Furloughs at the Department of Transportation have come to an end and employees are to return to work Wednesday. In a press release Tuesday evening, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said, "I am pleased that the Senate has acted to break its logjam and extend the Highway Trust Fund for another 30 days. This means that our valued employees may return to ...

A day after a report released by the Internal Revenue Service showed that federal workers owe more than $3 billion in taxes from 2008, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee has asked the agency to turn its attention on contractors, specifically those working within Medicare and Medicaid programs. According to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the Government Accountability Office previously ...

Is David Letterman to blame for the lack of diversity at the Department of Homeland Security? The talk show host's recent admission of trysts with women who worked for him, a Republican lawmaker said Wednesday, has provoked not outrage among his fans and the media, but rather a sense of reluctant acceptance. And Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) suggested that such a ...

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, ...

On Nov. 3, 2008, Elizabeth Colton, a Foreign Service officer, received an e-mail with good news: She had been offered a two-year posting as chief of the political-economic section at the U.S. Embassy in Algiers. "Congratulations!" wrote Maggie Nardi, acting director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. "On behalf of NEA and ...

President Obama has banned federal employees from text messaging when they are behind the wheel of government vehicles and from texting in their own cars if they use government-issued phones or are on official business. The ban, in the form of an executive order signed Wednesday night, was announced Thursday by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood at the culmination of a ...

Civilian agencies might soon be required to set aside a percentage of funds from multiple-award, multiagency contracting vehicles for small businesses. The provision, included in the 2010 Small Business Contracting Improvements Act introduced by Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, on Thursday, would require agencies to reserve for small firms a yet undetermined portion of orders placed against federal ...

In addition to a five-year discretionary spending freeze, President Obama on Tuesday night announced a reorganization effort to consolidate duplicative federal programs and reduce government waste. Government hasn't undergone a major restructuring in decades, leaving agencies with overlapping responsibilities, the president said during his State of the Union address. Efforts to cut waste haven't gone far enough, and administration officials in ...

A leading government online learning program that serves as a model for job training programs in China soon will allow federal employees to use more social media tools for training. The Agriculture Department's program, AgLearn, is scheduled for an upgrade to a new version of its supporting software, allowing it to provide its employees with blogs and wikis related to their ...

WASHINGTON — The White House has filled important policy jobs at the two departments essential to President Barack Obama's domestic priorities at a much slower rate than elsewhere in his administration after eight months in charge of the government. At the Treasury Department, which is overseeing one of the largest financial rescue plans in history, just 12 of the 33 high-level ...

Federal agencies are on course to start hiring new job applicants with a quicker, résumé-based system in November, government hiring managers said Tuesday. President Obama in May ordered federal agencies to hit the gas on hiring, giving officials until November to cut the federal job-application process to an average of 80 days by switching from a reliance on lengthy essays to ...

The U.S. Postal Service posted a $3.8 billion net loss during the fiscal year that ended in September, despite $6 billion in cost-cutting moves. Total mail volume fell more steeply than ever -- by 25.6 billion pieces, or almost 13 percent, more than double any decline in postal history. Worse, the Postal Service expects that 2010 mail volume will drop by ...

Rep. Gerry Connolly wants to make sure the 2,000 or so Transportation workers who were furloughed last week get paid. The Virginia Democrat introduced a bill Tuesday and the House passed it this morning to pay the employees for the two days they were off due to the lapse in the Highway Trust Fund legislation. President Obama signed into law a ...

In greater detail than he has before, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry outlined his thinking on remaking the federal personnel system during a speech this week. His address to a Human Capital Management: Federal conference was part of a series of discussions he is holding to help in the monumental task of developing a new civil service system. With ...

If the federal civil service had a flag, it would be flying upside down. The civil service is in distress -- not dead, but in need of rescue. Recognizing this, John Berry, the Office of Personnel Management director, ran some sweeping ideas up the flagpole on Monday to see who salutes. At the same time he heaped praise on the "unsung ...

John Berry fired the first salvo for how to "reinvigorate" and "unshackle" all aspects of federal human resources. The director of the Office of Personnel Management laid out Monday some initial ideas about changes that he hopes could bring agency hiring, firing, recruiting and retention practices in line with other Fortune 500 companies. Listen to WFED's Federal Drive "Our hiring system ...

Federal government offices in the Washington region will be closed on Monday. Nonessential government workers will be granted excused absences. Emergency employees are expected to report for work on time, and some employees who telework may be expected to work from their telework sites, as specified in their individual agreements. The Office of Personnel Management made the announcement Sunday afternoon, well ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional aides say the Obama administration has chosen a Colorado natural resources official to be the new agriculture undersecretary in charge of the U.S. Forest Service. Harris Sherman, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, is to be nominated soon, they said. The congressional aides familiar with the decision spoke on condition of anonymity because the ...

Current and former federal employees angered by premium increases in the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program will get their day before Congress on Wednesday, when senators hope to get answers about why the impending price jump is warranted and what the government did to inform participants. Most federal and postal employees are eligible for the program, which is run by ...

In a move designed to improve employee morale and to help reduce a growing backlog, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proposed changes Wednesday to its way of determining how long a patent examiner has to complete a patent examination and the incentives that examiners earn. The modifications, which must be approved by agency employees in the coming weeks, would be ...