June 4, 2008

 

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

1. Federal Diary: Telework Bill Cleared by the House
   
2. U.S. Seeks the Go-Ahead for Nevada Nuclear Dump
3. Lockheed Faulted for Failure to Control Costs
4. "Surviving the Presidential Transition": Presented by Young Government Leaders and the Partnership for Public Service 

Telework Bill Cleared by the House

The Washington Post

By Stephen Barr

A bill that would permit many federal employees to telecommute at least two days every two weeks was approved by the House yesterday on a voice vote.

Under the bill, federal agencies would be required to create and implement policies to enable eligible employees to work from home or away from their regular office as long as telecommuting did not hamper their performance or interfere with agency operations.

Telework advocates and union officials have been pushing for expanded telecommuting programs in the government for two years, and the House action enhances the chances of Congress sending a bill to the president this year.

Similar legislation has been approved by a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, but a committee report has not been released, a step needed before the bill can come to the Senate floor. There are some differences between the House and Senate bills that will have to be resolved, but a compromise is likely because the concept of expanded telecommuting in the government has drawn substantial bipartisan support.

Reps. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), John Sarbanes (D-Md.), Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), Tom Davis (R-Va.) and others have repeatedly stressed that allowing more government employees to work from home would ease traffic congestion and cut air pollution in such areas as Washington.

"This is a win, win, win," Sarbanes said yesterday. The private sector is ahead of the government in offering at-home work options and the government needs to expand its telework programs to remain competitive in hiring, he said.

Only 6 percent of the federal workforce participated in a telework program in 2006, according to a House report on the bill.

By most accounts, many federal managers are wary of telework because of concerns that communication among employees could be more difficult and that offices might have trouble turning around a sudden surge in work.

But Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said yesterday that "it is simply old-fashioned and outdated to think that employees cannot and will not be productive if they are at a work site other than their office."

Supporters of the House bill pointed to the Patent and Trademark Office and the Defense Information Systems Agency as agencies that encourage telecommuting and have suffered no decline in productivity.

Under the House bill, eligible employees would be permitted to telecommute at least 20 percent of the hours they worked in every two workweeks. That formula allows employees on alternative work schedules and those with non-standard hours to also be considered for telecommuting.

Not every federal employee will be able to qualify, however. Agencies would be able to deny telework to employees who handle classified information, have daily face-to-face contact with the public or who must use certain equipment to perform their jobs, according to a House report on the bill. 

U.S. Seeks the Go-Ahead for Nevada Nuclear Dump

The Los Angeles Times

By Ralph Vartabedian

 

The federal government applied for a license Tuesday to build a long-planned dump for the nation's radioactive waste in Nevada, but state officials vowed a renewed effort to block it, saying Washington has "lost track of reality."

After a quarter-century of scientific dispute and legal wrangling, the Energy Department officially launched what could be one of the most complex and costly engineering efforts in history. The Yucca Mountain repository, located 16 miles from the California border, would eventually store 70,000 metric tons of waste that has been accumulating since the first reactors went online.

And the amount of waste will grow at an increasing rate in future decades: In the last year, utilities have launched a nuclear power renaissance, announcing plans for 15 new commercial reactors.

The application "will further encourage the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, which is absolutely critical to our energy security, to our environment and to our national security," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday.

The license application, which is 8,600 pages long, was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has up to four years to act. If everything goes unfettered, Bodman said, Yucca Mountain could be open for business by 2020 at a cost of about $70 billion.

Although the impetus for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain may be greater than ever, the legal and political hurdles for the project are vast.

A sharp cut in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's budget has left it short of resources, Chairman Dale E. Klein said. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is years behind schedule in issuing a health standard for radioactive leakage from the dump. A previous standard was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court.

The issues that remain undecided could set off a frenetic pace of legal and regulatory scrambling in the closing days of the Bush administration.

Nevada officials said the administration was rushing forward with an incomplete application out of the belief that it would be more difficult to stop once it was in motion.

"They are just trying to get this on the plate while they still have a pal in the White House," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in an interview. "All they want to do is get it out of their hands and give it to the next administration."

The dump has become one of the biggest geographic disputes in modern U.S. history, pitting Nevada against a nuclear power industry centered in the East. California's two senators, as well as others in the West, have supported Nevada's opposition to the dump.

Edward "Ward" Sproat, director of the Energy Department's office of civilian radioactive waste, disputed the idea of a geographic divide, saying the dump would relieve 39 states of stored nuclear waste.

"I don't see it as an East versus West issue," Sproat said. "I see it as a national issue."

The design of the dump will provide for safe storage of the waste and represents 20 years of work by the nation's leading scientists, engineers and technical experts, including eight of the national laboratories and the U.S. Geological Survey, Bodman said.

