May 30, 2008
 
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Intelligence Agencies Seek Recruits from Immigrant Communities
2. Federal Diary: OPM Halts Work on Retirement Calculator
3. Aviation Groups Push Agenda as FAA Reauthorization Stalls
4. National Academy of Public Administration Hosts Reception to Celebrate Release of Paul C. Light's New Book

Intelligence Agencies Seek Recruits from Immigrant Communities

Federal Times
By Stephen Losey

Intelligence leaders are reaching out to first- and second-generation Americans for help in combating terrorism and other threats.

But members of immigrant communities say recruiting won't succeed unless officials speed up the security clearance process, look for recruits in ethnic studies and other specialized programs at universities, and be more sensitive in the treatment of so-called heritage Americans.

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and other officials met with Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans and other ethnic community leaders May 16 to discuss recruiting issues.

"If you look broadly at [minority representation in] our community, it's out of balance with regard to the percentages of America, the percentages in the federal work force, and the percentages in the civilian work force," McConnell said. "We're going to have to tip it out of balance with regard to heritage Americans because of our needs for language and cultural understanding and skills that would not grow up in Omaha or Iowa."

One of the main obstacles may be a lack of trust in the communities in which intelligence agencies want to recruit. Representatives of ethnic organizations spoke about their concerns about government watch lists, immigration enforcement and other policies their communities perceive as hostile.

Another problem that McConnell cited is some immigrants or immigrants' children come from repressive nations that direct intelligence operations against their own people.

"It is a situation for many of those citizens where the model that they know is a negative model," McConnell said. "So this is an uphill struggle."

During World War II, the country depended on foreign-born government employees who broke codes and made scientific advances that helped defeat the Axis powers, McConnell said.

But during the Cold War, intelligence agencies banned hiring immigrants or people who had relatives living abroad. This has hurt their ability to understand the Middle East and penetrate terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida.

Attendees told intelligence officials that reaching out to universities' ethnic studies programs would help them recruit more efficiently and weed out students who are ineligible for jobs because they are not citizens.

Instead of recruiting at traditional engineering and computer science programs where international students and first-generation students don't necessarily have citizenship yet, federal agencies "are starting to recruit with us," said Larry Shinagawa, director of Asian-American studies at the University of Maryland. Students in technical fields who also take Asian-American studies, "are bilingual, they are the cream of the crop, and they are a targeted group that should be encouraged."

Clay Johnson, Office of Management and Budget deputy director, said speeding up the security clearance process — partly through greatly increasing the amount of automation and technology involved — is necessary to get good job candidates who speak multiple languages on board quickly before other organizations hire them away.

Ron Sanders, the intelligence community's chief human capital officer, said he wants to pay attention to small details so as not to alienate heritage Americans. After Humira Noorestani, founder of the Afghan educational organization Ariana Outreach, pointed out that a slide incorrectly referred to her people as Afghanis — which is the currency of Afghanistan — she said, "Sorry to be annoying."

"No, you should be annoying," Sanders said. "That's why we're showing this to you, before anyone else sees it."

OPM Halts Work on Retirement Calculator

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr

The Office of Personnel Management sent a "stop work" letter to the contractor developing a software system to calculate retirement benefits for federal employees, officials said yesterday.

The contractor, Hewitt Associates, was given 10 days to propose a remedy for flaws and defects uncovered by the OPM during tests of the benefits calculator. Only five of 61 functions worked as intended during recent testing.

"We are obviously disappointed," said OPM Director L inda M. Springer.

Still, she stressed that the benefits calculator represented only a third of the project to upgrade retirement claims processing, known as RetireEZ. "It is just a pause to determine how we go forward, either with Hewitt or with someone else," she said. "It is not a pause for the whole project; it is only a pause for the calculation engine piece."

Hewitt, a consulting and outsourcing firm with headquarters in Illinois, responded in an e-mail from company spokeswoman Amy Wulfestieg that "we are working closely with OPM to understand their rationale and respond to the notice."

OPM officials indicated that they were surprised that the automated calculator had failed to perform. They said they had received repeated assurances from Hewitt since February that the project was on track and had negotiated ground rules with Hewitt for testing the calculator and how test results would be analyzed.

The RetireEZ system is supposed to permit the OPM to move out of a labor-intensive, paper-based system for calculating pensions earned by federal employees. In the past, most government employees have received a partial annuity at the start of their retirement because agencies and the OPM had to pull together paper personnel files, a process that can take months.

An automated system will allow the OPM to make full and correct pension payments within days of an employee's retirement. Springer has made that one of her priorities, in part because the OPM workload is growing as increasing numbers of baby boomers retire.

The OPM has said the new system would have to be capable of making up to 150 distinct calculations because federal employees are covered by different retirement rules. The formula for figuring the annuity of a law enforcement officer is different from the rules applied to a postal worker, for example.

