April 16, 2008

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

1. Federal Diary: Family-Leave Plan Is Halved
2. Panel's Bipartisan View: F.D.A. Is Underfinanced
3. Office of Management and Budget to Issue Guidance on Purchase Card Requirements
4. House Passes Bill to Check Contractors' Taxes

 

Family-Leave Plan Is Halved

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr
 
A proposal to provide eight weeks of paid parental leave to federal employees was cut to four weeks by a key House Democrat yesterday as Republicans expressed concerns about the benefit's cost.
 
Still, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said four weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child would make the government a leader in strengthening families and would be a "prudent fiscal approach."
 
Waxman's scaled-back leave benefit was approved by his panel's federal workforce subcommittee on a voice vote, with Republicans in opposition. The vote was on an amendment offered by Waxman to a bill sponsored by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), who has championed legislation for paid parental leave for the past eight years.
 
The amended bill is "a positive step in the right direction," Maloney said in a statement. "While I would like to see eight weeks of paid leave, I understand that policymaking is about compromise and incremental change."
 
Maloney has repeatedly pointed to studies showing that the United States has not kept pace with other industrialized countries when it comes to providing paid family leave, suggesting that it is time for the federal government to become a role model for the nation's employers. At a House hearing on her proposal last month, she noted that too often federal employees are forced to choose between their paycheck and spending time with a new child.
 
But her bill has encountered resistance from the Bush administration, which says federal employees have ample and generous benefits that can be used for maternity leave.
Yesterday, Rep. Kenny Marchant (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the federal workforce subcommittee, and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said that they were concerned about the cost of providing paid parental leave and whether this was the time to grant a new benefit to federal employees.
 
Federal employees should not receive increased benefits during an economic slowdown, when companies are cutting back, Issa said. By considering paid parental leave for them, "we are making a statement that we are out of touch," he said.
 
Marchant said he is worried that the bill would carry a "hefty price tag," while Jordan asked Democrats to give him an estimate of its cost.
 
Waxman said the most recent estimate was made in 2000 for a bill that would have provided six weeks of paid parental leave. It would have cost $95 million in the first year.
His approach, Waxman said, would provide paid leave for four weeks and then permit federal employees to take as much as eight weeks of paid sick leave, assuming they had been in government long enough to save that much sick leave.
 
Federal employees earn 13 days of paid sick leave each year, which they can build up over the years without limitation. Most employees also earn from 13 to 26 days of paid vacation each year, and they may carry as much as six weeks of annual leave into the following year.
 
Waxman said he hopes to have a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office before the legislation comes up for a floor vote. He and other Democrats stressed that cost should not be an overriding issue, suggesting that offering a benefit to keep people in government has to be balanced against the costs of hiring and training new employees.
 
The bill, as amended, was approved on a 7 to 3 vote by the subcommittee, with Issa, Jordan and Marchant, the three Republicans present, voting no.
 
In her statement yesterday, Maloney thanked Waxman and the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), for moving the bill toward a full committee vote and a floor vote.
 
The American workplace, she said, has not kept pace with the changing needs of families, especially those that "no longer have a stay-at-home parent to provide care for a new child."
 
Outdated family-leave policies, she said, "are a talent drain on the government -- they're an incentive for skilled people to look elsewhere for work at the very time when our government needs them most."
 
The subcommittee also approved on voice vote a bill sponsored by Davis that would encourage greater diversity in the Senior Executive Service, in part by requiring the Office of Personnel Management to set up an office to oversee the recruitment and management of federal executives.
 
The bill, and a companion measure in the Senate sponsored by Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), would order each federal agency to create three-member Senior Executive Service panels, each of which would include at least one member of a racial or ethnic minority and at least one woman.
 

Panel's Bipartisan View: F.D.A. Is Underfinanced

The New York Times
By Gardiner Harris
 
The Food and Drug Administration needs far more money than the White House has proposed for next year, senators of both parties said Tuesday.
 
"To us, it's clear that they're seriously underfunded," Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, said after a hearing of the Appropriations subcommittee, headed by Mr. Kohl, that oversees the agency's spending.
 
The subcommittee's ranking minority member, Senator Robert F. Bennett, Republican of Utah, agreed with Mr. Kohl and tried at the hearing to get the food and drug commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, to say how much more the agency could use wisely.
 
If lawmakers decide that the White House "was wrong and you needed to add another $100 million, just to pull a number completely out of the air, could you handle that?" Mr. Bennett asked.
 
Dr. von Eschenbach said he would "welcome an opportunity to present a scenario of portfolio options" for levels of financing.
 
The Senate passed a budget resolution last month that would make the F.D.A.'s allocated budget -- that part of its spending that comes from taxpayer revenue, as opposed to user fees paid by drug and medical device manufacturers -- $375 million greater in 2009 than this year. That would be a 20 percent increase, and Dr. von Eschenbach said he did not believe that the agency could absorb so large an addition in one year.
 
A report last year by a panel of outside advisers to the agency said American lives were in danger because the F.D.A. did not have the money, the staff or the scientific expertise to protect them. And in a speech last month, Dr. von Eschenbach acknowledged that the F.D.A. "may fail in its mission to protect and promote the health of every American" and that "peril exists."
 