The Energy Department has long argued against critics who want to leave the waste in place until technology improves. It would be irresponsible to not deal with the problem, the department has said.

The delays in building the dump have complicated the problem. Sproat said the Energy Department would have to ask Congress to expand the capacity of the Yucca Mountain site because all of its 70,000 metric tons of capacity will be reached in the next 24 months.

The nation has been trying to resolve the issue since the late 1970s. In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In his first term, President Bush, with congressional approval, selected Yucca Mountain as the designated site for what is mostly spent fuel from commercial reactors but also military nuclear waste.

Since then, Nevada has waged an effective legal, political and technical fight against it, drawing on the state's growing fiscal and political clout.

"The whole legal and regulatory process is corrupt," said Marta Adams, senior deputy attorney general in Nevada. "It would be very hard for Nevada to get a fair shake."

Only last year, Nevada blocked a federal effort to get access to 8 million gallons of state water to drill test holes at the site.

Nevada officials have a carefully laid out a plan to stop the project, said Robert Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. He said the state would immediately file to have the Energy Department's application thrown out, and if that fails, lodge more than 600 separate disputes or "contentions."

The notion that the dump would be safe is implausible, said Victor Galinsky, a former NRC commissioner and now a Nevada consultant.

The plan hinges on the use of titanium and palladium drip shields to protect waste canisters buried underground from water flowing through Yucca Mountain's porous rock. The Energy Department plans to install about 11,000 drip shields, each weighing five tons, using robots 100 to 300 years in the future when the repository would be sealed.

"It is pie in the sky," Galinsky said. "These people have lost track of reality."  

Lockheed Faulted for Failure to Control Costs

The Washington Post
By Dana Hedgpeth

Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. defense contractor, failed to follow military guidelines to track and manage costs on major weapons programs, according to an internal Pentagon document released yesterday by a government watchdog group.

The Bethesda company did not comply with 19 of 32 guidelines, which led to a lack of controls on the cost and schedule of multibillion-dollar programs including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the F-22 and F-16 fighter jets, the Defense Contract Management Agency said in a November 2007 report made public yesterday by the Project on Government Oversight.

John Young, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, said yesterday in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a corrective plan had been worked out between the Pentagon and Lockheed since the DCMA completed its report last fall. Young said that the Pentagon would withhold $10 million in payments from Lockheed if it missed any of 12 milestones established in the plan and that the DCMA was also meeting with Lockheed every two weeks to review its progress.

Tom Jurkowsky, a Lockheed Martin spokesman, said the company had "achieved three milestones that are part of the plan" and was working to train more of its managers and subcontractors on the guidelines.

"We're putting improvements in place that are going to be effective in keeping our programs on track with cost and schedule," he said.

The DCMA's report came as senators questioned government auditors and Pentagon officials about how 95 of the military's largest weapons programs are $295 billion over their original projected cost, bringing their total estimated cost to $1.6 trillion. The cost of the Joint Strike Fighter, for example, has risen from $203 billion in 2001 to $298.8 billion, according to a recent government report. Lockheed said part of the reason was an increase in the price of raw materials such as titanium, as well as changes in what the government wanted.

Another source of cost overruns, government auditors said, is that there has been a dramatic cut in the government's acquisition workforce over the past decade, leaving fewer people for oversight and management, while at the same time, the amount of work contracted out has doubled to $600 billion annually.

In its report, the DCMA said Lockheed was not "following, nor consistently applying" a set of Pentagon guidelines called the Earned Value Management System that flag cost overruns. The agency said Lockheed's attempt to follow the guidelines was "superficial at best."

"This undisciplined approach to program management and towards the maintenance of the EVMS, will ultimately jeopardize the long-term stability" of Lockheed's aeronautics program "and diminishes the purchasing power of the Department" of Defense, the report said.

The agency said that Lockheed had "vague and confusing" documentation on the management system and that it was altering some cost overruns and performance levels, which made the "accuracy and validity" of Lockheed's data "suspect" and hard for the Pentagon to figure out the costs and completion date of a program.

"This shows that the world's largest defense contractor can't spot cost problems before they get out of control," said Nick Schwellenbach, national security investigator for the Project on Government Oversight.

"Surviving the Presidential Transition": Presented by Young Government Leaders and the Partnership for Public Service

If you're interested in discussing the challenges facing the next administration or how the change will impact you, join the Partnership for Public Service and Young Government Leaders for a discussion on surviving the presidential transition on Thursday, June 26 from 12:00-1:30 PM at the Partnership for Public Service at 1100 New York Ave., Suite 1090 East in Washington, DC.

Experts John Kamensky, senior fellow at IBM Center for "The Business of Government" and Martha Joynt Kumar, a Political Science professor at Towson University will speak and answer questions from the audience. RSVP to today to rsvp@youngovernmentleaders.org. Space is limited!