• A new bill in the House would penalize career federal employees who don’t follow directives from a presidential administration. The so-called STRAFE Act would require agencies to report any policy resistance from federal employees to the White House. The penalties for violations would be on par with the consequences for Hatch Act violations. Texas Republican August Pfluger, who introduced the bill, said it’s meant to combat what he described as employees’ “coordinated resistance” to policies during the former Trump administration. It’s the same phenomenon that former Trump officials have pointed to as rationale for the now-revoked Schedule F executive order. Many organizations, however, have pushed back against that rationale. Federal advocates said Schedule F and other similar attempts are just veiled efforts to politicize the federal workforce.
• Some U.S. Postal Service (USPS) retirees may see more flexibility than usual in their health insurance enrollments. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is offering Medicare-eligible USPS annuitants, in some limited circumstances, an option to change their enrollments outside Open Season. Annuitants who opt out of Medicare Part D “in error” would get 90 days, or in some cases longer, to make a different selection, even after Open Season ends. The flexibility in OPM’s new final rule comes as concerns are rising about the possibility of USPS annuitants opting out of Medicare Part D without realizing the full consequences — that they would lose prescription drug coverage, while still paying the same premium rate.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is delivering more health care and benefits to more veterans than ever before. The VA provided more than 127 million health care appointments to veterans in fiscal 2024. That’s a 6 percent increase compared to the previous year. It also paid 187 billion in benefits to more than 6 and a half million veterans and their survivors. The VA is seeing this record workload under the PACT Act. The 2022 law expands health care and benefits for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rehired 100 employees it fired under the Trump administration. The VA also paid 134 million dollars to 1700 employees fired under the 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act. The legislation allowed the department to fast-track the firing of employees accused of poor performance or misconduct. Federal courts and arbitrators have repeatedly ordered the VA to reinstate employees it fired under the legislation. The VA agreed to these actions as part of a settlement it reached with the American Federation of Government Employees last year.
• The Defense Department’s chief information office is working on new departmentwide guidance and instruction for accelerating the department’s software modernization efforts. The guidance will expand on the Pentagon’s 2022 Software Modernization Strategy and the implementation plan that followed in 2023. Military services and components are currently in the midst of updating their implementation plans for fiscal 2025-2026, with a focus on adopting enterprise cloud solutions and expanding the software factory ecosystem. Kevin Mulvihill the acting principal deputy CIO, said the document will be out “fairly soon.”
• The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is rolling out an AI digital concierge for its workforce within the agency. Steve Wallace, DISA’s chief technology officer and director of emerging technology directorate, said they have received the permission to open up concierge AI. The agency is currently fine-tuning the system. One of the major use cases will be a bot designed to help DISA’s staff sift through the agency’s vast collection of policies and instructions. “We’re interested to see how this plays out. A lot of this is for our own internal education.”
• Agencies are exploring how technology can solve age-old challenges with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In their annual FOIA reports to the Justice Department, agencies described using artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to help process cases and search for documents. Customs and Border Protection used its bot system to conduct more than 22-thousand FOIA searches and close more than 32-thousand cases. The State Department has also used machine learning to help declassify diplomatic cables. The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy said it will continue to monitor new FOIA-related technology developments.
• The intelligence community is out with new data management guidance. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has finalized a new data reference architecture. The goal is to connect data across multiple different systems. Intelligence Community Chief Data Officer Lori Wade “How do we break down the data silos and have this distributed data ecosystem that we keep talking about?” Wade said at the Defense Department Intelligence Information System conference in Omaha, Nebraska on Tuesday. The new data management practices are central to the intelligence community’s artificial intelligence goals. Wade called on government and industry to work together to implement the new reference architecture.

Copyright
© 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.