But he was far less pessimistic in his testimony on Tuesday.
 
"I believe we have been eminently successful up to this period of time," Dr. von Eschenbach said. "We are the world's gold standard.
 
"But if we want to continue that level of excellence," he added, "we must change."
 
The Bush administration has proposed increasing the agency's allocated budget next year by 3 percent, to some $1.8 billion, not enough to pay even for increased costs. Dr. von Eschenbach spoke Tuesday about plans to hire up to 700 new employees for the F.D.A. staff, but he acknowledged that the agency would not have the money to do any hiring next year if the president's budget was adopted without changes by Congress.
 
"We are on a trajectory to increased staff," he said. "We just have to push it off a little."
Dr. von Eschenbach said the agency planned to open three new offices this year in the Chinese cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The combined staff there is to total 13 people, 5 of them to be hired locally.
 
Addressing the controversy over the blood thinner heparin, the commissioner said in his testimony that contamination in samples whose active ingredient had been imported from China was "apparently, we suspect, done by virtue of economic fraud," to enhance profit. This was the first time anyone at the F.D.A. had confirmed that the agency suspected that the drug's contamination had been deliberate.
 
But after the hearing, Dr. von Eschenbach said that he "probably went too far" in his testimony and that the agency did not have proof that the contamination had occurred as a result of fraud.

 

Office of Management and Budget to Issue Guidance on Purchase Card Requirements

Government Executive
By Elizabeth Newell
 
The Office of Management and Budget will issue a memorandum to agency leaders early this week emphasizing and clarifying existing requirements for the use of government purchase cards.
 
The memo comes on the heels of a Government Accountability Office report that found nearly 41 percent of $14 billion in transactions were not properly authorized or signed for by an independent third party. GAO's sample of transactions more than $2,500 concluded that 48 percent of purchases did not properly comply with federal rules to deter fraud.
 
GAO recommended that OMB director Jim Nussle issue memoranda reminding agencies of existing controls over purchase card activity, and agency officials said in a conference call last week they would do that. According to the watchdog agency, breakdown of internal controls "resulted in numerous examples of fraudulent, improper and abusive purchase card use." GAO's examples included instances where cardholders purchased Internet dating services, iPods and lingerie.
 
"What we've taken from this [report] is that we need to do a better job of working with agencies to get them to adhere to the policies that exist," said Clay Johnson, OMB deputy director for management. "On top of that there are certainly opportunities to strengthen some of these policies and put some of them into law."
 
Johnson and Danny Werfel, acting controller of OMB's federal financial management office, said they are working with lawmakers, in particular Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to expand existing OMB requirements into law.
 
"Once they're law, there's the ability to create stiffer penalties for misuse than are in OMB regulations, so we welcome Congress' help and partnership in building those stiffer penalties into the process," Werfel said.
 
Legislation to that effect, the 2007 Government Credit Card Abuse Prevention Act (S. 789), introduced by Grassley, passed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last Thursday. A companion bill in the House, H.R.1395, awaits review by the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement.
 
In the official written response to GAO's report, OMB officials agreed that the purchase card program will not be as efficient as it could be unless agencies implement strong and effective controls to prevent waste, fraud and abuse. They said they had designated charge card management a major focus area in 2005 under Appendix B of Circular No. A-123.

 

OMB also proposed issuing more guidance to agencies, pointing out that Appendix B extends to convenience checks as well as charge cards and agency personnel have financial responsibility with regard to unauthorized and erroneous purchase card transactions.
 

House Passes Bill to Check Contractors' Taxes

Federal Computer Week
By Matthew Weigelt

 

The House has passed a measure to deal with government  contractors' tax delinquency. Meanwhile, regulators are already close to finalizing changes in acquisition regulations to deal with the issue.

The Contracting and Tax Accountability Act, which the House passed by voice vote April 14, would prohibit a company with seriously delinquent tax debt from receiving a federal contract. It would require the potential contractor to certify it has no such debt and authorize the government to disclose the information to other agencies.

Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.) introduced the measure Dec. 19, but acquisition regulators had nearly nine months earlier proposed a change to the Federal Acquisition Regulation to achieve the same result.

The Civilian Agency Acquisition and Defense Acquisition Regulations councils proposed the rule in the March 30, 2007, edition of the Federal Register. The proposal would require contractors to certify -- among other things -- if they had delinquent taxes, had failed to pay taxes or had received notice of a tax lien against them. Also, if a contractor told the government it had had problems with taxes during the previous three years, an agency could suspend or debar the company from government work.

The certifications would help agencies make informed decisions about awarding government work to contractors, the notice states.

So far, the proposed rule has cleared legal reviews and received approval from the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. In February, officials were preparing it for the federal acquisition circular, according to a status sheet on open FAR cases.

Republicans said they agree with the intent of Ellsworth's bill but questioned why Congress is taking on issues already being handled by regulators.

"It is unclear to us whether this legislation is necessary," said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.).

The bill has been referred to the Senate.