Hewitt and the OPM launched the system in February, and the OPM said the system successfully delivered on 15 of the most common retirement calculations.

But the OPM contracting team decided to call a temporary halt to the project when tests showed that the system could handle only five of the next 61 functions. The calculator produced wrong answers some or all of the time or failed to even calculate an annuity.

Faced with a deadline of today on whether to accept Hewitt's work and continue with the project, the OPM decided to call a temporary halt.

The problems with the calculator will not affect pensions that have been paid or those that will be processed in coming weeks because Springer has kept the old method of figuring annuity payments in operation as a safeguard, on the assumption that bugs might be found during system tests.

OPM employees continue to clean up paper records for conversion to digital files and streamline the process for approving retirement claims. That work will help speed up retirement payments, even without an automated calculator, the officials said.

About $21 million has been paid to Hewitt to put the calculation engine in place, out of $27 million set aside for the project. The overall value of the Hewitt contract is projected at $290 million over 10 years for planning, acquisition, operations and maintenance of the RetireEZ system.

 

Aviation Groups Push Agenda as FAA Reauthorization Stalls

Government Executive
By Alyssa Rosenberg

Congress is unlikely to pass a new reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration before an extension of the agency's funding runs out on June 30. But aviation industry groups are pursuing priorities ranging from winning collective bargaining rights for air traffic controllers to defeating legislation that would increase oversight of foreign repair stations.

"If we see another extension to 2009...you could have a lot of little proxy wars over specific issues," said Matt Hallett, director of media relations for the Aeronautical Repair Station Association, at an Aviation Association breakfast on Wednesday. Hallett said it was likely that many amendments to the current FAA reauthorization bill could become stand-alone bills, requiring more time to pass.

The last FAA reauthorization, in 2003, expired on Sept. 30, 2007. Since then, the agency has been operating on a temporary extension that has frozen funding at the fiscal 2007 level.

Hallett said his organization was concerned by an amendment introduced in April by Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that would impose a number of requirements on FAA to provide greater oversight of aircraft service stations based in other countries. Under the provision, U.S. aircraft could be maintained only at FAA-certified stations, the agency would have to inspect stations twice a year -- at least once without advance notice -- and service stations would have to improve their security measures to meet Transportation Security Administration standards.

Doug Church, director of communications for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, agreed that aviation business needed to move forward -- with or without FAA reauthorization.

"We are desperate for something to give our members," Church said. "We prefer far and away that it's the FAA bill. It's very scary to us, the rapid turnover and the inexperienced workforce coming up."

Air traffic controllers are seeking to close a legislative loophole left over from the 1996 reauthorization bill that allows the FAA administrator to impose a final contract offer on the controllers' union if negotiations deadlock. In 2006, then-administrator Marion Blakey forced pay and work rules on the controllers, and NATCA has been lobbying Congress to send the agency and union back to the bargaining table. President Bush has said that he will veto legislation that requires FAA to reopen negotiations.

But some organizations say their needs can be met only by reauthorization and a new funding bill. T.J. Schulz, vice president of the Airports Consultants Council, which helps airports with architectural planning and environmental engineering, said airports were putting off long-term capital projects after eight months without a steady funding stream.

FAA reauthorization is not the only legislation on industry's agenda. The climate bill co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., would apply a cap-and-trade system to the transportation industry, requiring fuel providers to get licenses for the greenhouse gas content in the fuel they sell.

Some aviation organizations worry that such requirements would drive up gas prices, and consequently, the cost of air travel. They say curbing emissions is an important goal, but balancing cost efficiency and environmental concerns is not an easy task.

"There was an interest in ethanol," said David Castelveter, vice president of communications for the Air Transport Association, but "we can't use it. It freezes at altitude, you have to truck it [and] you can't pipe it. If you force the carriers to fly less, there's going to be pain associated with that."

"There are trade-offs in the emissions and the noise," said Eileen Denne, senior vice president for communications and marketing at the Airports Council International-North America. "The continuous descent approach decreases emissions, but you have to pay attention to the noise."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., also has introduced an amendment to the Lieberman-Warner bill that would mandate the Environmental Protection Agency to commission a National Academy of Sciences' study on aviation emissions. Participants at the breakfast acknowledged that there needs to be more data on aviation and greenhouse gases to inform the debate.

National Academy of Public Administration Hosts Reception to Celebrate Release of Paul C. Light's New Book

www.napawash.org  

Join the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) on June 9 to celebrate the release of "A GOVERNMENT ILL EXECUTED:  The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It" by Academy Fellow Paul C. Light. The reception will feature remarks by Senator Tom Daschle and Light. Please visit www.napawash.org for more details. Click here to RSVP by June 2.