Whooping cough, measles and flu, oh my! Sounds bad and can even be fatal. But then why don’t more people get shots to prevent them? No, that medicine-soaked sugar cube you had in grade school doesn’t mean you are protected now. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to find out.

The Defense Department says civilian employees should expect hiring freezes, the loss of temporary workers and possibly furloughs if Congress doesn’t pass a bill to prevent automatic budget cuts. Pat Niehaus, president of the Federal Managers Association, is like most of the Association’s members. She’s a civilian manager at the Defense Department. She says they’re all bracing for pain.

The National Archives is celebrating a milestone in its effort to release old formerly classified records. Its National Declassification Center has unclogged its backlog, which was once 361 million pages long. The Center’s director Sheryl Shenberger says employees worked overtime, cracking open dusty boxes and deciphering old notes in project folders.

In a bold move this week, a bipartisan group of senators announced shared principles for immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the U.S. But what would a new law following these principles look like for the federal government? For answers, we turn now to Alex Bolton, senior staff writer at The Hill newspaper.