OPM expects busy Open Season standing up USPS health insurance marketplace in 2024

The Office of Personnel Management expects to receive a much higher volume of calls during next year’s Open Season. That’s because a Postal Service reform bill signed into law in 2022 is moving postal employees and retirees into a different health insurance marketplace from the rest of the federal workforce, starting in January 2025. OPM Director Kiran Ahuja told members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee earlier this month that the agency is on track to create a standalone Postal Service Health Benefits Program. “It’s a huge effort, it’s…

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How Wrestling Explains America

Awash in strobes, Seth “Freakin” Rollins begins his waltz to the ring. His nemesis, the YouTube star Logan Paul, is there waiting for him. Rollins pauses beneath the jumbotron and holds his arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. Green and purple spotlights dart and swirl around Boston’s TD Garden. Thousands of fans start screaming the “whoa-ohh-ohh” part of Rollins’s theme song; exponentially more are live-tweeting the broadcast at home. It’s just before 9 o’clock on a frigid Monday in March—we haven’t even reached Act II of the three-hour pageant. RAW…

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Insisting Law School Students Respect 1st Amendment Is Akin to ‘McCarthyism,’ Bloomberg Columnist Claims

A Bloomberg Law columnist is upset that students at Yale Law School didn’t protest the First Amendment and shout down an invited speaker, James Ho, a Trump-appointed judge who sits on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. On March 15, Ho spoke at Yale Law School, and according to Vivia Chen’s opinion essay, his commentary went uninterrupted by angry student protesters. Following closely on the heels of another Trump-appointed 5th Circuit judge, Kyle Duncan, being shouted down by Stanford Law students, the fact that Ho’s speech was able to…

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Why federal employees are watching the political landscape more than ever

If you wonder why federal employees worry, along with everyone else, consider: mini financial crises, a stubbornly bear stock market, no breakthroughs on Social Security solvency, and the debt-ceiling debate dragging out. For one point of view, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with John Hatton, vice president for Policy at the National Association of Active and Retired Federal Employees (NARFE). Interview transcript: Tom Temin People are concerned. I actually had a reader write to me asking, well, our TSP funds insured? Unfortunately, no. And nobody’s investments are insured yet,…

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Nobody Likes Mike Pence

Mike Pence is making little secret of his presidential ambitions. He’s written his book; he’s assembling his team; he’s mastered the art of the coy nondenial when somebody asks (in between trips to Iowa) if he’s running. In early Republican-primary polls, he hovers between 6 and 7 percent—not top-tier numbers, but respectable enough. He seems to think he has at least an outside shot at winning the Republican nomination. And yet, ask a Republican voter about the former vice president, and you’re likely to hear some of the most withering…

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