doesn’t. That’s a really excellent point. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently, a couple years ago, released a memorandum specifically on marijuana. And it specifically addressed investments and said that indirect investments where a person isn’t reasonably expected to know every single stock that their money is invested in are acceptable. But you can’t just go out and invest in a pot stock directly out in the marketplace.

Tom Temin: And by the way, just as an ancillary, what about cryptocurrency, which is slightly shady to begin with?

James Heelan: I haven’t had any cryptocurrency issues come across my desk.

Tom Temin: All right. So that’s number one drug use and involvement. What’s the second big mistake?

James Heelan: The other is arrests. People think that just because there was an arrest that didn’t result in a charge, or that their record was expunged, they think that they don’t need to report these arrests. But the SF 86 is explicit. Even if an arrest is expunged, or if it was done away with through some sort of settlement agreement or alternative resolution program, you still need to disclose it on the SF 86 report in your investigation. People try to rationalize their way out of reporting things. They say, well, the Court told me that I wouldn’t have a record and the officer told me there wouldn’t be a report written up. Well, it’s still responsive to the question on the 86. And if you don’t report it, the background investigator, I assure people out there, will find out.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with James Heelan. He’s an attorney with Shaw Bransford & Roth. And what’s the third biggest mistake?

James Heelan: Foreign contacts. This has been a real developing issue over the last 15 years especially with social media. People go on vacation, they befriend some people, they become Facebook friends, they follow them on Instagram. It took a long time for security clearance adjudicators to really decide what a friend meant, for example, on Facebook. So people get into trouble because they forget the foreign contacts they have in their lives. And it’s awful difficult, especially if you live in an area like D.C. where you have foreign nationalities next door at the bars and restaurants you usually go to, you may have friends with spouses or in-laws who come from different countries. Those are all reportable foreign contacts. The big concern is that a country may use a foreign national to surreptitiously persuade you into divulging or otherwise compromising national security interests.

Tom Temin: Right. So if you went to France, it’s not every waiter that you met in the cafes and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but just maybe someone you might have retained friendship with and have regular correspondence with, say, as you mentioned, on social media?

James Heelan: Exactly. It’s the kind of person let’s say, you made real fast friends on your cruise ship and said, “If you’re ever in town, you can stay on my couch, you can stay at my place.” That’s the kind of person you need to report.

Tom Temin: And just to be clear, if say, a nextdoor neighbor, or someone that you are friends with day to day, you may not even know if they’re a foreign national. An accent is not necessarily an indicator one way or the other.

James Heelan: Right. But your obligation is just to report what you know. Right? Not just what you remember, you have a duty to do due diligence and dig in and really assess your own life and then report out.

Tom Temin: And if it isn’t neighbor, it’s likely they could be visited by that investigator anyway, because I, myself have been visited about my nextdoor neighbor a couple of times over the years.

James Heelan: Exactly. And that just goes to show even if you don’t disclose it, the government will likely find out and they’ll likely ask you about it. And you don’t want the first time you know about something to be in your investigatory interview.

Tom Temin: All right, and number four?

James Heelan: Prior job issues. People are required to disclose whether they left a former position and the circumstances under which they left the position. And people think oftentimes, again, with settlements, they say, Well, there’s a confidentiality clause. There’s nothing in my [Official Peronnel Folders], there’s no record of a proposed removal or a difficult circumstance that compelled me to leave the job. People, like I said, try to rationalize why they don’t need to disclose but the form is explicit. If you left your job after learning that you’re going to be forced to leave your job. Or if you’ve left your job under any kind of agreement or specific circumstances, you need to disclose. And so people get in trouble because, like I said, they rationalize and they decide the rules somehow don’t apply to them.

Tom Temin: The theme I’m hearing here is that even though things might be confidential from a legal standpoint, and whatever agreements you might have had established by a court, or some kind of a judging randomization, that doesn’t matter for purposes of reporting on your SF 86.

James Heelan: Exactly, exactly. The SF 86 doesn’t care about whatever legal fiction exists out there, and agreements and settlements and confidentiality clauses that might apply. The SF 86 is interested in the reality. They want to know what you have done in your life and want to be able to investigate it. They want you to be upfront and disclose it.

