To listen to the Federal Newscast on your phone or mobile device, subscribe in PodcastOne or Apple Podcasts. The best listening experience on desktop can be found using Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

• 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.

Military personnel analysts told Federal News Network the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case could make it harder for service members and civilians in states banning abortion to seek reproductive health care and could jeopardize their privacy.

The repercussions of the case make it especially trying for people who want an abortion and work in a career field where their bodily fitness is paramount and where stigmas against pregnancies are still prevalent. Despite efforts from DoD to give service members an opportunity to start a family, take parental leave and allow troops to recover fully from childbirth, pregnancy can still be disruptive to careers. That compounds with the same stressors those in the civilian world face around pregnancy and abortion.

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on June 24 that DoD will continue to provide seamless access to reproductive healthcare as permitted by federal law.

The Pentagon released its first guidance on the issue four days later.

“Federal law restricts the department from performing abortions or paying to have them performed unless the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term or unless the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest,” Gilbert Cisneros, Defense undersecretary for personnel and readiness.

The Supreme Court decision does not prevent DoD from performing those “covered abortions” in its medical facilities, even in states where abortion in any form is banned.

Things become more complex for service members who are not in those situations, but decide an abortion is right for them.

As of June 30, seven states have banned abortions. A total of 17 states are expected to ban most abortions if legal challenges in those states do not hold up. An additional six states would restrict abortions, such as Florida which bans abortion after 15 weeks.

Some pregnant service members seeking uncovered abortions would have to travel hundreds of miles to find care.

However, the Pentagon’s hands are largely tied from doing more to aid service members in those cases due to federal law, Katherine Kuzminski, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security told Federal News Network.

Cisneros’s memo states service members can still take leave to find abortion care.

“Access to emergency convalescent leave remains unchanged for all service members,” he wrote. DoD civilian employees may continue to request sick leave and other forms of leave as necessary to meet the health care needs of the employee and his or her family members.”

Cisneros added that the implications of the decision are complicated and “must be evaluated against various state laws, together with the views of the Department of Justice.”

Taking that leave can be a complex and time sensitive issue for service members, however.

“If a person needs to leave the area for this type of medical care, then there has to be a conversation with the chain of command because you can’t just leave,” Tammy Smith, former Army personnel chief, told Federal News Network. “There’s a leave form where there’s a process, there’s accountability, there’s all these things unique to our military community.”

The bottom line is that service members must get permission from their commanding officer before taking time off to go get an abortion in another state. Otherwise, they risk criminal punishment.

“The leadership answer to that is that there needs to be some signaling and some conversation,” Smith said. “Commanders need to be speaking up and saying that there is a place where you can have these conversations. These are difficult conversations to talk about human sexuality. That’s one of the most awkward conversations that you can maybe have with somebody who is a coworker or somebody is a member of your squad or platoon.”

Kuzminski said leave requests can lead to uncomfortable situations. If someone needs to take leave quickly to get an abortion, they may need to disclose that they are pregnant to their superior officer to explain the reasoning for the leave.

“The decision rests with the unit level commander,” she said. “There could be challenges there as well depending on the needs of the military and the needs of the unit. It could also bring into question the individual commanders flexibility for such a decision.”

Another issue for pregnant service members taking leave to travel to another state for an abortion is the incurred costs. DoD is prohibited from reimbursing service members for getting that care. Travel plus the procedure and prescription drugs can easily get into the thousands of dollars.

“I don’t necessarily know that DoD has much in the way of options,” Kuzminski said in terms of financially aiding service members.

The costs could be unsustainable for many service members. In 2021, Feeding America estimated that 160,000 active duty service members were food insecure due to poverty.

The organization estimated that nearly 30% of junior ranks were food insecure, the same service members who are in their childbearing years. E-1s to E-4s make between $19,000 and $41,000 a year.

Smith said there may be some relief for service members. Organizations like Army Emergency Relief (AER), a nonprofit that offers grants and loans to soldiers for emergencies, could provide funds. Federal News Network reached out to AER, but they did not respond by the time of publication.

The Dobbs ruling is just one of the handful of recent battles between conservative state laws and the military this year.

In March, the Air Force offered medical and legal help to military families living in states clamping down on LGBTQ+ and transgender children.

“The health, care and resilience of our Department of the Air Force personnel and their families is not just our top priority — it’s essential to our ability to accomplish the mission,” said Air Force Undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones. “We are closely tracking state laws and legislation to ensure we prepare for and mitigate effects to our airmen, guardians and their families. Medical, legal resources, and various assistance are available for those who need them.”

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

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.

The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee (ETAAC), in its annual report to Congress, urges lawmakers to provide the agency with “flexible, sustainable, predictable, multi-year funding.”

The report found the IRS experienced over 100 continuing resolutions since 2001, and that funding uncertainty forces the agency to opt for “more expensive, less effective, short-term solutions.”

“They spend resources to keep outdated legacy systems running. They use temporary staff over permanent staff and typically suspend hiring during times of budget uncertainty,” the report states.

Congress gave the IRS a $12.6 billion budget as part of the fiscal 2022 omnibus spending deal that passed this March, the agency’s largest budget increase in decades.

But lawmakers have yet to act on the IRS’ request for multi-year funds that would allow it to make meaningful progress on a long-term IT modernization effort

Congress does, however, appear willing to incrementally increase the agency’s annual budget after decades of staff attrition and diminished spending power.

The House Appropriations Committee also advanced a fiscal 2023 spending bill last week that would give the IRS a $1 billion increase to its topline budget.

The committee, citing the IRS’ challenges with paper tax returns and historic backlogs since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, also urges the IRS to modernize the electronic filing process for taxpayers.

IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig, whose five-year term ends in November, told the committee the IRS workforce went to extraordinary lengths over the past two years to deliver $1.5 trillion in financial relief to the public through Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) and tax refunds.

“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,” Rettig said Wednesday.

Rettig said the IRS’ shift into new lines of work, which made the agency more of a public benefits provider and not just a tax enforcement agency, went a long way to helping individuals who became unemployed, lost businesses or experienced food insecurity for the first time during the pandemic.

“It’s not like the EIPs got them out of the food bank line,” Rettig said, “But what pit] did is it showed these people that this country cared.”

While Rettig praised the agency’s work throughout the pandemic, he acknowledged some taxpayers are still waiting for their tax refunds.

The agency announced last week it finished processing the backlog of individual paper tax returns it received in 2021.

“When you’re in the middle of it, somebody who hasn’t yet got their refund, it’s hard for them to accept things went well,” Rettig said.

Response metrics ‘don’t translate’ to workforce’s dedication

The IRS has faced scrutiny over the past few years for a low response rate to taxpayer phone calls and a backlog of unprocessed tax returns, but Rettig said those metrics don’t reflect the hard work of IRS employees.

“I want you to know that the people at the IRS gave so much, so often, and I don’t want that lost in translation. Inventory amounts don’t translate into a lack of desire, dedication and the workarounds that had to occur with your help,” he said.

Rettig said the IRS workforce has been his “highest priority” as commissioner, and applauded employees for responding to a range of pandemic-era challenges.

“It’s no secret we’ve got some people that are doing 10 different jobs. We should have 12 people doing those 10 jobs, as in the private sector,” Rettig said.

The IRS plans to hire 10,000 additional employees and expects to make half of those hires this year.

ETAAC Chairwoman Courtney Kay-Decker, a former director of the Iowa Department of Revenue, said this year’s 31-page report takes a streamlined approach compared to previous years.

“We took a step back and said, in light of everything that’s happening in the world around us, let’s look at tax administration from a holistic sort of 30,000-foot approach, and figure out what it is that would mean most to the taxpayer experience,” Kay-Decker said.

The report, recognizing a historic mismatch between the budgets the IRS requests and what Congress approves, found that appropriate funding for IRS initiatives often comes down to four factors — collaboration, modern technology, prioritization of projects and a balance between machines and people.

ETAAC member Kimberly Pederzani, the compliance manager for the employee cloud business unit at Toast, said the IRS is focused on taxpayer service that tools with increased functionality over time, based on taxpayer needs.

“There has never been such a need for governmental turn-on-a-dime innovation as there has been during and following the facilitation of varying forms of relief stemming from the COVID 19 pandemic,” Pederzani said.

