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• The Office of Personnel Management will temporarily halt applications for the Federal Long-Term-Care Insurance Program or FLTCIP. Starting next month and lasting for two years, OPM will not accept new applicants to the program. Current enrollees will also not be able to apply to increase their coverage. The suspension intends to give OPM and the long-term insurance carrier time to assess benefit offerings and establish a new premium rate. The two-year suspension will take effect on Dec. 19.

• The Education Department has reached a settlement with its union after facing multiple unfair labor practice charges. The American Federation of Government Employees has settled 14 separate ULPs with the Education Department after four years. The union filed all of the charges between 2018 and 2020. That was after the agency ended negotiations with AFGE and put forward more restrictive policies for telework, training, employees’ use of official time, and much more. The settlement restores many previous policies and creates a new collective bargaining agreement between the agency and the union. AFGE represents close to 4,000 federal employees at the Education Department. (AFGE, Education resolve years of negotiations  in settlement of over 20 disputes – Federal News Network)

• A federal employee union is saying that management at some Department of Veterans Affairs facilities denied administrative leave to some employees looking to vote. The American Federation of Government Employees is filing a national grievance over claims that about a dozen VA facilities denied or limited administrative leave to employees looking to vote during the workday. AFGE said VA management in some cases denied leave to workers if polls were open before or after their shifts or limited the leave to as little as half an hour. An executive order signed by President Joe Biden in March granted federal employees up to four hours of administrative leave to vote or serve as non-partisan poll workers. (AFGE files grievance over VA facilities limiting time off for employees to vote – Federal News Network)

• Two former Department of Veterans Affairs employees have pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $3 million from the agency. Prosecutors said former VA employees Randius McGlown and Charles Gates billed the Dallas VA Medical Center through companies they created, but did not deliver any goods or services to the agency. The scheme of generating phony purchase orders allegedly began in 2014. Both former VA employees face up to 10 years in federal prison.

• The Defense Department is looking to spark a big shift in how it defends its digital networks. DoD’s zero trust strategy, just out this week, presents a detailed, ambitious plan to instill zero trust principles across military networks by 2027. The strategy includes 45 distinct capabilities across seven separate pillars of zero trust. “There aren’t any technical, critical path items that are unachievable for us to get to zero trust at the at the target level,” said Randy Resnick, director of DoD’s zero trust portfolio management office. “It’s just a matter of leadership’s ability to execute.”(Pentagon releases zero trust strategy to guide DoD cybersecurity priorities – Federal News Network)

• A lead cyber agency is on the hunt for a key piece of technology. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is developing requirements for a Cyber Threat Intelligence Exchange Platform. CISA said it needs a streamlined way to find, analyze and share threat data with federal agencies and other partners. The agency is focused on solutions that will allow it to collect and analyze data from a range of feeds, including social, mobile, and web sources.

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