Tom Temin: And then that leads us to the fifth biggest mistake.

James Heelan: The fifth biggest mistake encapsulates everything I’ve just said it’s lacking care and thoroughness on the SF 86. Not thoroughly reviewing your personal records not going through your credit report to report any sort of what’s called derogatory information on the SF 86. People, it’s not a quick form. It’s lengthy for a reason. It deserves lots of time and attention. You want access to national security information, you should do your own due diligence before you apply.

Tom Temin: And should you have someone review it, even though there is a lot of confidential stuff in there that is the government’s right to know but perhaps nobody else’s? But I mean, I guess –

James Heelan: As an attorney in this area of law, I would say absolutely. I would say absolutely have an attorney review it. People can review it for thoroughness, they may want to go through all of your documentation with you. There’s different levels of service out there that attorneys will provide.

Tom Temin: And it strikes me that if someone is in this general field of perhaps working for or with the government, even if you don’t anticipate anything in the near future, requiring clearance, is it a good idea just to download the SF 86 and go ahead and fill it out, so you’ll be ready should the time come? If you like self torture?

James Heelan: You really want to be prepared? Sure. It could be like updating a resume. You keep it up to date. And as you go along, you continue adding the addenda. I haven’t done that myself but I could see some people out there wanting to be awful prudent. Follow that kind of advice, yes.

Tom Temin: All right. 125 pages. So if you do a page and light, it’ll only take you four months.

James Heelan: Or a very long weekend.

Tom Temin: Yeah, or a very long weekend. James Heelan is an attorney with Shaw Bransford & Roth. Thanks so much.

James Heelan: Thanks a lot, Tom.

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Federal employee whistleblower complaints are often investigated by the agency itself, rather than by the Office of Special Counsel. This can speed up resolutions or end up with complaints going nowhere or even suppressed. Bob Tobias, a professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University, has looked into this question. He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with some perspective.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: And, Bob, it seems that there is no one perfect way to deal with whistleblowers but having the agency do it internally doesn’t always work out, does it?

Bob Tobias: It does not. Former President Trump in 2017 argued in an executive order that the Department of Veteran Affairs should be allowed to investigate the whistleblower complaints internally, in the interest of resolving them faster and more efficiently. And then the executive order was later turned into a statute. But that approach, I think, runs into the real challenge of what it means to investigate internally. Because what it requires is a focused attention and support a political appointees who are willing to hear bad news, see bad news published in newspapers and on social media, accept responsibility for the bad news, and then take action to turn the bad news to good news.

Tom Temin: But let me just ask this: In some agencies, it is the inspector general’s office that looks at whistleblower complaints. And we’ve seen that even at VA, and so therefore, you do have some independence there. And the inspector general doesn’t care if the news is bad.

Bob Tobias: Well, yes, theoretically, Tom, but when we do have a recent evidence of the [Department of Homeland Security] inspector general, who suppressed over 10,000 DHS employee sexual assault complaints, and when it was discovered, Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas created a new, centralized process for processing employee complaints. But I ask in the long term, will that work because maybe the next secretary of DHS will use the idea of centralized decision-making to suppress those complaints in the future?

Tom Temin: Right, so then having an external body like the Office of Special Counsel, you run into the issue of just sheer workload, sheer time it takes and as we’ve seen so many adjudicative types, or investigative types of processes by federal agencies internally or externally just take so long.

Bob Tobias: Well, I think the answer to that, Tom, is to beef up the Office of Special Counsel, rather than to depend on the long term, on political appointees meeting that high bar of allowing themselves to look bad. While there may be individual political appointees who accept responsibility for the failure of those they lead, and more importantly, for their own failures, we can’t depend on every political appointee over the long term, to meet that bar.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Bob Tobias, professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University. And I guess it’s understandable why some politicals would want to avoid this. There was a administrator of the GSA a number of years ago, I think, early in the Obama administration, and I remember the scandal of the expensive Las Vegas conferences that GSA was doing. And it was a scandal. And you had a crooked bunch running this thing, and taking junkets paid for out to Las Vegas to check the venue, three or four times. And there was the famous picture of the guy with the wine glass in the bathtub and all of this. But it was the administrator that took the fall, even though this all occurred entirely before she even arrived at the agency. And so her career was sullied and her reputation to some degree, even though she had literally nothing to do with it.