The IRS, in recent years, received more than 90% of all tax returns electronically, but the volume of paper tax returns received has led to complications and processing backlogs.

The report finds that at least half of paper tax returns were prepared using commercial software, and that challenges prevented taxpayers from filing their returns electronically.

Prior to the pandemic, about 5% of total returns filed went into error resolution. During the 2021 filing season, the rate of returns sent to the IRS Error Resolution System (ERS) was about 20% of returns filed.

That uptick in tax returns that needed to go through a manual review process created substantial delays in processing tax returns.

Tax returns filed during the tax season 2021 that required manual review often led to tax refund delays of 90 to 120 days, or even longer.

The committee found that congressional changes to the tax code in the middle of filing seasons contributed to an uptick in tax returns flagged as having errors. Pandemic aid programs also required some individuals to file a tax return who might not otherwise need to.

The IRS however, after the filing season of 2021, put together a program called “Fix ERS” to troubleshoot the volume of errors sent to error resolution.

The team developed an automation solution in April 2022 that significantly shortens the time needed to process tax returns that have errors in them.

The tool resolved about two-thirds of the returns coming through the ERS system, minimizing human intervention for those returns and bringing returns to the ERS queue back to the pre-pandemic levels of around 5%

Prior to the pandemic, an IRS agent could process about 100 returns per employee per day. With the new automation tool in place, an employee can process about 5,000 returns per day.

“A true strength of the IRS is making sure that the highest volume workflows are successful. This means prioritizing resources to ensure that forms with high volume can be filed,” said ETAAC member Jihan Jude, an attorney and counselor at law with the Davey Law Group.

Committee member Latryna Carlton, president of Committed Citizens of Waverly, Florida, said that while call volumes increased astronomically during the pandemic, the IRS has not been able to hire enough staff to keep up.

“The IRS folks who answer the phones are typically often the same people who open the mail and the other processing tests as well,” Carlton said, adding that in a typical year, 55% of a customer service representative’s time is spent on the phone.

Carlton said the IRS has deployed some tools, including chatbots, a callback service and secure document upload capabilities, that have improved the level of phone service for taxpayers.

ETAAC member Terri Steenblock, compliance director at the Federation of Tax Administrators, said the committee recommends restructuring the IRS’s funding to eliminate appropriation categories.

The report also recommends the IRS implement a pilot that allows the agency to retain a portion of defined amounts it collects for technology or staffing-related projects.

“We believe investing now in the future of the IRS is an important key to their long-term sustainability and success,” Steenblock said.

The report states that the IRS workforce and hiring challenges are significant, but warns that simply adding new hires “is an expensive, unsustainable, and largely ineffective way to solve what ails the IRS.”

“The IRS cannot meet taxpayers’ service expectations without a healthy balance between technology and human capital investments. By optimizing technology in the right places, the IRS can provide high-quality customer service through a leaner, more agile workforce,” the report states.

If the governmentwide “Trusted Workforce 2.0” initiative is a once-in-a-generation chance to modernize and streamline the personnel vetting process, then the Intelligence and National Security Alliance isn’t sitting on the sidelines.

Personnel vetting reform is one of the White House’s top performance initiatives, with published strategies and action plans. And agencies have already made strides in adopting continuous vetting and speeding up the background investigations process in recent years.

But INSA is continuing to offer new ideas and poke holes in current policies and processes, most recently with new white papers on security clearance mobility and clearing personnel with foreign ties, respectively.

Larry Hanauer, vice president for policy at INSA, said the group is staying engaged with Congress and the intelligence community on major clearance initiatives, like continuous vetting and the development of the National Background Investigative Services.

“We also look at ways just to make the clearance and adjudication process more efficient for both government staff and contractors,” Hanauer said in an interview for Inside the IC.

The mobility paper, for instance, dives into inconsistent policies and processes that make it challenging to move personnel who need Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance from one agency to another.

The issue is most acute for contractors who often move personnel across multiple contracts and agencies. But it can affect recruiting for both agencies and industry.

For instance, some intelligence agencies allow personnel who already have TS/SCI clearance to begin work while they wait for their polygraph test, while others make those employees wait until the polygraph is complete. Depending on the type of polygraph needed, that can mean a delay of anywhere from 30 days to 18 months.

Greg Torres, the director of personnel security at Booz Allen Hamilton, said the net result is a small pool of personnel who are qualified to start work under contracts immediately.

“This means we’re just shuffling the deck chairs, moving someone from one government mission to another, making a hole somewhere else,” Torres said. “And we usually need to pay a premium for that employee to leave their current job.”

INSA’s white paper recommends intelligence agencies consider the counter-intelligence polygraph sufficient for personnel to begin work until a full-scope polygraph can be scheduled.

“We think this is a risk management approach, which we think is the right approach given the myriad tools that these agencies now have to mitigate any perceived risk,” Torres said. “If you think about it years ago, they didn’t have tools like continuous evaluation or user activity monitoring and a host of other tools. But they do now.”

The white paper also recommends the Defense Department eliminate component-specific requirements for granting SCI access and name a senior official in charge of developing department-wide policies for such access.

INSA estimates additional and disparate processes across the 43 DoD components can result in delays of two to five weeks beyond the few days it takes for a component to initially accept an individual’s clearance. And it recommends clearing Top Secret applicants at the SCI level, as well, so additional processes don’t delay that individual if they require SCI access in the future.

DoD and the IC should also put an official or team in charge of uniting policies that affect personnel mobility, from clearance reciprocity to polygraphs to contract language and industry coordination, according to INSA’s paper.

“Since the 9/11 attacks, the government has made really a concerted effort to make sure that intelligence is shared, so you can work at agency X, and you’re accessing intelligence information that comes from agencies Y and Z,” Hanauer said. “Why, if you’re going to go support agency Y or Z, should those agencies have to re-adjudicate your clearance or ask the different investigative steps be done all over again? … It’s these really duplicative processes that don’t add anything to security.”

Re-examining foreign ties

Clearance and mobility processes can also present barriers to the intelligence community’s goal of increasing diversity in the national security workforce. Contractors often compete for the same people who are already cleared at the highest levels, and new applicants can be dissuaded from going through a lengthy, often confusing process.

“If you keep moving the same people around from place to place, you’re not going to be as successful as you as you could be,” Torres said on diversity.

INSA’s new white paper on “recruiting and clearing personnel with foreign ties” also dives headlong into diversity issues, positing that the security clearance process “does not lend itself” to hiring individuals with different backgrounds and experiences who may have key language and cultural skills.

The paper said the intelligence community needs to “re-examine historical assumptions about the risks posed to national security by foreign-born persons or those with close foreign ties.”

Adjudicative guidelines for granting or revoking a clearance requires agencies to examine factors like allegiance to the United States, foreign influence, and foreign preference.

But INSA suggests investigators could look at those aspects from a risk mitigation approach, as opposed to eliminating all risk.

“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.

The paper also recommends mission-focused teams, such as analysts, work more closely with their counterparts in security and human resources, respectively, to ensure candidates with critical skills don’t get easily dropped from the clearance process because of foreign ties.

“We just feel like better communication between the human resources people, the mission-focused teams that want to hire a candidate, and the security folks will help ensure that people with those critical skills don’t just hit that brick wall,” Hanauer said. “The mission-focused teams might be able to provide the the security team, with additional insights into the reasons why this candidate is facing obstacles.”

The white paper also recommends bias awareness training for all officials responsible for recruitment, hiring, investigations and adjudications. Meanwhile, new policies and procedures could consider a more granular consideration of foreign ties, INSA’s paper suggests, such as reasons behind why a candidate wants to hang onto a dual citizenship.

Hanauer said that INSA is now working on a white paper comparing how commercial companies screen their job candidates and contrasting it with the government’s clearance approach.

“Commercial companies … manage to protect their sensitive information pretty well without subjecting their job candidates to a months-long vetting process,” he said. “We’re in the process of doing a comparison of public sector and private sector personnel screening to see if maybe the government can adopt some more efficient best practices from industry.”

Current and former Hill staffers say technology can and has solved many common problems for members of Congress, but they want to see members tap into more commercial-friendly platforms and give centralized authority to bodies like the Bulk Data Task Force, or the House Digital Service.

