President Biden scuttled his weekend plans in Delaware to return to Washington a day early to deal with rising tensions in the Middle East. The Washington Times stories: White House
Read More...Union officials are urging Congress to provide more funding to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. BOP has spent years struggling with staff attrition, and safety and security issues. The American Federation of Government Employees said the fiscal 2024 budget for BOP, as part of the recent government funding deal, would only worsen the agency’s current 40% staffing shortage. And AFGE warned that a 38% cut to funding for facility maintenance would make federal prisons more dangerous environments for both employees and inmates. (BOP needs more funding, not Less, to address…
Read More...Concerns about NASA’s sixth iteration of its governmentwide acquisition contract known as SEWP have been bubbling underneath the surface for much of the past few months. Industry experts have quietly been wringing their collective hands over NASA’s plans for the small business size standard it detailed in the draft solicitation. The worry is the new size standard would exclude or make it nearly impossible for a large swath of small businesses to compete on the contract. Those fears broke through the surface in a new letter from Reps. Roger Williams…
Read More...Three years into the Commercial Platforms Initiative, the vision Congress had for the initiative isn’t necessarily coming to fruition. But new data and analysis shows that doesn’t mean it’s a failure by any means. The number of agencies using the platform more than quadrupled between 2020 and 2022 to 27 and the spending, while far below initial estimates of $ 6 billion have increased to $ 40 million last fiscal year. And beyond the raw numbers, agencies told the Government Accountability Office in a new report that it is saving them…
Read More...IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel told employees in a new memo about their constitutional and statutory right to make protected disclosures to Congress. The Washington Times stories: White House
Read More...Lindsey Barr was fired from her substitute teaching job after expressing concern over the content of a book in the school library. Barr is a mother of three boys. All her children attend public school in Bryan County, Georgia, about 30 miles southwest of Savannah, where she also works as a substitute teacher. In August, Barr learned that McAllister Elementary School, where her first- and third-grade sons attend and where she sometimes works, planned to have the book “All Are Welcome” read during a “read aloud” story time in the…
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