National & World Headlines

  • Furloughs for civilian Defense Department employees officially kicked off this week. That has many employees singing the blues -- literally.

    July 08, 2013
  • House members with constituents impacted by budget cuts to the Patent and Trademark Office and Department of Defense are taking steps to ease the effect of sequestration and furloughs.

    July 08, 2013
  • Approximately 85 percent of the Defense Department's civilian workforce -- more than 650,000 employees -- will be staying home Monday, as the first of DoD's cost-cutting furlough days goes into effect. The furloughs were put in place to offset automatic, across-the-board spending cuts implemented by sequestration. DoD estimates the furloughs will save between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion.

    July 08, 2013
  • Department will move away from DoD-specific approaches to cybersecurity, lean more toward informing and relying on governmentwide efforts.

    July 08, 2013
  • Thousands of federal employees at four separate government agencies are required to take an unpaid furlough day July 5. Meanwhile, employees at two government agencies could see a diminished impact of furloughs.

    July 05, 2013
  • On this week's Capital Impact show, Bloomberg Government analysts will discuss how the Berry Amendment is affecting troop supplies, what's ahead for Congress when its members return from vacation, and the lobbying activities of companies that supply goods and services associated with the July 4th holiday. July 4, 2013

    July 04, 2013
  • Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed DoD's cyber posture at a recent Brookings Institution event. Dempsey says part of the planning process is forcing DoD leaders to look outward at the changing world.

    July 03, 2013
  • The Defense Information Systems Agency is targeting the third or fourth quarter of 2014 for full operational capability of its cloud broker service. DoD components will use automated tools to choose cloud computing services from DoD, other agencies or private providers.

    July 03, 2013
  • The DoD Special Missions Wing in Afghanistan does not have adequate personnel to man its existing and planned aircraft fleet, according to an audit from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The air wing only has one fourth of the recruits needed to achieve full strength to be able to handle 48 newly purchased aircraft.

    July 02, 2013
  • The U.S. government has until noon on Wednesday to respond to a request to block the force-feeding of hunger strikers at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. Lawyers for the prisoner argue it violates human rights. The U.S. military holds 166 foreign captives at the detention camp on the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, and a spokesman said 106 had joined a months-long hunger strike to protest the failure to resolve their fate after more than a decade of detention.

    July 02, 2013
  • A new report from the Government Accountability Office shows the Defense Department still lacks end goals and metrics in its service acquisition system. DoD currently is the largest buyer of services in the government.

    July 02, 2013
  • A new memo from the Defense Department tells field commanders and managers not to shift workloads onto military personnel or contractors, and not to require civilians to work longer hours to make up for productivity losses during mandatory furlough days.

    July 01, 2013
  • How did Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda, on the run and facing defeat and certain death at the hands of Rwandan troops, get out of Eastern Congo and into the U.S. Embassy in Kigali Rwanda? A U.N. report says he managed to slip away and used a small path and a single escort to make his way to the U.S. Embassy and turned himself in for arrest on international war crimes charges. He turned up at the embassy on March 18.

    July 01, 2013
  • The Department of Defense is looking to utilize alternative fuel sources in order to respond to changing operational energy needs on the battlefield.

    July 01, 2013