Stephen Dwyer, senior adviser to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), pointed to solutions such as the Dome Watch and Dome Directory mobile apps, created by the office to help members of Congress, their staff and the public better track movements on the House floor. The 13-year-old private intranet DemCom for House Democratic staff was also redesigned last year with expanded access for Senate staff, mobile functionality and a bigger database of information.

But custom-built systems for “uniquely Congressional purposes,” as Dwyer said, are not all that’s recommended. He told the House Select Committee on Modernization last week, the programs are representative of what is possible when the legislative body coordinates its technology efforts, but that requires in-house digital staff for each office. He recommended hiring digital aides with programming and development skills for every member, in addition to more traditional political science and communications staffers.

“There’s just so much more that they need to do, even versus five, 10 years ago when I was in a congressional office,” Dwyer said. “A lot of that is in digital communications. Every office needs to not just take a bunch of pictures and post them on Twitter and Facebook but they have to do more technical Facebook Lives, they’ve got to take their boss live, there’s a lot of technical tasks that didn’t exist many years ago.”

But Dwyer said Congress needs to recognize the demand for these workers and compensate them appropriately. The House is raising its staff salary floor to $45,000, after essentially a decade-long pay freeze and record inflation made it difficult to attract and retain employees.

One of the Modernization committee’s recommendations last Congress was to create a common committee calendar portal to reduce scheduling conflicts. Vice Chairman William Timmons (R-S.C.) asked witnesses for suggestions to get the ball rolling on what he said could have a big impact on members and staff. Reynold Schweickhardt, Lincoln Network senior adviser, said an issue is that between the House clerk, the chief information officer and the committees themselves there is no clear button to push for technology needs. As such, another recommendation was to clearly focus the responsibility for legislative product.

“I think the other challenge that I alluded to is there’s no gatekeeper for scheduling projects. The CIO, they may be working on five to 10 projects, so they tell you they’re working on your project and they are, but they’re sort of shuffling things back and forth,” said Schweickhardt, who served at the Committee on House Administration for 13 years and the Government Publishing Office for eight years Versus a program-management kind of functionality that says, ‘What are the three things we want to accomplish in the next couple of months? Let’s knock ‘em out. Let’s figure out what the next set of important things are.’”

Dwyer said the foundation is laid. For several years, House rules have required all committees to post hearings and testimony in a central place, putting the body ahead of the Senate, but amplifying that with a more consumer-friendly version would help, he said.

Melissa Dargan, co-founder of AppMy LLC and a former Hill staffer, seconded the use of funds for a centralized scheduling platform. It’s a problem she tried to tackle when she launched the TourTrackr app to better manage constituent tour requests.

“From constituent tour requests to flown flag purchases, these important responsibilities were tracked using printouts, binders and excel spreadsheets. It was a fragmented, inefficient process. At the time, there were no digital alternatives that House offices were approved to use. So while these tasks seemed easy, they were tedious, repetitive and time consuming,” she said, adding that technological innovation does not need to come at the expense of security.

“I respect and understand that the House has high standards for new tech approval. Protecting security and personal identifiable information are critical to ensure the integrity of the institution. That said, upholding those priorities and creating a welcoming environment for new tech products can be done simultaneously,” Dargan said.

The USPS inspector general, in a report released Friday, found service performance increased for all five major mail classes during the fiscal 2022 peak season, compared to the same period the year prior.

Service performance improved across several categories — including priority mail, first-class packages, first-class mail, marketing mail and periodicals — compared to the year prior.

The IG report found USPS reduced the amount of overtime paid out this peak season, compared to the previous year.

The USPS IG redacted many of the agency’s service performance metrics in the public version of its report, but states in general terms that the agency’s earlier-than-usual holiday preparations led to improve performance.

“In response to the decrease of service performance that occurred during the FY 2021 peak season, Postal Service management executed a new year-round strategy in preparation for peak seasons by implementing permanent operational changes,” the report states.

The report generally supports the Postal Service’s own year-end findings that it provided a significantly higher level of service this year, compared to the widespread mail and package delays it saw in December 2020.

USPS hired more than 51,000 temporary employees to prepare for its busy year-end period. Of those, it hired 43,000 processing employees and 8,000 retail and delivery employees.

USPS also converted more than 63,000 pre-career employees to career positions, in an effort to reduce workforce turnover.

The IG report found USPS maintained about an 80% level of employee availability, approximately the same level of staffing it had for the fiscal 2021 holiday season.

The Postal Service, during its busiest season, saw an uptick in COVID-19 quarantines among its workforce last year.

The American Postal Workers Union told Federal News Network in late December that at one point, more than 65,000 employees were out of work because of COVID-19 infection or exposure.

Those figures, however, amount to less than half of the 19,000 postal workers who were under quarantine in December 2020.

USPS management told the IG’s office that employee availability decreased in January 2022 because of the attrition of the peak season temporary employees.

USPS also took several steps to prepare its facilities for the year-end rush.

USPS also installed 89 package sorting machines between July and November 2021. The additional machines enabled the Postal Service to meet its goal to increase the daily package processing capacity.

It also leased 46 package support annexes and 51 temporary mail processing and logistics annexes.

Beyond the holiday crush of mail and packages, USPS also relied on leased annexes to start issuing free COVID-19 rapid tests to households.

USPS has delivered at least 380 million free tests through the program so far.

The rollout of the operation has won praise from the administration and the public, USPS behind the scenes went to great lengths to make the program a success.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, in an interview earlier this year, said USPS executives joined the White House and several key agencies in phone calls outlining the plan in the days leading up to Christmas.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said she is focused on improving recruitment for the agency’s reservist workforce, which comprises the majority of FEMA’s response force going out to communities to respond to disasters. That’s especially important, she said, as the number of disasters FEMA responds to each year has more than tripled in the last decade, up from 108 to 349.

“The more tools we have to recruit a really strong reservist workforce will help us increase the number of individuals that we have available, but also the types of technical skills that we need to face the types of disasters that we are starting to see,” Criswell told senators at a June 22 hearing for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

To better recruit and support reservist workers as disasters intensify, FEMA added multiple programs focused on improving the mental health of its workforce. The White House’s fiscal 2023 budget request would continue to fund those programs, Criswell said. The budget request contains additional initiatives to support and strengthen FEMA’s workforce, including $6.4 million for the incident management workforce.

“The unrelenting pace of a year-round cycle of disasters and crises places great demands on the FEMA team. We must look out for the physical, the emotional and the mental health of our workforce,” Criswell said.

That comes as the agency struggles with staffing shortages, which the Government Accountability Office said makes disaster response all the more difficult.

Criswell said along with helping agency workers, she wants to ensure FEMA has the right balance of employees to respond to what has become a year-long disaster response pace. At a House hearing for the Homeland Security Committee’s Emergency Preparedness subcommittee, Criswell said FEMA is looking at ways to increase its services without placing additional strain on the agency’s staff.

“We are taking a look right now at taking a step back, now that we have more of this year-long operational tempo instead of the peak that we have traditionally seen during hurricane season, of what does the future staffing model need to look like,” Criswell said at the June 14 hearing. “We’re doing a deep dive into that analysis so we can better plan and appropriate our staff for a year-long response as we continue to go forward.”

To provide better response efforts to underserved communities, FEMA’s strategic plan for fiscal 2022 through 2026 additionally incorporates diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility priorities. And a significant part of the agency’s DEIA efforts are internally facing.

“Through investment in diversity and inclusion efforts — including employee resource groups and multicultural training — FEMA can increase its employees’ involvement and participation in cultivating a culture of inclusion. Additionally, leaders and managers must be leveraged to promote equity practices, transparency, and accountability across the agency,” the strategic plan stated.

“The more our workforce resembles the nation we serve, the better we will serve it,” Criswell said at the HSGAC hearing. “We are adapting our recruiting efforts to reach individuals from underrepresented communities by partnering with organizations like historically black colleges and universities, as well as other minority-serving institutions.”

To measure DEIA improvements to its workforce, FEMA will use the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to analyze the results of questions on diversity, equity and inclusion, the strategic plan said.