Bob Tobias: Well, that’s true. Because what can happen in that kind of a situation is a culture of noncompliance can develop. And in a culture of noncompliance, the people in charge suppress any complaints and continue to behave as you just described. So in my view, the only way of managing and as in the case, you pointed out, someone who was innocent, but took the hit is to encourage an outside investigative authority like the Office of Special Counsel to do its work, but do it faster.

Tom Temin: Right, because really, it was not fair for this person to take the hit for that and she exposed it and said, we really made a big mistake here. Which was gracious of her but it really wasn’t that person’s mistake. And so that, again, you’re saying mitigates in favor of external look at these events entirely.

Bob Tobias: I think so, Tom, I think so. There isn’t any evidence anywhere over the long term of successful looking internally at oneself by political appointees, finding fault and fixing that fault.

Tom Temin: But I want to get back to the inspector general question because, yes, IG’s are also politically appointed. But their purpose in life is to have this external, or at least objective, outside-of-the-agency chain of command view of things, no matter how bad they might be. So why can’t IG’s step up more here?

Bob Tobias: They can, and they should. But it only provides for me proof of the fact that no, we can’t depend on every political appointee to be fault free. And the only way we can make sure that it doesn’t occur is to have, not only is to have the Office of Special Counsel be able to investigate problems in IG offices as well.

Tom Temin: Well, that question I think is probably going to be resolved not for quite a while because the whistleblower complaints come in. And I think this is going to be something we were going to deal with for a while.

Bob Tobias: Well, I think it is. But I think it’s also true that when you have a over-2-million-person workforce, there are going to be people who fail to follow the laws, rules and regulations, to make sure that these complaints get surfaced and an employee’s career is not damaged for surfacing these problems.

Tom Temin: All right, Bob Tobias is a professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University. Thanks so much.

Bob Tobias: Thank you, Tom.

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• More funds for the Department of Homeland Security’s consolidated campus are coming into focus. The fiscal 2023 spending bills making their way through the House would give $580 million to the DHS St. Elizabeth’s West Campus. The proposed funding is split between DHS and the General Services Administration. The St. Elizabeth’s campus has been a work in progress for than a decade, and is the largest federal building project since the Pentagon. The project has secured more than $2 billion in congressional spending so far.

• Senate lawmakers want to ensure two Homeland Security offices are permanent fixtures at DHS. A new bipartisan bill would re-authorize the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. It would also codify the responsibilities of DHS’s Office of Health Security. The bill would also require the CWMD office to submit reports to Congress on the strategy to counter weapons of mass destruction and other emerging threats. The legislation is being led by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Ranking Member Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

• The IRS needs more consistent funding from Congress to dig out from pandemic-era challenges, replenish and modernize its workforce, an advisory panel told Congress. The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee finds the IRS experienced over 100 continuing resolutions since 2001. The committee tells Congress that funding uncertainty forces the agency to opt for more expensive, less effective, short-term hiring and IT solutions IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig, whose five-year term ends in November, says the agency went to extraordinary lengths to deliver $1.5 trillion in pandemic aid. “I think that history will be very polite to the Internal Revenue Service, and to everybody who’s helped the Internal Revenue Service during this period of time.” (Federal News Network)

• Six of seven metrics on federal customer service declined last quarter. The latest data from the Office of Management and Budget shows customer satisfaction, confidence and trust, and employee helpfulness were among the areas that dropped for the 35 High Impact Service Providers. The one metric that saw progress was around equity and transparency. These HISPs collect customer feedback after the citizen has completed their business with the agency. OMB released an update to the President’s Management Agenda earlier this month. This included updates on cross-agency goals like customer experience as well as individual agency goals.

• Standout Freedom of Information Act agencies are offering best practices to improve the public information request process. Among the recommendations from FEMA, the Postal Service and the FBI is for public information officers to be proactive in letting requestors know when estimated completion dates on requests are pushed back. FOIA mandates agencies provide estimated completion dates to the requester. Many agencies have had issues providing them. Other recommendations include connecting PIOs with agency leadership to expedite the process and releasing a list of frequently requested records. (Federal News Network)

• Federal employees still have the chance to help improve the Freedom of Information Act process. The Office of Government Information Services is extending the deadline for new members to apply to the FOIA Federal Advisory Committee to July 15 instead of June 30. OGIS is looking for nominations from at least three cabinet level and three non-cabinet level agencies. The committee is made up of 20 members who serve two-year terms and attend monthly meetings to discuss possible improvements to the FOIA process.

