Agency Oversight

  • Patrick McFarland, the inspector general of the Office of Personnel Management, confirmed to a Senate subcommittee Thursday that his office has been investigating USIS, the government's largest contractor for background-investigation services, since late 2011. He said at least 18 security clearance investigators have been convicted of falsifying investigations since 2007. McFarland said there may be "considerably more" fraud that hasn't been uncovered due to "alarmingly insufficient oversight" of the security-clearance process.

    June 20, 2013
  • A new commission, proposed by David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general, would recommend ways to streamline government by removing duplication and extraneous spending from government agencies. Federal-employee unions criticized the proposal and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee lawmakers expressed skepticism that such a proposal could gain congressional approval.

    June 18, 2013
  • President Barack Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) pledged to clear up delays in the regulatory process if confirmed by the Senate. Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday, Howard Shelanski said improving the timeliness of OIRA's work -- which has come in for criticism from Republican lawmakers and transparency groups, alike -- is among his top priorities.

    June 12, 2013
  • The Veterans Affairs Department has been compromised by at least eight different nation state organizations that stole data from its systems, House lawmakers and other experts say. VA officials say there always are risks, but their computer security is better than ever before.

    June 05, 2013
  • The Internal Revenue Service held 225 employee conferences between 2010 and 2012, at a total cost of $49 million, according to a new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The report also revealed the embattled agency used funding originally slated to hire front-line employees to foot most of the bill for a $4.1 million conference held in Anaheim, Calif., in 2010.

    June 04, 2013
  • The Pentagon will begin tracking how much time its acquisition managers spend performing and responding to oversight in an effort to remove "non-value-added" processes from the procurement system.

    May 28, 2013
  • On this week's Capital Impact show, Bloomberg Government analysts discuss the billions of dollars spent on intelligence operations by the federal government, and the latest jobs report. May 23, 2013

    May 23, 2013
  • President Barack Obama will nominate Dan Tangherlini, the acting administrator of the General Services Administration, to officially fill that position. Tangherlini stepped into that post amid the April 2012 conference spending scandal at the agency.

    May 22, 2013
  • Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and the GSA inspector general released separate, but related, reports that show GSA abused its authority to give Senior Executive Service (SES) members bonuses between 2009 and 2011. GSA official said they have since fixed these problems. McCaskill also found that on average the Labor Department, the Navy and the National Science Foundation handed out more than one bonus per SES employee.

    May 17, 2013
  • The Obama administration's proposed fiscal 2014 budget called for consolidating or eliminating 116 of the government's 226 STEM initiatives and centralizing the coordination of STEM programs under just three agencies: the Education Department, the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. The administration's STEM proposal is one of the government's first visible steps in reversing some of the duplication that riddles the federal landscape and which some lawmakers have seized on as examples of government waste.

    May 17, 2013
  • The Office of Personnel Management has made steady progress chipping away at a longstanding backlog of retirement claims. But Oversight Committee lawmakers and other government watchdogs remain concerned that the absence of a long-term plan to overhaul the mostly paper-based process combined with across-the-board budget cuts and a lack of strong leadership within OPM could stall or derail the progress the agency has made.

    May 09, 2013
  • Two senators from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee want to change Senate rules in an attempt to make sure new federal programs or initiatives in proposed legislation don't overlap with existing efforts. Earlier this month, two House members introduced a measure that would require House committees of jurisdiction to hold oversight hearings on an annual report from the Government Accountability Office detailing government duplication.

    April 29, 2013
  • The agency also puts former Region 8 Commissioner of the Public Building Service on administrative leave until the MSPB Board makes a decision on the appeal.

    April 15, 2013
  • Congress approved a bill Friday to eliminate expanded financial-disclosure reporting requirements for Senior Executive Service members, just days before the new requirements were to go into effect. Both the House and Senate approved the measure by unanimous consent. The expanded reporting requirements were set to go into effect Monday.

    April 12, 2013