One HSGAC committee member, though, questioned FEMA’s focus on equity initiatives during the hearing. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he was concerned that the agency’s DEIA focus would take away from its ability to respond to disasters.

Criswell said in response that FEMA’s strategic plan emphasizes improving equity to better understand how individual communities experience disasters differently, and how the agency can build internal equity to better respond to disasters in underserved communities.

“[Of] each of the objectives within my priorities, one focuses externally on how we deliver our services to communities, one focuses internally on how our workforce is going to support that and another one talks about how we partner with other stakeholders in order to deliver our programs,” she said.

On Capitol Hill, some legislation is also looking to improve equity at the agency. Under a bill from Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), HSGAC’s chairman, FEMA would establish a new office dedicated to better serving communities who historically receive disproportionately low funds from FEMA during and after disasters.

HSGAC also passed the Civilian Reservist Emergency Workforce, or “CREW” Act, in December, which would extend USERRA protections to FEMA’s reservist workforce. USERRA – or the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 – was originally established for reservist civilian personnel who get called in for military service, to ensure reinstatement of their civilian jobs after completing their service. The CREW Act would extend the same pay and training protections for FEMA reservists.

“What this act will do is give them reemployment protection, which means it will transform the way that we can recruit our reservist workforce, bring in specialties to come in and support those jurisdictions [and] even give us the opportunity to have more reservists that are right in the local community,” Criswell said at the House committee hearing.

“This is a hugely important piece of legislation for our workforce and for FEMA’s mission,” she added.

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne

At least some members of Congress are pushing for telework to become a big and permanent feature of federal employment. The latest gambit is a bill that requires agencies to gather statistics about telework and prevent them from restricting it. It’s called the Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act. Federal Drive with Tom Temin  has more from one of its sponsors, Maryland Democratic Congressman John Sarbanes.

 Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin: Well, let’s start with what the bill requires in terms of data collection metrics collection, what do you want to know, from agencies through this bill?

John Sarbanes: We’ve had really robust telework over the last 10 years. And I was very pleased back in 2010, to help author the Telework Enhancement Act with Congressman Connolly from Virginia and so forth. We got that in place really, to encourage federal agencies to increase their uptake, their deployment of telework across the federal government, and that worked pretty well. But we understand we have got to come back and do real evaluation, you want to make sure that data is being collected well. You want to make sure that, you know, any sort of bumps in the road that these agencies have encountered over the last few years, or lessons that have been learned as we’ve been in the middle of pandemic, the things that really put pressure on the federal workforce and make telework a real important option. That we’re learning those lessons, that we’re gathering the data. So what this new bill does, which is called as you indicated, it’s not a sexy title, but it’s Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act, is to is to gather up that data. So it would make sure there are standards in place for how we collect and use federal agency data that’s related to telework. It would make sure that the training that’s happening is being done in an effective way. So supervisors really know how to push this out and make it available to the workforce. It would guide the agencies good management practices with respect to telework. So all the things you’d like to see, to make sure that that remains a robust option going forward. But it also would require some real accountability and transparency. So the federal telework option sort of how agencies are using it, they’re going to be required to report on that annually to OPM, on sort of the goals, priorities, how they’re expanding access to telework, reporting to Congress, if there’s any proposed reductions in telework. And that’s important, because I for one, and I know many of my colleagues, think this is a really important tool. And we don’t want agencies sort of arbitrarily cutting back on it without providing a good explanation of that. So this bill would put that requirement in place. And then a real important thing, just to close here is there’s been some fuzziness about the how remote work is considered or defined within the category of telework. And this bill would help clarify the definition make it clear that remote work counts as telework. And when you’re doing data collection, that’s really important to make sure you’ve sorted that out. So  that’s the idea. But bottom line, there’s a lot of technical dimensions to this bottom line. It’s about keeping telework strong, making sure that’s a good option for the federal workforce.

Tom Temin: And do you envision the level of telework that has been occurring as a result of the pandemic, especially in 2021, and maybe early ’22, but mostly ’20 and ’21? Could that be in your view, the norm for the federal government?

John Sarbanes: I don’t know that we’ll see the same levels of telework that, frankly, we had to engage in with the pandemic. I mean, that was a very extraordinary circumstance. I do think that the pandemic pushed a lot of agencies and workers and supervisors to a new appreciation of how you incorporate telework into the productivity of an agency. So I think you’re going to continue to see a real premium on this that has been kind of enhanced and introduced to a lot of the workforce because of the pandemic. And I’m looking forward to what that represents, again, for the productivity of these agencies. Across the board.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Congressman John Sarbanes of Maryland. He’s co-sponsor of the Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act. And what have you heard from constituents and not necessarily just constituents in Maryland, but the federal workforce, the federal employee unions, perhaps, and how does it contrast with what you’re hearing from supervisors and maybe even political appointees, some of which have come in and have never seen the bulk of their workforce?

 John Sarbanes: Well, first of all, you should know that the bill that we’re discussing right now has been strongly endorsed by the National Federation of Federal Employees, the Federal Managers Association, the American Federation of Government Employees. So the people who know this workforce best and understand how it can be most productive, they have leaned in hard behind this this bill, this strengthening of telework options. From my constituents who obviously depend significantly on what the federal agencies can offer to them across the board, the more sort of comprehensive the toolbox is for serving the needs of your constituents, the better for those constituents. So I think they liked the idea and benefited from the fact of more telework opportunity for the federal workforce. Look, there’s still things that your constituents need to do in person, there’s still certain kinds of meetings and interactions that have to happen face to face, and telework can’t replace that. But if telework allows the workforce to be more nimble in its response to the concerns of constituents. That helps not just boost the morale of the workforce,  it boosts the morale of the public that’s being served. So I think there’s definitely an appreciation among the public that this is an important tool to have in the toolkit of service to the broad public. In terms of the workers themselves. I mean, we have seen surveys over the last few years that demonstrate really strong support among the federal workforce for this option. They’re expressing that in the sense that they’re using this opportunity. But they also, in the surveys that are taken, kind of recommit to this as an important option. You can see among supervisors, some are more hesitant than others in terms of how they deploy this. But I think the general experience is, once you kind of push forward and embrace this as a tool, you get more comfortable with it. And you also can see how it increases the productivity of the people that are working with you. Frankly, not just those who are teleworking, but those who aren’t teleworking, the productivity across these agencies goes up when they treat telework is an important component of how to deploy their services.

Tom Temin: And one of the agencies where this all seems to be clashing somewhat in this being resolved or not resolved, I believe is in your own district, and that is the Social Security Administration. And they’ve had labor relations issues, let’s say going back to the Trump administration that haven’t really been resolved in the Biden era, and there’s still an acting director that maybe hasn’t been all that effective in settling all of those issues. What’s your sense of that as kind of a crucible for all of this social security?

John Sarbanes: Well, I mean, there have been some challenges and some of the agencies including that one, I think that just puts a fine point on why this, this new piece of legislation that we’ve introduced is so important. Because it will help to encourage –  pressure, in some instances, the agencies, all agencies, to look at how they can embrace telework, achieve that right balance for how telework is integrated into their agencies workforce and productivity. And by collecting data that reflects that, you create the right kind of positive peer pressure across agencies. So for example, I would expect to see, based on the data collection, and the reporting that we are asking for in this bill, that some agencies will be able to highlight best practices, and really convincing data about how it’s contributing to their productivity. And then agencies maybe next door who haven’t been implementing it, or embracing it at the level they could, will feel the pressure and expectation to do the same. And that’s exactly what we’re going for here. I mean, every agency is different to some extent, but there are best practices that can be uniform. And if we collect data that reflects that and then get it broadly distributed across these agencies and across the workforce and across the various supervisors and leadership, you get to a better place in terms of achieving that proper balance.

Tom Temin: Just a final question on telework. That’s a related issue that Congress and the and the bureaucracy have been laboring over for many, many years. And that’s the federal real estate, bulk footprint, whatever you want to call it. It seems like if there is a permanent increase, to the degree we’re talking about, of telework, it’s really past do reevaluating what federal space looks like.

