March 10, 2008

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

1. Final Day to Submit Your Nominations for the 2008 Service to America Medals!
2. Federal Diary: Comptroller General Leaving for Love of Country
3. Fed Networks Increasingly Under Siege
4. Feds Need More Respect, Better Benefits, Says Congressman

Final Day to Submit Your Nominations for the 2008 Service to America Medals!

The Partnership for Public Service
 
Do you know an extraordinary federal employee who is doing remarkable work on behalf of our country? There is one month remaining to help them receive the recognition they deserve and a chance to win up to $10,000 by nominating them for the 2008 Service to America Medals (Sammies).
 
With your help, the Sammies put a compelling human face on government service and seek to inspire a new generation of Americans to serve.
 
The awards include cash prizes from $3,000 to $10,000 in the following categories:

• Federal Employee of the Year
• Career Achievement (requires 20+ years of government service)
• Call to Service (age 35 or younger, and 5 years or less of government service)
• Citizen Services
• Homeland Security
• Justice and Law Enforcement
• National Security and International Affairs
• Science and Environment

Click here to download the 2008 nominations flyer. Nominations must be submitted online at http://www.servicetoamericamedals.org/ by March 10, 2008.

For more information, please send an email to awards@ourpublicservice.org or call Kristin Esham at 202-775-9111.

 

Comptroller General Leaving for Love of Country

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr

The way the government pays and manages its people was not on David M. Walker's radar when he came to the Government Accountability Office more than nine years ago.

But he soon decided that the federal personnel system needed an overhaul.

Job classifications and compensation were based on laws and rules from the 1940s and 1950s, he found. He concluded that the General Schedule, used to set the pay for about 1.6 million federal workers, "is fundamentally flawed," contending that 85 percent of the GS pay increases "have nothing to do with performance. Zippo."

Walker called for a shake-up of the federal personnel system and revamped GAO pay practices. "It was something that became a higher priority after I realized how serious a problem it was, not just at GAO but government-wide," he said in an interview.

On Wednesday, Walker gives up his title as comptroller general of the United States and says his farewells at the GAO, the congressional watchdog agency. He is leaving to become the president and chief executive of a new foundation that will urge solutions to the nation's growing fiscal and demographic problems -- an issue he has been speaking out about, on national television and in "fiscal wake-up" tours, over the past three years.

Walker came to the GAO with a goal of making it a model agency, using best practices that could be exported to the rest of the government. The GAO, with about 3,000 employees, has been ranked as one of the best places to work in Washington.

Under Walker's watch, the GAO has issued bleak reports on Iraq, faulted the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina and challenged Vice President Cheney to provide information about meetings he held with energy companies.

Inside the government, Walker will be remembered for the attention he drew to shortcomings of the federal personnel system. In January 2001 he put it on the government's "high-risk list," a designation traditionally reserved for federal programs deemed at risk of waste, fraud and abuse.

Walker also brought the buzz phrase "strategic human capital management" to the federal government, stressing that agencies needed to improve how they recruit, train and reward employees. "Any organization is only as good as its people," he tirelessly told members of Congress, Bush administration officials and academics.

The Bush Cabinet got similar marching orders from Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., then the director of the Office of Management and Budget. At a May 2001 Cabinet briefing, an OMB briefing paper described the government as hamstrung by too many management layers and a pay system that did not reflect the realities of the labor market and was likely to suffer a "skill gap" in critical occupations when baby boomers retired.

"I learned a lot from the work and thinking that David had done," Daniels, now the Republican governor of Indiana, said.

Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, said Walker "will be sorely missed." Walker and Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) were among the first to "beat the drum" on the importance of better managing the federal workforce, Stier said.

Still, Walker's efforts to revamp the GAO's internal pay practices did not go smoothly. In 2005, he split a pay band, or salary range, in two, sparking complaints that led to a congressional hearing and fueled a decision by GAO analysts to unionize. Some GAO employees thought they were not treated fairly in the split. Others were angered when they did not receive a raise, the practice across most of the government, in 2006.

The pay-band split, Walker said, was "the most controversial thing by far that we have done and the thing that led to the most emotion and ultimately led to the union."

In hindsight, he said, the switch to new compensation practices should have included a guaranteed base pay raise for all employees, "to ease the transition."

Most employees see a guaranteed raise as a way to protect their purchasing power, and Walker said the idea may make sense for government agencies that seek to leave the General Schedule for performance-based systems.

Walker, 56, is leaving the GAO to lead a foundation started by Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, a private investment banking firm. Peterson, 81, has pledged $1 billion to the foundation for research and projects to address the federal budget deficit, federal entitlement programs and social problems.

Engaging the public on the nation's fiscal challenges means advocating solutions, building coalitions and mobilizing grass-roots campaigns, Walker said. He could not do that while at the GAO, he said.

Walker said the timing was right to take "the unique opportunity" to join Peterson to work on national issues.

"I know myself well enough to know that I'm an innovator and a change agent. I'm not a maintenance guy. I can do maintenance mode, but that is not my highest and best use," Walker said.

Gene L. Dodaro, the GAO's chief operating officer and a longtime career official, will serve as the acting comptroller general when Walker steps down Wednesday. Congress and the White House jointly select comptrollers general, and that can be a lengthy process. Nearly two years passed before an agreement was reached to appoint Walker, who took office in 1998.

"I love my job. I love GAO. But I love my country more," Walker said of his decision. "I'm really concerned about the future of the country."

Fed Networks Increasingly Under Siege

Federal Times
By Courtney Mabeus 

Richard Westfield acknowledges his small agency, the National Labor Relations Board, doesn't possess the most sought-after data in government. But that doesn't mean his agency is not a target for hackers.