• The Interior Department made a major award as part of its network modernization effort. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education is bringing high-speed internet to 64 reservations across 13 states. BIE awarded Verizon a 10-year contract that could be worth as much as $147 million under GSA’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions or EIS program. Under the task order, schools in states such as Arizona, California, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and others will gain access to 1 gigabyte internet connections. This is up from the 100 megabyte connections implemented over the last decade. Verizon expects the upgrades to be completed by the end of 2023.

• The Marine Corps wants the information domain to be a big part of how it thinks about warfighting from now on. The Corps formalized a new publication yesterday that makes “information” a core component of the service’s doctrine. Marine Corps Publication 8, as it’s called, tries to make sure individual Marines and commanders build communication, cyber, and other considerations into all of their combat and and training plans. Officials say they want the new doctrine to be a “living document” that continues to evolve alongside changes in communications technologies and warfighting realities.

• The Navy conducted its first-ever exercise focused on response to events caused by climate change. Imagine you’re a sailor in 2030 conducting an exercise on an island nation in the western Pacific. Suddenly, a typhoon changes course and completely bungles the operation. That’s what Navy officials, think tank experts and industry thought through this week as they considered how climate change might impact future operations. The Navy and the Defense Department are taking into account extreme weather as climate change is making more of an impact on installations, weapons and operations. The Navy says it plans to build climate contingencies into future training and to conduct more operations focused on climate events. (Federal News Network)

• Maj. Gen. Philip Garrant was tapped as the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements. The new position would involve a promotion to lieutenant general. Garrant would replace Lt. Gen. William Liquori. Garrant currently serves as the program executive for ground-based weapons systems at the Missile Defense Agency.

• Federal hiring managers are trying to focus more on applicant’s skills, rather than where they learned them. Jenny Yang, director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, says agencies are starting to reexamine degree requirements for job openings. Yang adds that eliminating educational requirements can expand applicant pools, a common federal hiring issue. She joined an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission workshop series, addressing challenges that prevent underrepresented communities from accessing jobs. The Office of Personnel Management has also posted guidance to help agencies recruit more diverse candidates.

• A new report suggests the national security community reexamine how it recruits and clears people with foreign ties. The security clearance process may be unnecessarily preventing people with foreign backgrounds from serving in national security positions. That’s the crux of a new white paper from the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. INSA suggests investigators take a more granular approach to evaluating factors like foreign family members and dual citizenship. INSA vice president of policy Larry Hanauer. “Investigators are never going to be able to learn everything they want to know about a candidate’s uncle in rural China somewhere, but they can assess whether such a family tie really affects a candidate’s loyalties or creates security risks that can’t be mitigated,” Hanauer said. (Federal News Network)

• The American Federation of Government Employees says agencies should better compensate feds seeking an abortion. Federal workers can use sick leave to travel for medical care under current policy from the Office of Personnel Management. But AFGE says the federal government should do more, and instead provide paid administrative leave. That’s for federal employees who live in states with restricted, or now banned, abortion access. The union is part of a growing number of organizations calling to expand paid medical leave for feds, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week.

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• Federal building alarm systems and security cameras are falling short of expectations. But just how short? Well that’s unclear from a heavily redacted report released by the General Services Administration inspector general this week. Auditors reviewed the security systems and cameras at 14 federal buildings and seemed to find they were in various states of disrepair. One of the IG’s recommendations is for GSA to implement a plan to repair, replace and even install security cameras and alarm systems as part of a nationwide assessment. The IG also says GSA and the Federal Protective Service should revise their memorandum of understanding to clearly identify who’s responsible for maintaining these systems.

• The Government Accountability Office found $206 billion of waste in government spending on personal property like office chairs and cars between 2016 to 2020. GAO found agencies use only 8% of the over 2.6 million excess items. Recommendations include promoting the maximum use out of excess property and advising agencies to review their internal guidance on considering excess property. Tuesday’s report comes two weeks after Comptroller General Gene Dodaro addressed the Senate with ways to limit government overlap earlier this month.

