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 ...

Hiring reform for the entire federal workforce, not just cyber security positions, is the topic of a public meeting the OPM planned for Friday. Participants have been asked to discuss "whether normal, competitive hiring is an effective avenue for bringing recent college graduates into the federal workforce," according to the Federal Register. The hearing follows a May 11 directive from Obama, ...

Progress in promoting women to the top levels of the federal civil service has flowed like the mighty Mississippi River in the springtime. Wrong. Lately, it's been more like a leaky faucet in Uncle Sam's kitchen. While men and women are close to being equally represented in the lower grades of the federal workforce, "at the higher levels women are woefully ...

The next time you hear someone bad-mouthing federal workers as bureaucrats who sit around bemoaning this and that, tell him or her to ask Doug White about Lisa Grimm and Brian Norton. Grimm, Norton and other air-traffic controllers guided White to safety on April 12, 2009, when the pilot of his plane died during a flight. Grimm, based at the Federal ...

When it comes to an agency's reputation among federal employees, the Transportation Security Administration has long been a bottom feeder. Morale is low, attrition is high and it has no leader. And if that were not enough, the agency now has some really unhappy transportation security officers at Dulles International Airport who say they are being marked AWOL, absent without leave, ...

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 ...

When it comes to providing employee benefits, Uncle Sam strives to be a model employer. But there's rust on his halo. Take a look at thousands of Forest Service workers who get no health and retirement benefits, despite years of service to the federal government. They are temporary employees. It's not uncommon for temps to go without benefits, but these folks ...

Federal employee union leaders threw the second of a one-two punch at a Senate plan to tax health insurance premiums on Tuesday, saying it would mean significant benefit cuts and higher health costs for workers. The presidents of the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers joined with the Communications Workers ...

One of the good things about being a federal employee is the large number of health insurance companies available to them. One of the difficult things about being a federal employee is picking from the large number of health insurance companies available to them. Difficult isn't the same as bad, but it can be confusing. Even so, as government workers face ...

President Obama will win no fans among federal workers with his action to limit their pay increase next year to 2 percent. That's a long way from the 18.9 percent average raise Obama said many government workers would have received using a complicated statutory formula designed to make federal pay more comparable to private-sector compensation. "Our country continues to face serious ...

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 ...

The effort to expand domestic benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees took another step forward Wednesday when a House committee advanced legislation to do just that. After sometimes heated debate, the 23 to 12 vote in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee broke down along party lines, with the victorious Democrats arguing that the measure is a matter of ...

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 ...

If President Obama's plan to attract lots of bright people to work for the feds by making "government cool again" doesn't quite do the trick, money might. Congress is considering legislation to create a program that makes such good sense, you might wonder why no one thought of it before. The Roosevelt Scholars program would draw young people to key positions ...

It's ironic, and shameful, that President Obama's point man on his employment initiative for veterans is barred by law from being one. John Berry directs the Office of Personnel Management and is openly gay. No one is more eager about increasing employment opportunities for those who have served in the military, yet his government, but not this administration, says it does ...

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 ...

A congressional hearing on the future of the U.S. Postal Service can be one depressing experience. The sky outside the Rayburn House Office Building was bright Thursday morning, but it was all gloom and doom in Room 2154. Members of a Committee on Oversight and Government Reform panel explored novel ways the Postal Service might pull itself from deep debt -- ...

During these highly partisan and contentious times, it's not every day that Democrats and Republicans, labor and management, and workers and retirees find themselves on the same side of an issue. But that was generally the situation Tuesday when the Thrift Savings Plan for federal workers was mostly praised during a House subcommittee hearing. The TSP operates like a 401(k) retirement ...

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 ...

Sometimes Uncle Sam sounds like he has marbles in his mouth. Read, if you can, the accompanying excerpt from an Education Department regulation, which was printed in Wednesday's Federal Register. This one sentence has more than 220 words, nearly the equivalent of a typed page, double-spaced. It's typical of impenetrable fedspeak that produces more indigestion than information. But help is on ...