For fish and wildlife to thrive in the United States, they need space. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke to someone who has spent a career helping secure woods and grasslands that support conservation. Now he's a recipient of a Presidential Rank Award, one in a series of interviews of PRA winners, the deputy director for program management and policy at the Fish and Wildlife Service, Steve Guertin.
In today's Federal Newscast, public satisfaction in federal customer experience reached an-time low last year, according to a scorecard that’s been tracking this for decades.
In today's Federal Newscast: The Defense Authorization Bill has been signed; We'll tell you about a few changes. Still on the Pentagon's Circumspect List: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. And in COVID news, more sailors test positive, while 66 more marines are fired.
Some 650 pieces of federal land have the word squaw in their names. Now the Interior Department has called on a group called the Board on Geographic Names to change them.
For more, the GAO's director of Natural Resources and Environment Issues, Frank Rusco, spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.
Instead of closing new Grand Junction headquarters, BLM will now have two headquarters.
Vacancies jumped from 121 open positions in July 2019, when the Bureau of Land Management first announced the relocation, to 326 in March 2020, a 169% increase, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Chief data officers are relatively new additions to most agencies, but the Biden administration sees them as an essential part of some of its top priorities.
As a way to "minimize disruptions," the Bureau of Land Management will not require employees, with the exception of a few core senior leaders, to move to Washington, D.C., the Interior Department said.
The Interior Department is expanding opportunities over 88 wildlife refuges covering more than two million acres. For more on what it takes to make this happen, the chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System at the Fish and Wildlife Service, Cynthia Martinez.
As the House sets new deadlines to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill by the end of September, here are several provisions that might impact federal employees and their agencies.
About 3,500 federal firefighters at the Interior Department and 11,300 others at the Agriculture Department's Forest Service will see pay raises to meet a $15 an hour threshold. Federal employees should see the raises in their paychecks starting next week, both departments said.
House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations released the latest agency grades on progress around IT modernization goals.
The Biden administration recently announced a series of steps it would take to improve pay and expand capacity for federal firefighters, but a federal union worries they're not nearly not enough to support intensifying fire seasons that grow longer each year.
Relocations in the federal government have received a bit of a bad rap lately, and a recent survey and research shows agencies often struggle to track the costs and tie the moves to the professional development needs of their talent.