ST. PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota lawmakers balanced the state budget and erased a $3 billion deficit Monday, wrapping up their work for the year in a way that allowed Democrats and Republicans alike to claim some credit but also set the terms of the election debate to come. The deal struck by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, presiding over his last legislative session, ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama restated his campaign pledge to allow homosexual men and women to serve openly in the military, but many in his audience of gay activists were left wondering when he would make good on the promise. "I will end 'don't ask-don't tell,'" Obama said Saturday night to a standing ovation from the crowd of about 3,000 ...

WASHINGTON – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had cancer surgery earlier this year, was kept at a hospital overnight after she became drowsy and fell from her seat aboard an airplane. Court officials blamed a reaction to medicine. Ginsburg was taken to Washington Hospital Center around 11:15 p.m. Wednesday by paramedics and released Thursday morning, court officials said. Ginsburg, ...

You know things are bad at a government agency when a Cabinet secretary says as much while swearing in the new boss. It happened at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in August, when Commerce Secretary Gary Locke showed up to swear in the new director, David Kappos, and told the rank-and-file that the agency's backlog had a negative impact on ...

Federal employee groups fear that they are being left out of a health care reform compromise forged by unions and lawmakers to alleviate the effects of a proposed excise tax on insurance plans. The deal, posted on the Web sites of the AFL-CIO and the National Education Association, would raise the premium threshold level at which a 40 percent tax kicks ...

Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts. Tougher enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, which tightly restricts the distribution of pain medicines such as morphine and ...

WASHINGTON -- The economy lost more jobs than expected in December while the unemployment rate held steady at 10 percent, as a sluggish economic recovery has yet to revive hiring among the nation's employers. The Labor Department said Friday that employers cut 85,000 jobs last month, worse than the 8,000 drop analysts expected. A sharp drop in the labor force, a ...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) announced yesterday that he will bring the nomination of former FBI agent and police detective Erroll Southers to head the Transportation Security Administration to the floor of the full Senate for consideration when lawmakers re-convene next month. The move comes as federal worker labor unions respond to the South Carolina Senator who is blocking Southers's ...

Federal employees submitted more than 38,000 ideas to help the government save money. An Office of Management and Budget official says as of Oct. 14 employees suggested about 38,400 ways to make the government more effective and efficient. OMB stopped accepting official entries as of last Tuesday, but says on its Web site that it would still take ideas. The official, ...

Workers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development know how to party. The L'Enfant Plaza Hotel ballroom was filled around noon Wednesday with employees ready for a plentiful buffet. The Rooted East band rocked as government workers accustomed to sitting 9 to 5 behind a desk did the Electric Slide in the middle of the day. Amid all this, it ...

By unanimous consent, the Senate on Thursday passed legislation (S. 806) to stabilize the funding and management of Federal Executive Boards, which coordinate the actions of federal offices outside the Washington area. "President Kennedy showed great foresight when he called for the coordination of federal agencies' activities in 1961, and FEBs have done a good job since then in coordinating their ...

Feeling snug in your government building? Before you get too comfortable, consider these incidents involving the Federal Protective Service (FPS), the agency responsible for safeguarding federal facilities, described in a Government Accountability Office report: -- An infant in a carrier was placed on the moving belt of a security X-ray machine while the child's mother looked for identification. "Because the guard ...

The New York attorney general’s office is inviting anyone who spent $1,000 for a particular training package sold as a sure route to a high-paying government job to become part of its lawsuit against the company that sold the allegedly phony promises. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday announced that his office has filed suit against the New Jerseybased State ...

Miami commissioners finally balanced the city's 2010 budget shortly before midnight Tuesday, after unanimously accepting hard-fought agreements with the city's police, fire and general service unions. All told, the agreements -- two of which were voted on by union members Monday, the other only a few hours before the city's third budget hearing got under way Tuesday -- will save Miami ...

DIXON, Calif. — For a while, it appeared budget cuts at Dixon High School would make it harder for athletes Jeffery Anderson and Kayla Beal to impress college recruiters. Faced with a $3 million budget shortfall, the school system 20 miles southwest of Sacramento decided in February to discontinue all sports at the town's middle and high schools for the 2009-10 ...

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) -- An 82-year-old Maine woman faces charges after she tried to carry a concealed handgun into a federal building in Augusta. Imelda Yorkus, of Whitefield, said she forgot she had the gun when she tried to go to the post office in the Edmund S. Muskie Federal building on Tuesday afternoon. Security officers in the building discovered the ...

The first doses of swine flu vaccine arrived Monday as more than half the USA reported widespread flu cases. "The level of activity we're seeing for this time of year is really unusual," said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "We just really don't see the level of activity we're seeing." The high number ...

WASHINGTON - Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mail messages from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two private groups that sued over the Bush White House's failure to install an electronic recordkeeping system. The groups ...

RICHMOND, Va. - New numbers show more workplace injuries and illnesses were reported in Virginia from those in government jobs than in the private sector in 2008. According to a Virginia Department of Labor and Industry report released Monday, 97,900 workers were injured or became ill on the job in 2008. That's down from 104,200 in the previous year, Of those, ...

Lawyers and professional staff at a federal legal aid organization voted on Tuesday to form a union under the auspices of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. "We welcome the union as a new partner and look forward to working together to advance the mission of LSC to provide access to justice for all," Legal Services Corporation President Helaine ...