• USPTO is investing in a foundational piece of its zero trust architecture. With what may be the first of its kind in the federal sector, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is going all in on SASE or secure access service edge. Jamie Holcombe is the CIO at USPTO and he explains why this is the first foundational piece of the zero trust architecture that they can act upon. “I like SASE as that architectural philosophy so to ensure that we can identify users and devices, and apply the policy-based security controls delivering that secure access to the applications and ensuring that our data is secure.” (Federal News Network)

• Agencies need to prepare for a big change to a widely used email and collaboration service. Microsoft will start disabling Basic Authentication for Exchange Online starting on Oct. 1, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is making sure agencies are ready. In new guidance, CISA laid out steps agencies should take to determine to what extent they still rely on basic authentication, if they haven’t already. Microsoft announced the Oct. 1 deadline last year. The company says Basic Authentication is one of the most common ways its customers are compromised, and its shifting to methods that support multifactor authentication.

• The Social Security Administration is looking to replace its current system for managing public records requests. SSA is among the agencies phasing out the FOIA online case management solution. In a request for information, SSA says the new system should allow its FOIA analysts to communicate directly with public requesters. It also should be compatible with an electronic payment system, like Pay.gov. SSA is looking for responses by July 6.

• The Biden administration wants to hear your ideas about sustainability. At the first Federal Sustainability Solutions forum, Federal Chief Sustainability Officer Andrew Mayock asked all federal workers and contractors to share their journeys and experiences with sustainability during their careers in the public, private or nonprofit sectors. Mayock said the government needs to learn from, and copy, the successes achieved in the private sector, whose efforts surpassed those of the government during the last few years, to combat climate change while customizing the ideas to scale across the government.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs adopted Login.gov to improve online customer experience to veterans. With Login.gov veterans can now use the same username and password to access VA.gov, My Health-E-Vet and VA’s Health and Benefits mobile. The service also allows veterans to use the same credentials to access services across multiple federal agencies, including the  the Office of Personnel Management and the Small Business Administration. VA’s adoption of Login.gov meets a key goal of the Biden’s administration’s executive order on improving customer experience.

• The agency in charge of the Thrift Savings Plan is trying to keep up with high call volumes to customer service. Another 100 staff members are likely heading to TSP’s customer service center. The TSP board has so far added 320 representatives, now up to a total of 800 employees. That’s a 66% increase to the agency’s call center — and a record high for the board. The staff increase is an effort to alleviate unprecedented delays and hold times after a major TSP update on June 1. (Federal News Network)

• Agencies get an extension for hiring temporary employees in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Office of Personnel Management says agencies can continue to use a special hiring authority to add short-term staff, through March 1, 2023. OPM says agencies have an ongoing need to hire short-term workers, to meet both their missions and responsibilities related to the pandemic. Agencies may continue to fill positions on a temporary basis for up to one year. They can also extend the appointments for an additional year if needed.

• Sean O’Donnell has been serving as the Pentagon’s acting inspector general for more than two years. But the Government Accountability Office says he hasn’t had the authority to serve in the position since last November, and his initial appointment also violated federal law. GAO’s findings are based on its own, new, interpretation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, a law designed to limit how long acting officials can serve in Senate-confirmed positions. DoD’s OIG says it’s still reviewing the opinion. DoD hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed inspector general since 2016. (Federal News Network)

• The Defense Department and Air Force are teaming up with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to create a new research center. The military’s 15th academic research center will focus on tactical autonomy, helping the Defense Department develop technologies that involve independent computer systems. The Air Force is committing $12 million a year for five years to the center. DoD will add another $2 million a year. The organization will be a consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, furthering DoD’s push for diversity and inclusion. The Pentagon hopes to use the center to help the schools build out their research capacities and recruit a more diverse workforce. (Federal News Network)

• The Joint Staff approves the military’s first-ever accredited space exercise. The Space Force’s SPACE FLAG exercise joins other approved exercises like the Air Force’s RED FLAG and the Navy’s Fleet Synthetic Training as programs providing capability to provide realistic environments in a joint context. In total there are 37 accredited joint training programs.