John Sarbanes: I think that’s fair. And again, I think the information data we’ll be pulling in as a result of this legislation, if we get it passed, and it’s implemented, will help with that kind of analysis, and evaluation. I mean, the world is changing every day, we all have to keep up with that. The private sector’s keeping up with that, and we’re very conscious of that. I mean, a lot of these opportunities around telework that we’re trying to make available in the federal work space, are ones that the private sector has been embracing for years. And, frankly, if we have good telework policies and opportunities in government, we can compete better for really high quality employees that the private sector may be recruiting now, because they’ve got a lot of flexibility. But getting to the question of what’s that physical footprint of the federal government look like? Are there opportunities to downsize or resize that, for example, based on the uptake around telework? That’s definitely going to be part of the equation as we move forward. And again, I think this legislation will benefit from that analysis.

Tom Temin: And if you’ve got a couple of minutes longer, I’d like to ask you about a totally unrelated issue, and that is your bill, public service loan forgiveness program, the introduction of which was followed by a Biden administration move to overhaul that whole public service loan forgiveness program.  What’s the latest what’s going on here? What are you trying to accomplish?

John Sarbanes: What we’re trying to accomplish is to make it easier for people to choose a path of public service, in spite of having maybe significant loan debt that they’ve accrued, for purposes of their education. So over 10 years ago, I introduced the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act, which would allow people who are pursuing public service to have reduced monthly payments on whatever their their student debt was, if it was federal consolidated student debt. And then at the end of 10 years have that forgiven completely. There have been some bumps in the road along the way. The Biden administration has taken some pretty dramatic steps recently to make sure that those student borrowers out there who qualify for this opportunity are getting the benefits of what we intended from that legislation. So there’s a lot of workers in the federal space, who are carrying student loans, and can benefit from this opportunity for loan forgiveness, after 10 years of serving in government, and are seeking to take advantage of that. The Biden administration, we’re certainly watching them carefully, I think is implemented some steps to make sure that opportunity is there and people can take full advantage of it. So it’s just another way to support those people who make the decision to go into public service, which may not be as lucrative as some other opportunities that they could have. But it represents a kind of mission-orientedness on their part, we want to support them, helping them with their student loans is one way to do that.

Tom Temin: But just to play devil’s advocate, it’s not as if public federal servants are not paid. They’re not volunteers, they do have a really good defined benefit pension plan. They have a salary and promotion schedule, they’ve got a lot of things that actually many people in the private sector don’t have. Do you expect this perhaps maybe to spark, I don’t know, a forgiveness program paid for by private sector employers? And maybe the government can get off the hook that way, instead of just by fiat for the trillion dollar overhang we’ve all got.

John Sarbanes: The federal federal workers do have a certain amount of benefits. When you add them all up, it typically does not, it still doesn’t exceed or necessarily remain competitive against what the private sector can offer somebody with the same credentials. So I think we got to be looking at different ways to incentivize people to make that choice, particularly on the front end of their career. And if they know that a significant loan burden could be alleviated by choosing to take the path of public service, in this case, working for the federal government. And those are talented, skilled people that we want to have serving the public from their position in the federal workforce, then I think we ought to offer that opportunity to them. I’ve seen it make a difference in the calculation of young people who are entering the workforce and are trying to decide “do I take this path? Or do I take a different path?” And if they’re taking the path of public service, we want to make sure that we’re supporting that, because we all will benefit from it in the long run.

Tom Temin: And of course, you mentioned 10 years ago, the original overhaul bill, now you have the what you can do for your country act. That’s just an update to the original loan forgiveness program plan?

John Sarbanes: Correct. That’s a way to go in and address some of the bottlenecks. We’ve seen some of the kinds of glitches and how the program is administered and make sure that anybody who entered public service with the expectation based on the public service loan forgiveness program, that their student debt would be forgiven after 10 years of commitment, aught to be able to benefit from that and have that expectation realized. And so this new bill is designed to make sure that that all of those pieces are in place. And that really thousands, tens of thousands of people across the country, who every year will be rolling into this opportunity can rely on it being there for them.

Tom Temin: Democratic Congressman John Sarbanes of Maryland. Thanks so much for joining me.

To listen to the Federal Newscast on your phone or mobile device, subscribe in PodcastOne or Apple Podcasts. The best listening experience on desktop can be found using Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

• New legislation would make it easier for security clearance applicants to overcome a history of using marijuana. A provision in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2023 intel authorization bill would prohibit agencies from denying a clearance solely based on the applicant’s previous pot use. The provision was championed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). He’s also pushing to make it so ongoing marijuana use is not the basis for denying or losing a clearance. Today, cleared individuals can still expect to forfeit their clearance due to ongoing pot use, even if it’s legal in the state in which they reside.

• Kiran Ahuja reaches one year as director for the Office of Personnel Management. Ahuja is the first confirmed OPM director to reach one year in office since 2015. After implementing changes like adding time off to vote and updating telework policies, Ahuja said she’s pushing for more reforms to federal recruitment, “We’re going to stand up a chief diversity officer council, which is something that will be coming this summer, paid internship guidance that will be coming out later this summer. We want to ensure that federal jobs and opportunities are accessible to all, as well as doing some reforms to the Pathways Program.” (Federal News Network)

• Agencies have some new guidance for securely using cloud services. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency updated its Cloud Security Technical Reference Architecture this week. The agency received more than 300 comments on the original TRA released last September. The new document reflects requests to bring the guidance in line with the federal zero trust strategy, clarify its connections to the FedRAMP program, and create more consistency with Identity and Access Management capabilities.

• Health and Human Services welcomes its inaugural class of digital fellows. The fellows are part of an early career program to get technology career workers into government. At HHS, the fellows will use data, analytics and innovation to help with pubic health outreach. The program is designed to recruit new tech employees into federal government. Fellows come from a variety of backgrounds ranging from recent college grads, to software engineers and product managers. The Office of Management and Budget last week announced the 41 fellows who will spend the next two years working at 13 different agencies to solve technology challenges.

• Frontline employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency may see more resources from federal leadership. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell requests funding in the fiscal 2023 budget to expand mental health programs for agency workers. That’s as FEMA faces staffing shortages and a now year-round pace of disaster response in the U.S. Criswell said the agency is analyzing its future staffing model to determine how to increase services, without placing more strain on employees. FEMA’s budget request also includes $6.4 million for the incident management workforce.

• A bill to make federal buildings more resilient against natural disasters makes it through the Senate. The Disaster Resiliency Planning Act would require the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to agencies on how to make natural disaster resilience part of their asset management decision-making. OMB would also work with the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help agencies identify potential gaps in their disaster resilience prevention efforts. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced the bill.

• The upside to Congress’ decentralized nature is that innovation can come from anywhere. The downside is that coordinating those innovations is hard. Current and former staffers say technology can and has solved many common problems for members of Congress, but they want to see members tap into more commercial-friendly platforms and give centralized authority to bodies like the Bulk Data Task Force, or the House Digital Service. The House Modernization Committee said they agree Congress needs better collaboration on tech solutions but it may take dedicated staff from each member office. (Federal News Network)

• Federal contractors and subcontractors have less than a week to certify their compliance with their affirmative action requirements. The Labor Department’s Office of Contractor Compliance set a June 30 deadline for vendors to submit their plans to the OFCCP Contractor Portal. Labor found most contractors and subcontractors were not meeting federal affirmative action requirements forcing them to create this new rule. It mandates companies, on an annual basis, to develop and maintain annual affirmative action plans and upload them to the portal. Contractors and subcontractors who fail to register or certify their compliance will face an audit from Labor.

• The IRS is looking to diversify its contractor base. A new request for information published on SAM.gov says the agency is doing market research. It wants to determine if there is a sufficient population of contractors capable of providing goods and services the IRS needs. The RFI specifically asks for responses from businesses that qualify for socio-economic set-asides. IRS is looking for responses by July 12.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs is now better at negotiating prices of pharmaceuticals. The VA’s National Acquisition Center heeded the advice of its inspector general and renegotiated prices with 10 pharmaceutical suppliers and achieved almost $43 million in immediate savings. The acquisition center went back to the contractors after the IG found all 10 did not have valid reasons for not offering the agency most-favored-customer pricing. The IG also found the acquisition center didn’t reliably track all the items contractors offered through the Price Reduction Clause, causing the higher prices. VA expects to save more than $328 million over the life of the contracts.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs encourages veterans to self-check for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on PTSD Screening Day, June 27. The agency shared a 50-second self-evaluation to help determine if the subject may have symptoms of PTSD by answering six questions. Paula Schnurr, the executive director of the National Center for PTSD said that the message they want to send is one of hope and she said that PTSD is treatable and a normal response to trauma.

