BLM employees given timeline to decide on relocation plans

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• Employees at the Bureau of Land Management’s Washington D.C. headquarters have limited time to decide if they will move out west with the agency or not. E&E News reports BLM’s acting chief William Perry Pendley told more than 200 employees they have 30 days to decide whether to accept reassignment and 90 days to report to their new duty station.

• The Office of Personnel Management says it’s working on new resources to help agencies support work-life initiatives like telework, Employee Assistance Programs, and family and dependent care. OPM says employees who know their employers value their overall well-being are more likely to show their commitment to their agencies. Tools to help agencies better support nursing employees, a new webinar on telework, training for Employee Assistance Program coordinators and dependent care research are all in the works for 2020. October is National Work and Family Month. (Chief Human Capital Officers Council)

• OPM is also working with the Federal Chief Information Council to create a job rotation program for federal employees who went through the Federal Cybersecurity Reskilling Academy pilot program. Veronica Villalobos, OPM’s principal deputy associate director for employee services, said the job rotation would last for nine months, and would complement the three months of reskilling coursework. Some of the employees in the academy’s first cohort have gone back to their previous jobs, and remain uncertain about their prospects of moving to a job in federal IT. (Federal News Network)

• Applications are open for the 2020 Presidential Management Fellows Program. Interested candidates can apply through October 17. The PMF program has been running for 41 years. OPM first established it as the Presidential Management Intern program back in 1977. Over 4,000 people applied to the PMF program last year. 351 finalists were selected. 12% of last year’s group were veterans. (Office of Personnel Management)

• It’s not as bad as it seems when it comes to customer service at some federal agencies according to the Partnership for Public Service and Accenture. Many of the government’s more popular and widely used services earn high customer satisfaction scores. The report says agencies could do a better job publicly sharing the customer service data they collect so other agencies can compare themselves with similar organizations. The report also found that the Paperwork Reduction Act created a huge burden for agencies to quickly solicit and collect public feedback. (Federal News Network)

• The congressional Appropriations Committees allowed the Defense Department to shift two and a half billion dollars before the end of the 2019 fiscal year. DoD took funds from program savings, deferrals and overestimates in pricing to add money to a slew of programs, such as the design of a long-range hypersonic weapon. Some of the initiatives benefiting from the shift include the design and building of a long-range hypersonic weapon and prototypes for an extended-range artillery cannon. (Department of Defense)

• Once again, HP is a big winner on the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. The Navy awarded HP a $358 million contract to supply laptops, desktops and other end-user devices over the next three years. It could be worth up to $1.4 billion over the next nine years if the Navy exercises all of its options. The award is the first of two the Navy’s making as part of the recompetition of its Next Generation Enterprise Network contract. HP also won the previous NGEN contract in 2013, and operated the entire NMCI network for five years before that. (Federal News Network)

• A new program executive office for the acquisition of advanced aircraft will be in charge of Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper’s Digital Century Series idea to bring new aircraft into the service. The office will take advantage of technologies like digital engineering and modular open systems architecture to better design the aircraft before they are built. (Air Force)

• There has been an update to the Transportation Security Administration’s cloud strategy. Under its Cloud Strategy 2.0 the TSA will roll out a “cloud first” approach for new IT services. It also includes a “cloud smart” strategy for existing applications, with mission-critical systems moving to a private cloud. The agency expects to implement and hybrid cloud model, and lists building a culture of experimentation and innovation, replacing legacy systems, and enabling a mobile workforce as its cloud-centric goals. (FedBizOpps)

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