• The Supreme Court denies a petition from the National Postal Policy Council to review a federal appeals court’s ruling from last year. U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found last November that the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) struck a careful balance when it allowed USPS to set mail rates higher than the pace of inflation. The commission, however, is reexamining its decision to grant greater pricing flexibility to USPS under a provision of the fiscal 2022 omnibus spending bill. (Federal News Network)

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Even as the armed forces develop hypersonic missiles, the Missile Defense Agency pursues a project to develop measures to counteract enemies’ hypersonics. But the program is having significant oversight problems and technical risks. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turns to the acting director for contracting and national security acquisitions issues at the Government Accountability Office, John Sawyer.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Mr. Sawyer, good to have you on.

John Sawyer: Thank you.

Tom Temin: Let’s talk about this program at the MDA. Is it something that is completely in the research stage? Do they have products they’re delivering to the military? Or is this something that is kind of in post? Where does it stands at this point?

John Sawyer: All of the above. The agency is responsible for acquiring and developing defense capabilities for threats. So at any point in time, they are delivering assets. They are performing testing, they are acquiring, developing anywhere throughout that acquisition process. So the answer is all of the above.

Tom Temin: Now they have countermeasures that I guess are more mature for missiles that don’t go so fast that might be coming from an enemy. Where does the hypersonic defense stand? It looks from reporters if they have been able to develop glide interceptors that kind of catch these things in mid-flight?

John Sawyer: Yes, sir. They have and hypersonic, hypersonic weapon, as you just alluded, really relates to weapons that can travel really fast, five times or greater than the speed of sound. That is one of the characteristics, not only just ballistic missiles but hypersonic. Another thing interesting about a hypersonic missile is that it is able to travel at lower altitudes than a ballistic missile. And the third thing that would distinguish a hypersonic is that it has the ability to maneuver during flight. In other words, it’s almost like a baseball pitch, that curveball where you think that curveball is going one direction, but it has the ability to maneuver during flight. And that is the challenge that the Missile Defense Agency has in fielding a capability that can outperform the threat. And that is where they are with their hypersonic defense.

Tom Temin: And is this something that is developed entirely by the government or are there contractors involved in the countermeasure development?

John Sawyer: This is something that is developed with the government being the overseer of the project. However, the government, DoD, the Missile Defense Agency, does rely on contractors, contractors to assist with the development, product development, the technology development, currently with the glide phase interceptor, you have Lockheed Martin is involved, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, they are all, they have contracts and they are looking at concept design and risk reduction. There’s also another effort that is used for hypersonic or being considered for hypersonic defense and that is the hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor. HBTSS is what is a called, and you also have contractors involved in that process. L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, are two contractors that I can think of that are involved in assisting the Department of Defense and the Missile Defense Agency in fielding capabilities to protect our homeland, our allies abroad.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with John Sawyer, he’s acting director for contracting and national security acquisition issues at the Government Accountability Office. So it sounds like the agency then is developing sensor capabilities. There must be tons of software assessment and processing that happens here. And in the case of the glide interceptor, that’s kind of a form of a missile itself, correct?

John Sawyer: Correct. Correct. The glide interceptor is just that. It is a missile designed to intercept a hypersonic weapon. As I mentioned earlier, in order to defeat a hypersonic weapon, you need to field a capability that is four or five steps ahead or able to outperform that threat. And that is exactly what the glide phase interceptor is being designed to accomplish. It is a missile that is designed to intercept a threat.

Tom Temin: And in looking at this program, then I guess, maybe it’s a collection of sub-programs. What were your main findings? Because it seems like you were concerned a lot about whether there is technical oversight from an independent point of view that is really needed here.

