Federal employees can now donate leave to victims of Hurricane Irma as well

Federal Newscast

In today's Federal Newscast, the Office of Personnel Management sets up its second official emergency leave transfer program of this month.

Eric White@FEDERALNEWSCAST

September 21, 2017 8:10 am

3 min read

Federal employees can donate unused annual leave to their colleagues impacted by Hurricane Irma. The Office of Personnel Management has set up an official emergency leave transfer program. It’s the second one set up this month to help survivors impacted by recent hurricanes. Individual agencies will tally which employees need leave, and who has available time to donate. (Chief Human Capital Officers Council)

The Defense Department prepares to add 500,000 employees to its continuous evaluation pilot by Jan. 1. The program is part of the Pentagon’s effort to add rigor to the security clearance process. DoD said the additional employees would bring the total uniformed and civilian employees enrolled in continuous evaluation to 1 million. (Federal News Radio)

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer thinks the service’s ship collisions this summer are part of a bigger military problem. He’s ordering a review of sailors’ work hours, promotion boards, and everything in between. The review runs parallel to a comprehensive review being conducted on the ship collisions. (Federal News Radio)

The Air Force has made a $1 billion contract award to outsource its email systems in the cloud. The five-year contract is with Dell, General Dynamics and Microsoft, and the Air Force plans to move more than 700,000 of its users to the new system within the next year. It’ll also provide services to the Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Under the contract, the vendors will provide a private version of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity suite, including voice, video and instant messaging functions and records management services. (Federal News Radio)

Lawsuits brought against the Office of Personnel Management and a contractor for their roles in the massive data breach of 2015 have been tossed out by a D.C. judge. In her opinion, District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said just because the victims’ data was stolen, does not necessarily give them standing to sue. The lawsuits were filed on behalf of the 21.5 million victims by the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Federation of Government Employees. NTEU has filed an appeal while AFGE said it is currently reviewing all options. (Federal News Radio)

The Veterans Affairs Department has fired the former director of the Washington, D.C. VA Medical Center. It’s the second time it’s fired Brian Hawkins, after the Merit Systems Protection Board granted him a stay on his initial removal. VA used new congressional accountability procedures to fire Hawkins this time around. An inspector general report sparked Hawkins’ second disciplinary review. The IG said Hawkins mishandled agency information when he sent it to his and his wife’s personal email accounts. (Federal News Radio)

VA will cut its human resources function in half over the next few years. Assistant HR and Administration Secretary Peter Shelby said the VA Central HR Office in Washington is closed. Those employees are getting new jobs elsewhere at headquarters in D.C. Shelby is also creating regional HR offices and consolidating others across the country. VA currently has 172 HR offices and nearly 7,000 employees who work in that function. (Federal News Radio)

Another federal CIO is on the move, this time from Veterans Affairs. Rob Thomas, the VA’s chief information officer and the acting assistant secretary for information and technology, is retiring in October. A VA spokesperson confirmed Thomas’ decision. Scott Blackburn, the director of the MyVA Task Force, will take over as acting CIO and acting assistant secretary in the interim. Thomas becomes the sixth department CIO to leave in the last few months. When Blackburn takes over in October, there will be 11 acting CIOs among the 24 CFO act agencies and the three military services. (Federal News Radio)

Acting Commerce Department CIO Rod Turk has weighed in on the Internet of Things. Turk said agencies need to consider IoT as a commodity, and think of cybersecurity around these devices with a risk-based approach. He said despite the chaos and complexity of IoT, the same basic principles of cybersecurity apply. This includes learning how data is accessed and moved, and managing that flow of data through the devices.