Presidential executive orders are lofty, historical documents, generally signed in White House ceremonies with pomp and circumstance. Seldom do we think of them beginning in a small town on the eastern edge of West Virginia. But it was in Shepherdstown, with a population of 803 at last count, where President Obama's latest executive order, designed to facilitate the hiring of veterans ...

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 ...

The 40 people who met behind closed doors in the Ronald Reagan Building on Wednesday weren't in a position to make any decisions about fixing the federal government's recruitment and hiring process, but their discussion could have a lasting impact on federal policy. The Harvard Kennedy School, along with the University of Maryland and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), organized ...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A new poll shows Southerners are fretting about job loss and the economy and don't think the federal government is doing enough to address either. The Winthrop Poll of 866 respondents in 11 Southern states found the economy was the top concern of four in 10 — the same share of people who said they were concerned about ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Census Bureau on Friday severed its ties with ACORN, a community organization that has been hit with Republican accusations of voter-registration fraud. "We do not come to this decision lightly," Census director Robert Groves wrote in a letter to ACORN, which was obtained by The Associated Press. In splitting with ACORN, Groves sought to tamp down GOP ...

Within his first few months in office, President Obama signed the largest economic recovery package in a generation, significantly boosted government assistance to banks and auto manufacturers, and augmented the role of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. No matter your political affiliation, it is undeniable that these policies have expanded the missions of federal agencies, and by proxy, those of government contractors. ...

With logic only a lawyer -- and perhaps only a government lawyer -- could love, the Obama administration is refusing to obey a federal judge's order that agrees with a position the administration supports. Last month, Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, ordered the Office of Personnel Management to allow health insurance companies ...

Nearly 1,000 American Federation of Government Employees members marched on the Capitol on Tuesday, urging Congress not to target the federal workforce in efforts to reduce government spending. AFGE members from all 50 states delivered petitions to their senators, arguing that freezing federal salaries, cutting benefits and reducing the government workforce were not good ways to balance the federal budget. The ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The unemployment rate jumped to 9.7 percent in August, the highest since June 1983, as employers eliminated a net total of 216,000 jobs. The level of job cuts is less than July's upwardly revised total of 276,000 and is the lowest in a year. Analysts expected the unemployment rate to rise to 9.5 percent from July's 9.4 ...

WASHINGTON – West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd has become the longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history, a milestone to be marked Wednesday with a Senate resolution. "I look forward to serving you for the next 56 years and 320 days," Byrd said in a statement marking the occasion. His only regret, Byrd said, was that his late wife, Erma, was not ...

Lawyers, lobbyists, librarians and concerned citizens, rejoice: As of Monday, it is much easier to access the Federal Register. The de facto daily newspaper of the executive branch publishes approximately 80,000 pages of documents each year, including presidential disaster declarations, Medicare reimbursement rates, and thousands of agency rulings on policies ranging from banking to fishing to food. It's a must-read for ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - What's all the fuss about? After all the noise over Democrats' push for a government insurance plan to compete with private carriers, coverage numbers are finally in: Two percent. That's the estimated share of Americans younger than 65 who'd sign up for the public option plan under the health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is steering ...

At a Government Executive breakfast meeting yesterday, I was asked about salaries for federal employees – an issue that has received some attention lately in the popular press. Especially in these difficult economic times, everyone is understandably concerned about the performance and salaries of our federal workers (which is one reason why the President is freezing salaries and bonuses for all ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Minneapolis assistant police Chief Sharon Lubinski has become the first openly gay U.S. marshal. The U.S. Senate confirmed the Green Bay, Wis. native to be the U.S. marshal for the Minnesota district. Last week's confirmation also makes her the first female marshal in the state. Lubinski has served a number of roles with the Minneapolis Police. She was also ...

Federal agencies might have better luck selecting the best job candidates if they included a simulation of the work in the application process, according to a new report from the Merit Systems Protection Board. Developing tests to see how prospective employees respond to a given work environment or how they perform a particular task can be expensive. But "agencies need to ...

Delivering on President Obama's promise to boost the labor movement, the administration has announced a $35 million federal construction project in New Hampshire that requires union representation for the workers and forces nonunion employees to pay dues and contribute to a union pension fund. Mr. Obama issued an executive order in the first weeks of his presidency that would make the ...

The Department of Veterans Affairs' problems with the Post-9/11 GI Bill's benefits seem to linger, no matter what the government does. Tens of thousands of veterans, active-duty servicemembers and their dependents have been waiting for promised higher-education benefits from VA since fall classes began last month. The agency attempted to address the backlog by granting $3,000 in emergency checks, but that ...

The Government Accountability Office has again found widespread flaws in how the office administering Medicare and Medicaid manages contracts. The watchdog agency studied a random sample of contract actions at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and estimated that more than 84 percent of fiscal 2008 contract actions had at least one instance where officials failed to implement a key ...

The federal government needs to hire more than 270,000 workers for "mission-critical" jobs over the next three years, a surge prompted in part by the large number of baby-boomer federal workers reaching retirement age, according to the results of a government-wide survey being released Thursday. The numbers also reflect the Obama administration's intent to take on several enormous challenges, including the ...