John Sawyer: Our main findings and in our review our assessment, this is the 19th year that we have performed the assessment of the Missile Defense Agency with a specific emphasis on assessing what progress has been made in achieving delivery and testing goals, what progress has been made in delivering assets and meeting their testing goals. And the second thing that we looked at was just what we’ve just talked about, the hypersonic counter weapons. Our main findings this year, that was consistent with prior years, that each year MDA plans to deliver certain assets, they plan to perform certain testing, but they were unable to meet their goals. On average, over the past five years, the MDA agency has been able to meet, like 52% of its testing goals. And we believe that additional attention should be given to that area, because those are areas that that are funded and budgeted for. But they have demonstrated a history of being unable to meet those goals. Some of those goals or some of those delays or are acceptable. But we just believe in an area like this, where you are constantly fielding capability capabilities to mitigate threats, that you you need to have the most accurate information available, accurate information as it relates to costs, as it relates to risk to enable you to go fast. And that’s one of the terms used, to go fast in order to meet the warfighters’ requirements.

Tom Temin: Because the hypersonic enemy situation itself is sort of a moving situation, because they’re developing greater and different capabilities all the time. So it sounds like they need some flexibility. And to do that you need that testing capability.

John Sawyer: Absolutely. Absolutely. That is exactly what testing is designed to do. Testing is that key tool that is designed to assist decision makers with demonstrating system performance. How are our programs able to perform in certain scenarios, integrated together, the the one of the goals that makes the system work is that they integrate the elements or programs and testing is all the more important to give management that information to assist in better informed decisions.

Tom Temin: Well, then let’s just summarize your main recommendations, then.

John Sawyer: In this report, we issued three recommendations. Our recommendations are really centered on ensuring that management performed or did what it needed to do, the recommendations were directed to the Secretary of Defense. And what we asked was that ensure that the agency performs the cost estimates and independent cost estimate to know what it will cost to really field or to acquire these these programs that you’re trying to acquire. We also felt that there was a need for an independent technical risk assessment, which all of these things according to best practices, leading practices, these items should be performed before product development to assist management in making better informed decisions. And then lastly, we have a recommendation that as it relates to the HBTSS, which is a sensor that is, that involves space, that there are also other agencies involved in space work. And we believe that there should be better coordination, a memorandum of understanding to ensure that the Department of Defense, MDA has a plan in place to manage duplication and overlap. You want to make sure that the agencies leverage what other agencies may be doing, and not to, to duplicate or overlap what they are doing. Those were the recommendations in our report. We have also summarized recommendations that we have issued in the past 10 years since 2010. GAO has issued 61 recommendations to help improve missile defense acquisitions. While MDA has made considerable progress in implementing those recommendations, 23 of them remain open and we will continue to monitor the corrective actions that the Defense Department and MDA will put in place to address those recommendations so that we can give the agency credit and properly identify those recommendations as closed.

Tom Temin: And just a detail question before we close that might or might not be within the scope of what you looked at when calling for independent technical assistance. And I think that’s something the MDA promised it would do and still needs to do on hypersonic defense. Is the industry in hypersonics mature enough that there is someone they could turn to for independent technical evaluation?

John Sawyer: Thank you. That is a good question. That is something that our report did not address, but there are offices, there are departments within the Defense Department who have responsibility for overseeing and performing these independent technical risk assessments. And I believe that the department has a process designed that would effectively give them the information needed to assist in these decisions.

Tom Temin: John Sawyer is acting director for contracting and national security acquisition issues at the Government Accountability Office. Thanks so much for joining me.

John Sawyer: Thank you, Tom.

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It’s an old question. An agency awards a services contract because of specific people the contractor promised would work on the project. Then one of them quits. In the ensuing protest cases, the Government Accountability Office and the federal courts seem to be of differing minds. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin gets more now from Smith Pachter McWhorter procurement attorney Joe Petrillo.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: We had a protest case where the key personnel person left and this was known to the agency and they went ahead with the award anyway, what happened? Tell us more about this case.

Joseph Petrillo: All right. So here’s the the situation, as you mentioned, when the government’s buying services, it’s customary to evaluate offered key personnel. And it’s very clear that when a bidder proposes someone for work on the contract, the bidder has to have a good faith belief that that person is going to be available. But what happens when the person becomes unavailable after proposals are submitted? And there as you eluded the Government Accountability Office, in its bid protest decisions, say that the offeror needs to inform the government of the unavailability even after proposal submission. In a recent decision we discussed a few weeks ago, one judge on the Court of Federal Claims, said no, there’s no such obligation in the statute or the regulations. So we have this differing view. And it’s illustrated again, by this recent decision in the Sehlke Consulting case, a GAO bid protest decision, it arose from a contract competition by the National Reconnaissance Office, part of DoD, they were buying finance support services. They were looking to award a cost plus award fee contract, they did that through a best value, trade off acquisition, and had both cost and non-cost factors which were weighted equally. In the non-cost factors, the most important sub-factor of the most important factor was key personnel. The issue we’ve been talking about here, that was an extremely important part of the evaluation. And it became a subject to the protest. KPMG, the incumbent won the contract. Another bidder, Sehlke Consulting, protested to the GAO that evaluation showed that Sehlke’s evaluated cost was about you know, 4 or 5% lower than KPMG’s, but KPMG had higher ratings in the non-cost factors.