• The concept of a government scorecard for customer experience is coming into focus. Former federal officials suggest a customer experience category could be added to the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act scorecard, or could exist as a standalone scorecard. Matt Lira, former special assistant to the president for Innovation Policy and Initiatives tell the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee a FITRA-like scorecard for CX would get results. “It’s tangible, it’s binary, it’s quantitative. And I will say firsthand, being on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, it was an incredibly useful tool, the FITARA scorecard, in driving agency deliverables,” Lira said. (Federal News Network)

• Two observers of federal management have a list of nine tenets for more agile government. The National Academy of Public Administration and the Project Management Institute’s latest report, “Agile Regulation: Gateway to the Future,” outlines an agile regulatory framework with tenets like collaborating early and often on regulatory development, using small inclusive teams to manage the regulatory development process, and automation tools. NAPA President Terry Gerton saidthat after the pandemic, the public sector must begin to operate differently and make public satisfaction the top priority.

The article cited a New York start-up with Kombucha on tap, meant to lure workers. I don’t know of a single government office with Kombucha on tap. In government, to solve the people problem we need to the make the case to tech workers that their country needs them and their work will be meaningful.

I am the CEO of a small government contracting business based in Virginia. After high school I joined the Marines for a sense of purpose, adventure and to do something meaningful. Following my military service, I started my business to continue serving the nation I care so much about.

On a workplace culture panel last year co-hosted by George Mason University and Defense Acquisition University, I pointed out that federal agencies and contracting businesses like mine aren’t only competing against one another for talent. We’re also competing against the Teslas and Apples of the world.

Government work might not pay the same salary as glitzy tech start-ups, but as employers target younger workers, pay may not be the deciding factor.

Studies of millennial and Generation Z workers reveal 90% of this generation wants meaningful work. Half of millennial respondents in one survey of over 2,000 workers said they would even take a pay cut to do more meaningful work.

Government, at every level, impacts our friends and our neighbors. The success of our missions is felt at home and abroad. We see the striking need for stability and good government when unrest barrages across our Twitter feeds. Government work makes a difference in our communities, our nation and even across the globe.

For those of us hiring in the government sector, we need to find opportunities to tell the story of government work. It doesn’t sound sexy. But when we’re doing mission-first work, our work matters.

One of my government contracts in Vermont serves veterans. My team learned of a 95-year-old World War II veteran who was forced out of Canada during the early months of COVID. He and his wife ended up in Vermont, but they were homeless. My team stepped in to coordinate support across community resources to get this homeless veteran housing, nutritionally-sound meals, VA health benefits and a phone and computer. A government contract put the right people in this veteran’s life at the right time to be able to help him and honor his service.

In 2019, a Department of Housing and Urban Development Assistant Secretary told Congress that the Federal Housing Administration’s information technology structure radically needed modernization. He stated some systems were more than 40 years old. My company partnered with other businesses to lead a long-overdue modernization project at HUD. The new system improves accuracy and efficiency and streamlines operations in critical analytics. Needed modernization efforts are rewarding to both the taxpayer and the tech employees making these vital improvements.

When I talk to fellow government contracting leaders, I hear the same challenge emerge. We’re all dealing with the people problem. We should support good educational opportunities that get potential young employees into agency and government contracting pipelines early in their careers, but developing talent takes time. In the immediate, let’s tell our real-world stories of the government sector making a difference. I urge my fellow contracting executives and public sector partners, let’s show how government work is meaningful and we’ll attract the tech workers our nation needs.

Michael Sanders is founder and CEO of Interactive Government Holdings, Inc., a verified service-disabled, veteran owned small business based in Springfield, Virginia.

The public’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security’s lead immigration agency has one primary focus in this year’s annual report to Congress: reducing the backlog of cases and its impacts. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ backlog has nearly 5.2 million cases and approximately 8.5 million cases are pending, according the CIS Ombudsman Phyllis Coven.

By comparison, the backlog was around 2.7 million in July 2019. On a call with USCIS leadership Wednesday, Coven said the affirmative asylum backlog is worst of all.

“We’re hyper focused on all backlogs, but there are some impacts beyond just the time loss. That’s of great concern to us. We’re examining things like how customers can request, expedite and advance parole, which snowball because of the backlogs,” Coven said. “We looked at needed solutions, including digital ones to encourage the agency to take bolder steps. And we’re also trying to give due credit where it’s due such as the approach of dealing with the U visa [for nonimmigrant victims of certain crimes] backlog that the agency has undertaken by developing the [Bona Fide Determination] process.”

USCIS struggles to hire enough staff to address the case backlog, even after hiring freezes in fiscal 2019 and 2020 lifted. In fiscal 2020, the average time to onboard a new adjudicator was 97 to 118 days after the date of a hiring decision, according to the CIS Obudsman’s office.

Dan Renaud, senior counselor to the USCIS director, said that when social distancing measures were in place, staff used video interviews and biometrics to continue processing cases. He also said the agency leveraged appropriations to cover overtime for adjudicators.

“Our first round of hiring has favored more towards supervisory roles, which has meant additional internal promotions and an HR infrastructure that’s ready to support an increase in new staff. We’re glad that we’ve been able to promote those career civil servants committed to our mission,” he said.

USCIS plans to hire more than 4,000 employees by the end of this calendar year, and set new, more aggressive “cycle time” goals for fiscal 2023. Renaud said these are an internal management metric comparable to median processing time.

Timesaving accommodations were made for certain applicants. Doug Rand, senior advisor to the USCIS director, said individuals in the health care and child care industries who are renewing their work authorizations can request an expedited review and completion of their employment authorization document renewals. The work permit validity period also increased from one to two years for certain “adjustment of status” and humanitarian applicants.

Meanwhile, back in March, USCIS published a final rule to effectively expand premium processing services for cases, which is an additional fee applicants can pay to expedite their forms. But this expedited service is still handled by human beings, and Rand said there is a limit to how many cases employees can process at once.

“One needs extra human beings to be able to do a faster turnaround time. So we understand and appreciate the fact that a lot of folks out there would be paying for premium processing for a lot of these ones right now, if they could,” Rand said. “We really want to satisfy that demand. We wish we could, we could just flip a switch and turn it on for everybody, but that’s not really operationally possible.”

Fee-for-service model leaves USCIS underfunded, understaffed

Although the CIS Ombudsman’s annual report to Congress is due by June 30, Coven’s office already issued two formal recommendations on March 31 and June 15. One was to amending USCIS’ funding model which relies almost entirely on fees-for-service, a long-running obstacle for the agency to tackle its backlog.

USCIS’ workforce of more than 20,000 people and 200-plus offices and facilities have an annual budget averaging above $4 billion since 2018, 97% of which comes from fees-for-service. The federal review and public comment process for adjusting fees takes several years, and the agency has never adjusted those fees for inflation – which reached an annual rate of 8.6% in May, the highest in 41 years.

But that’s not all.

The drop in services performed by USCIS during the pandemic, various humanitarian disasters that occur at unforeseen times, and cuts to nonpayroll expenses in order to avoid a massive COVID-related furlough compounded to reveal the inadequacy of USCIS’ funding model, the ombudsman wrote. The recommendations included dedicated appropriations to tackle case backlogs, and to cover humanitarian and asylum services which are not fee-based yet paid for at the expense of applicants for other immigration needs.

“We recommend that USCIS seek legislative or regulatory action to: Reengineer the agency’s biennial fee review process, particularly its associated staffing allocation models, to ensure it fully and proactively projects the staffing levels needed to meet targeted processing time goals for future processing as well as backlog adjudications … [and] Authorize and establish a financing mechanism, through the auspices of the Department of the Treasury, that USCIS may draw upon to address unexpected revenue shortfalls and unfunded policy shifts and to maintain adequate staffing to meet its performance obligations to its customers and Congress,” the report said.

