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 ...

In a State of the Union address that ranged from job creation to education reform, President Obama also called for restoring trust in government, streamlining the federal budget, and extending debt forgiveness to students who spend 10 years in public service careers. Saying "no one should go broke because they choose to go to college," Obama proposed a program that would ...

WASHINGTON - From federal government clerk positions to grocery store cashiers, the competition for jobs is phenomenal. Applications for all types of positions are flooding in. "We are pretty much overwhelmed with the number of applications that we are receiving for every job posting," says Deputy Associate Director of the Center for Talent and Capacity Policy at the U.S. Office of ...

A POGO investigation has found that many state and local governments with laws limiting contractors’ campaign contributions (meant to reduce the influence of private interests in the public contracting process) are facing obstacles to enforcing these “pay-to-play” laws on stimulus-funded contracts. As a result, stimulus-funded contracts are not being subjected to this additional level of corruption prevention, a missed good-government opportunity. ...

Federal agencies are failing to maximize opportunities to make contracts competitive, often because of poor management or because officials have grown comfortable with incumbent contractors, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The watchdog reviewed trends in noncompetitive contracts during the past several years and discovered a number of questionable business practices by contracting officials and program managers. ...

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 ...

Federal agencies have room for improvement when it comes to assessing applicants for federal jobs, according to a new survey of government officials and observers. The report, released Thursday by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and PDRI, a human resources consulting firm, found government does a poor job of evaluating applicants for federal positions. During discussions with seven focus groups ...

Applying for a job with the federal government can be a miserable experience. Announcements of vacancies are often written in arcane, incomprehensible jargon; applications can stretch for dozens of pages; one branch of an agency might not have any idea of the hiring needs of a second branch. This is not the opinion of jilted job-seekers. Instead, it was the frank ...

WASHINGTON - The federal government may soon mandate that you avoid your usual morning traffic headaches. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., has sponsored a bill that would require all federal agencies to allow 20 percent of their employees to telework at least one day a week. "It will improve air quality, it will improve congestion, and make for a much better quality ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON — The $787 billion economic recovery package also is stimulating growth in the federal government as agencies hire thousands of workers and spend millions of dollars to oversee and implement the package, according to government records and spokesmen. Fourteen of the top federal agencies responsible for spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act say they've hired about 3,000 workers ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON - At a time when the White House is projecting the largest deficit in the nation's history, Uncle Sam is trying to recover billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from its own employees. Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees ...

Imagine you've just been hired to manage the Washington Nationals. Your contract is contingent on your ball club making it to the World Series. But the team's owner says you have to take the field with essentially the same players you inherited -- despite their losing record. Sound absurd? Of course, but it isn't far from reality, considering an administration proposal ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House environmental adviser under fire for inflammatory statements made before he joined the administration resigned after what he called a "vicious smear campaign against me." Van Jones "understood that he was going to get in the way" of President Barack Obama's agenda, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sunday. The resignation was disclosed without advance ...

As the United States withdraws its combat forces from Iraq, the government is hiring more private guards to protect U.S. installations at a cost that could near $1 billion, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. On Sept. 1, the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) awarded contracts expected to be worth $485 million over the next two years to five firms ...

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 ...

OSLO (AP) -- President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism. Nobel observers were shocked by the unexpected choice so early in the Obama presidency, which began less than two ...