Tom Temin: And one of the non cost factors that weighed in favor of KPMG was this key personnel that worked for a subcontractor?

Joseph Petrillo: Right, that turned out to be pivotal. It was the only sub-factor where any offeror had received an exceptional ranking. And in the source selection decision, it was identified as the distinguishing factor that determined contract award. So it was crucial.

Tom Temin: Yeah, so what happened with that person?

Joseph Petrillo: Sure. So the person resigned while offerors were being evaluated. But after proposal submission, and NRO became aware of that, because KPMG is the incumbent contractor, notifed them that the person who’s also working on the contract was resigning. Even though NRO had received that information, it was after proposal submission, and so they did not take it into account in making the award decision or in evaluating the proposals. Where after Sehlke protested, however, GAO sustained the protest and held it was unreasonable for NRO not to consider the unavailability of the person that it knew about.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Joseph Petrillo. He’s a procurement attorney with Smith Pachter McWhorter. And earlier you said that in another case, the court had taken the opposite view that it was immaterial, basically, to the award that a key person on the bidding had left. Could the difference be the criteria of the agency? That is to say, in one case, could the key personnel have been more important in supplier selection than it was in the other case? And that’s why the GAO and the courts differed? Or is there some fundamental disagreement here?

Joseph Petrillo: That there was some discussion of the court case in the GAO decision. GAO pointed out one important difference between the two and that is that in the court decision, there was no indication the agency was aware of the unavailability. And here the agency was aware of the unavailability. So GAO felt that that was a sufficient difference to distinguish it but they also were very clear that they’re not obliged to follow the decisions of a single judge on the Court of Federal Claims, and so they’re going to be going their own way it seems.

Tom Temin: All right, so getting back to this particular case, then of NRO and Sehlke versus KPMG. Sehlke protested. It was sustained by GAO because of the departure of that person from KPMG’s team, what happens next?

Joseph Petrillo: Well, under the GAO bid protest decision, the recommendation is that NRO has to choose one of two alternatives. One, either reevaluate the KPMG proposal without the person who’s become unavailable. And that’s one of four key personnel or reopen the procurement and allow all offerors to submit revised proposals.

Tom Temin: Or find out where that person went to work and then get them to bid.

Joseph Petrillo: Presumably, that’s not an option because the procurements ongoing and the number of offerors is set. But these cases raise really, really interesting policy decisions and policy implications. If you look at GAO’s position, their feeling is well, how can we have a good evaluation, rational evaluation of proposals, if one of the most important factors if not the most important factor is based on a situation that’s not true? That’s not valid. It will may have been true when proposals were submitted, but it’s no longer the case. But on the other hand, you’ve got a situation in the regulations, as the Court of Federal Claims pointed out, where there’s a deadline for the submission of proposals, proposals are submitted. And there is no real mechanism for one offeror to modify his proposal or substitute out an important aspect of performance, while the government’s doing the evaluation. If you set up this rule where you have to notify the agency of the unavailability of someone, well, you’ve got a situation there where the agency’s put into a very difficult position because it has to decide, well, are we going to kick this offeror out of the procurement or put it in a situation where it’s highly disadvantaged in the evaluation? Or are we going to reopen the procurement for amendments and modifications by all the offerors and the competitive range and potentially go through multiple rounds of bidding and evaluation? So it’s a difficult decision with no clear good answer under those circumstances.

Tom Temin: Joe Petrillo is a procurement attorney with Smith Pachter McWhorter again, no resolution, but we’ll see what happens. Thanks for joining me.

Joseph Petrillo: Thank you, Tom.