Although, researchers pointed out in 2020, when USCIS requested emergency funding, “As a fee-funded agency, USCIS has been largely exempt from customary congressional oversight,” and the reason it was made a self-standing agency was to “strengthen the benefit-granting functions of the immigration system and sever them from [congressional] enforcement missions.”

‘Efficiency at the expense of equity’

The second recommendation was to improve the notification process for Form I-129 beneficiaries. Form I-129 is a petition filed by an employer to extend, amend or change the status of their nonimmigrant worker. Currently, USCIS only notifies employers of actions and status changes for the application, but does not notify the workers who would in fact benefit from the I-129 petition. According to the CIS Ombudsman, this means those workers reply on their employers for all information, which could leave them without status documentation and make them susceptible to abuse. The report called this “administrative efficiency at the expense of equity,” echoing several of the Biden administration’s directives for improving customer experience and the federal workforce as a whole.

As of now, eligible nonimmigrant workers are supposed to receive a tear-off Form I-94 from their employer, which they carry around at all times. Employers keep a copy, but USCIS will not send the form to workers themselves.

Proposed solutions included notifying beneficiaries by mail or online; allowing beneficiaries to track their status online; and for USCIS to collaborate with Customs and Border Protection so that applicants can check their Form I-94 status online using passport information.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is looking to streamline and speed up its hiring process based upon a suite of recommendations from agency advisors who found CISA is not moving quickly enough to address a critical dearth of cyber talent.

CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee approved its first tranche of recommendations during a meeting Wednesday. The federal advisory committee met for the first time late last year. The personnel recommendations approved during the latest meeting were issued by the “Transforming the Cyber Workforce” subcommittee, led by Mastercard Chief Security Officer Ron Green.

The subcommittee is recommending CISA conduct “a comprehensive review of its current workforce and talent needs to ensure that it is properly aligned with the agency’s strategic goals and future growth.” It is also urging CISA to cut in half the amount of time it takes to onboard job applicants and expand the agency’s recruiting efforts to a wider swath of potential candidates.

CISA Director Jen Easterly praised the subcommittee’s work and said she would consider the recommendations over the next 90 days. The agency will then produce an action plan that sketches out a path forward for the recommendations it adopts.

“I like the ambition,” Easterly said during Wednesday’s meeting. “I like the audacious nature of some of them.”

The committee acknowledges recent strides CISA has made in its hiring process, including the agency’s use of the new Cyber Talent Management System (CTMS). But it is urging CISA to “move with far greater speed and urgency” in improving its talent acquisition processes.

“The process is lengthy and difficult to navigate both internally and externally, and therefore places CISA at a tremendous disadvantage relative to private sector employers for this critical and highly sought-after talent pool,” the report states.

The committee is recommending CISA set a goal of 90 days for a cybersecurity candidate to go from offer to onboarding. The process currently takes an average of 198 days at CISA, according to the report.

Additionally, the committee is urging CISA to “move away from a rigid, inflexible job classification system to a flexible, adaptable, pool-based talent management approach better aligned with organizational needs and career paths for experienced professionals.”

CISA is already in the process of hiring a “chief people officer,” Easterly confirmed. The new position will work with agency leadership “to advance a unified approach to talent acquisition, establish workforce development priorities, and ensure alignment with professional career paths,” according to the advisory committee’s report.

“The CSAC strongly supports CISA’s current plans to do this,” it adds.

The panel is also recommending CISA develop “a systemic approach to collecting and analyzing data on candidate pools and hiring processes to benchmark, monitor and improve hiring cycles, using an organizational chart to monitor time to fill, time to hire, source of hire, recruitment funnel effectiveness and diversity of candidate slate metrics.”

Other reports have highlighted the lack of good data as a barrier to the government’s cyber and IT personnel management.

During the meeting, Easterly said CISA needs more innovative hiring ideas. She also acknowledged the slow start of the CTMS. The talent system was launched in November following years of development. Last month, FCW reported that just one employee had started working under CTMS.

“It has had a slow start because it’s a brand new way of managing people. It’s an entire entirely different system,” Easterly said. “But we’re now starting to get our bearings and are starting to up the number of people we’re giving offers to.”

Remote and telework positions at CISA

One of CISA’s greatest strengths with hiring is its flexibility on location, according to Easterly. She said nearly 2,000 CISA positions are either remote or telework-eligible. CISA’s total workforce is approximately 2,500 employees, according to budget documents.

Easterly asked the workforce subcommittee to also take a closer look at recommendations around remote work and telework.

“I think it’s terrific, it really helps with recruiting,” Easterly said. “But as we allow for this important flexibility in our workforce, I want to make sure that we are in fact instilling the culture that we need to be successful, and that we are all embracing the values and the principles that define the culture that we’re at CISA.”

Security clearance hurdles

The panel also identified the security clearance process as a major sticking point in speeding up hiring for CISA. “The subcommittee heard consistently that the current, unpredictable suitability process is unnecessarily cumbersome and time-consuming, which is a significant obstacle to hiring,” the report states.

The panel is recommending CISA conduct a “thorough review of the interagency security clearing process to identify paths to streamline and speed up this critical path for CISA candidates.”

Easterly asked the committee to dive further into the security clearance issue as well. She says CISA is taking a look at all of its open job positions to make sure clearance requirements aren’t an unnecessarily high bar.

“We’re very much scrutinizing all of our open jobs to make sure if they really do need a level of clearance,” she said. “Not all need a [Top Secret] clearance.”

National cyber workforce plans

In addition to addressing its internal workforce challenges, the panel also says CISA must play a “key role” in building the national cyber workforce. “The agency’s future depends on it,” the report states. “There is a significant gap in availability of skilled cybersecurity professionals compared to the rapidly growing need.”

Cyberseek, a public-private partnership, estimates there are some 700,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions nationwide. That includes nearly 40,000 unfilled positions in the public sector.

The committee is recommending CISA focus on education, including by supporting a virtual National Cyber Academy, akin to a digital West Point, where attendees could participate in a “CISA Cadet Track” leading to a traditional degree along with a commitment to work at the agency.

The panel is also recommending CISA work with members in the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative to establish a “Cyber Force” pilot program involving “tours of duty” at the agency. The JCDC was established last year. Its members include several major technology and cybersecurity firms.

“JCDC members should loan out top security practitioners/volunteers for a one-to-two-year tour of duty before returning to the private sector as designated CISA Liaisons to facilitate ongoing public-private collaboration such as threat sharing, especially during ‘Shields Up’ initiatives and cybersecurity crises,” the committee’s report states. “To further incentivize broad participation in this program, the CSAC recommends that CISA support legislation to offer tax credits and other similar benefits to participating organizations.”

The Office of the National Cyber Director at the White House is developing a national cyber workforce strategy, which will include CISA. The advisory committee says its ideas “align with their initial thinking.”

The temporary raise comes as the departments of Agriculture and Interior and the U.S. Forest Service — agencies that employ federal wildland firefighters — face rising recruitment and retention challenges for the frontline positions.

The salary increase for about 15,000 federal firefighters is funded with $600 million under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). Federal firefighters will receive a bump to their biweekly pay starting July 3, up by either $20,000 or 50% of their annual base salary, whichever number is lower.

“Hiring and retaining firefighters in increasingly long and complex fire years is a challenge that we take seriously. The President’s budget and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provide a significant down payment towards investments in the stable, professional and permanent wildland firefighting workforce we need to confront the wildfire crisis,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a June 21 press release.

The temporary pay increase will also incorporate retroactive pay going back to Oct. 1, 2021, the administration wrote in a June 21 fact sheet.

A provision of the BIL initially paused the raise’s enactment, which required USDA, DOI and the Forest Service to analyze and implement the pay increase only in areas where it’s difficult to recruit or retain firefighters. Ultimately, the agencies determined that the raise will apply to “every geographic area,” a June 21 FAQ page stated.

The temporary raise will last through September 2023, and builds on President Joe Biden’s executive order last June, which increased the base pay for all federal firefighters to at least $15 per hour.

Many federal unions and organizations voiced their support for the pay raise. The National Federation of Federal Employees, the union that represents a majority of federal wildland firefighters, said in a June 21 press release that the announcement will go a long way to help agencies hire and keep workers in those positions.

“There has been a serious recruitment and retention problem for wildland firefighters at federal agencies this year. Firefighters simply could not make ends meet on the hopelessly low salaries offered at federal agencies, so jobs were becoming very difficult to fill,” NFFE President Randy Erwin said. “For wildland firefighters, the additional income will give them the opportunity to pay for housing, childcare and other everyday necessities.”

The changes for federal firefighters include more than just a pay raise, though. The BIL funding will also support a mental health program for firefighters.

Additionally, the Office of Personnel Management, in partnership with the Forest Service and DOI, created a new wildland firefighter occupation series —something that has not existed in 50 years. OPM announced on June 21 that the occupation series defined new position descriptions for wildland firefighters.

OPM said the occupation series will support more equitable compensation and a better work-life balance for federal firefighters. In line with other recent efforts from OPM, the job postings will also call on agencies to focus on a skills-based approach when considering applicants. Federal firefighters can opt in to the series, and the new information will let agencies post more specific job opportunities with a clear career progression.

In contrast, the previous approach folded all firefighting jobs into one broad job description, making it difficult for federal wildland firefighters to understand a path for advancement, OPM wrote in a June 21 announcement.

“The new standard is an important step toward recognizing and valuing the wildland firefighter workforce,” OPM wrote. “The clarity on career progression will also support better retention. Wildland firefighters will be able to readily understand the career path and the expectations and requirements for promotions.”

The new occupation series, along with the pay raise, will help long-term efforts to improve federal firefighting positions, said OPM Director Kiran Ahuja.

“These are important steps that will provide a solid foundation for recruitment, retention and further strengthening our wildland firefighter workforce,” Ahuja said in a statement.

“For decades, federal wildland firefighters have faced the challenges of longer, more severe fire years with pay that has lagged behind their counterparts,” the White House wrote. “These measures are a significant step forward that will deliver an immediate, temporary pay raise to federal wildland firefighters across the nation, and sets federal agencies on a path to continue working with stakeholders towards an updated, competitive and equitable pay structure, along with a support system that will address the many challenges that have plagued our wildland firefighter workforce for decades.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are also pushing forward on legislation to help federal firefighters receive better health benefits.

The Federal Firefighter Fairness Act would create the presumption that certain illnesses and disabilities are the result of on-the-job duties for federal firefighters, making them eligible for workers’ compensation.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee approved the bill on May 25, following the House’s passage of partnership legislation on May 12 in a vote of 288 to 131. The full Senate has not yet voted on the bill.

Prior to the Senate’s May 25 confirmation of Cathy Harris as the third and final MSPB member, previously confirmed members Tristan Leavitt and Raymond Limon have been chipping away at a small number of the pending cases.

Leavitt and Limon have “made good headway” by issuing 200 decisions out of an initial group of about 300 cases that the MSPB staff handed to the board, Harris told Federal News Network in an email.

“Once we finish that group, I expect the staff to provide us with a next grouping of 300 cases or so,” Harris said.

MSPB reached quorum for the first time in five years after the Senate confirmed Leavitt and Limon in March. With Harris now the official third member, this is the first time MSPB has had a full three-person board in seven years.

MSPB is tasked with protecting federal employees against prohibited personnel practices, such as whistleblower retaliation and employees who believe they were wrongly terminated. Federal employees and agencies can appeal to the three-member board about cases on which an MSPB administrative judge previously issued a decision. The board members then adjudicate those cases.

Harris currently serves as acting chairwoman for MSPB, overseeing hiring and litigation decisions, and overall management of the agency. The Senate has not yet confirmed Harris as chairwoman.

Confronting the MSPB backlog

After the Senate confirmed her, Harris said she, Leavitt and Limon are primarily focused on the 3,600 cases that the board must adjudicate. The backlog grew significantly during the absence of a quorum for the board.

“Appellants and agencies have been waiting for years for resolution, and it is our responsibility to adjudicate these cases thoroughly and efficiently,” she said.

Breaking down how exactly to take on the huge pending caseload is complicated. To start, the MSPB staff gave the board a large mix of case types.

“These include … cases that may include an award of backpay, whistleblower cases, certain retirement cases and several of the oldest cases. The grouping also includes some simpler cases to assist us in getting our feet wet,” Harris said.

But how quickly the board can get through the pending cases is still in the air. Mark Robbins, a former MSPB board member, said the new board could start by focusing on cases with clear-cut decisions, but getting through the simpler decisions quickly still means there are more complex cases left in the backlog.

“You’ve cleared a lot of brush, but you’ve still got some big trees that need to be either taken down or pruned,” Robbins said, who now works at the Election Assistance Commission.

The board will, in part, prioritize cases based on how old they are, but will also include some newer ones, depending on how time-sensitive the issues are, Harris said. Certain cases may have pressing issues that should be adjudicated more immediately.

If MSPB pushed all new cases to the back of the decision line, it would be a long time before the board voted on them. By the time the board got to them, Harris said, those cases would have to be updated or possibly reworked because of changes to statutes, regulations and case law. The delays would create processing inefficiencies.

Along with the backlog, the board will have to continue working through new cases as they come in.

“You’ve got active new cases coming in, which may be equally as important. The backlog doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Robbins said.

Robbins added that approaching the backlog with a mix of cases, by folding in a few easier ones, can help the members focus on some of the older or harder cases, and learn how to best collaborate as a full board.

“They’re going to have to get used to working with each other [and] their staffs are going to have to get used to working with each other,” Robbins said. “As an initial path forward, doing a little bit of a mix is probably good because it will give the three members of the board an opportunity to see what actually is in the backlog, what’s coming in now [and] where might they need to focus given that they’re all three new to the board.”

Jim Eisenmann, a former executive director and general counsel for the MSPB, now a partner at Alden Law Group, said using “short-form” opinions may help sift through the backlog more quickly.

Those decisions, which offer little explanation in cases where the board doesn’t decide in the employee’s favor, comprised about 75% of cases up until about 2010. Then, more detailed decisions started becoming prevalent, requiring more work for the board to get cases out the door.

MSPB members: Three versus two?

Although the board reached quorum in March, having a third member still makes a significant difference. The three-member body will help avoid potential ties on cases, along with some other issues the board can prevent now with three rather than two members.

“Once a quorum was restored, the board members could vote on cases. However, if they split their votes, the decision of the administrative judge would become final. Having three board members permits for a full appellate review of the initial appeals and eliminates the issue of split votes,” Harris said. “If one board member must recuse from a case, it permits the appeal to still be voted upon by the other two board members.”

She added that a three-person board will help MSPB move through the backlog more quickly, as there are now more people to review and process cases.

Complicating the situation, though, employees whose cases have been pending for several years may have challenging aftereffects of the board’s decision, Robbins said. If a decision goes in favor of an employee, the individual, for example, might be entitled to backpay. In some cases, the board may require an agency to rehire the employee.

“That means they’d get their old job back, which after six years, you’ve got to wonder what the agency has done with that job. Did they backfill it? Does it even exist anymore? Did they go through restructuring?” Robbins said. “Now the agency is going to have to figure out what it wants to do with that. How do you deal with bringing in someone who hasn’t been around for that long? That could be very complicated.”

Along with issuing case decisions, MSPB is also responsible for reporting on the health of federal workforce management. MSPB conducts special studies on agencies to report to the White House and Congress, determining if federal workers are adequately protected from prohibited personnel practices.

The board was unable to completely fulfill this duty before reaching quorum, but in the meantime the board’s Office of Policy and Evaluation continued to publish a monthly newsletter related to some of the report topics.

Eisenmann said the office would also have already issued draft reports in preparation for the new board coming in.

“There are reports about recruitment, hiring, retention, performance management [and] supervision,” Eisenmann said. “It’s an important function of the board. The studies are often cited by members of Congress and other nongovernmental organizations regarding best practices [and] the state of the law in certain areas,” Eisenmann said.

Harris said as part of her new role, she’s focused on working with the other two members to release some of those reports.

Although her background is partly in the private sector, Harris has a long history of representing federal employees and agencies before MSPB, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and in federal courts.

“I developed a broad understanding of the federal-sector case law that applies in MSPB cases, which is helping me render decisions in the cases before me. After being in private practice for quite some time, I am honored to have the opportunity to return to public service,” she said.