The agency's computers are linked to other networks. "Once they have access to the network," Westfield said, "They can use that as a launch pad to other organizations."

So he wasn't too surprised last year when a hacker in China started sniffing around the agency's firewalls looking for weak entry points. "I feel honored they didn't get in," he said.

Just another skirmish in the fast-escalating silent war playing out every day amidst government networks, filters, servers and routers.

In all, agencies last year reported more than 5,600 cases of computer attacks, intrusions, probes and plantings of malicious code from unseen enemies around the world. That's up 56 percent from the previous year and up 80 percent from two years ago, according to a new report by the Office of Management and Budget.

"I like to refer to them as a morphing threat," Treasury Department CIO Mike Duffy said. "The reality is there's a lot of people out there. They're highly motivated."

The Defense Department endures the worst attacks. Last summer, the department was forced to take 1,500 computers in the Office of the Secretary of Defense offline after an infiltrator got into an unclassified e-mail system.

A Senate panel will examine this week whether current laws go far enough to safeguard sensitive information held by federal agencies.

The anonymity of cyber attacks "conceals all manner of enemies," said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate homeland security subcommittee on federal financial management, government information, federal services and international security, which will hold the hearing March 12.

"A real problem with cyber attacks is you may not know where they are coming from or who is responsible for them," he said. "Are they individuals? Foreign governments?"

The threats against government computers are not only external. Improper use of federal data by federal employees and contractors is zooming, too: Cases shot up to more than 3,300 last year, up 418 percent from the previous year. Many of those resulted from the loss or theft of equipment that contained sensitive data.

Another measure of the state of battle: Unconfirmed threats prompting further investigation spiked from 912 in 2006 to more than 4,000 last year.

OMB's report, released March 1, does not include IT security incidents at the Defense Department. The Defense Department does not release the number of attacks or attempted intrusions launched upon its networks.

Karen Evans, OMB's administrator of e-government and information technology, said one cause for the spike in security incidents is that agencies are reporting more than they used to.

Federal agencies are required to report network intrusions and breaches to the Homeland Security Department's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, called US-CERT.

Other experts and some CIOs said it's likely many incidents go unreported.

Still, it's clear that the level of malevolent activity aimed at government computers is on the rise. And IT managers aren't optimistic they will subdue the problem anytime soon.

"It's going to get worse before it gets better," NLRB's Westfield said.

"Clearly, we're under a lot more pressure," said James Lewis, director of technology and public policy for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's coming from people who don't like foreign U.S. policy. It's coming from hackers who are bored. ... The list of people that are trying to break in is very large."

Timothy Madden, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations, which oversees the 5 million computers that make up DoD's information grid, said there are millions of scans of its network every day by people seeking to exploit a vulnerability of its system.

Scanning tools can be found and downloaded from the Internet in a matter of minutes, and those who are looking to do harm will "take their time," said John McCumber, strategic programs manager for Symantec, which develops antivirus and other intrusion detection software.

"They'll put in little bits of code and they'll wait days, even months," McCumber said.

To read the entire article, click here.

 

Feds Need More Respect, Better Benefits, Says Congressman

Government Executive
By Alyssa Rosenberg

 

Strong leadership, workplace flexibilities and respect for employees are key to improving morale and performance at federal agencies, a freshman Democratic lawmaker told members of the National Treasury Employees Union on Thursday.

 

"The right kind of leadership on all levels can turn [federal agencies] around pretty quick," said Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., during the closing session of the union's legislative conference. Sarbanes, who has spent much of his first term working on federal employee issues, is the son of former Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. "As much as it's a disservice not to support the federal workforce; at the end of the day, it's a disservice to the public."

Sarbanes is a co-sponsor of the Telework Improvement Act, which would expand telework opportunities for federal employees. That bill passed the House Oversight and Government Reform Workforce Subcommittee on a 3-0 vote on Feb. 29. Sarbanes also authored a provision of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act that reduces monthly payments and provides loan forgiveness for students who perform 10 years of public service work.

Sarbanes said his first term in Congress has been informative, teaching him to trust front-line employees more than the Bush administration, which he criticized.

"One of the things that you come away with, you start to form an impression," Sarbanes said. "Having sat through the testimony of the folks at the front lines and unpersuasive testimony of people at the highest levels, it's like there's been an orchestrated attack on federal employees."

He joked that it was almost as if there was "a handbook saying 'how do you undermine the reputation of good government?' I have no hard evidence that such a book exists, but I have circumstantial evidence."

Sarbanes set a reformist tone, which NTEU President Colleen Kelley echoed in her remarks about a bill Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., chairman of the Federal Workforce Subcommittee, introduced on Thursday that would raise the age from 22 to 25 for dependents covered under the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program.

"[The Office of Personnel Management] opposes [the legislation]," Kelley said. "That's OK. They've opposed a lot of things we've made happen, and supported a lot of things we've crushed."

Kelley made it clear that NTEU planned an aggressive legislative and political campaign throughout the year. She announced the union's political engagement awards for its People Organized to Win Employee Rights campaign, commending Internal Revenue Service locals in Akron, Ohio; Central Florida, St. Paul, Minn.; St. Louis, Mo.; the Customs and Border Protection local in El Paso, Texas; and the Transportation Security Administration local in Atlanta.

NTEU and other federal employee groups hope that Congress's preoccupation with more politically sensitive issues this election year will make legislation addressing workforce concerns easier to pass.

Sarbanes said that federal employee issues set the standard for private industry.

"I regard unions and an organized workforce as one of the best sources of creative thinking that there is when it comes to improving the productivity and competitiveness of the American workforce," he said. "You are the forefront. You're starting to model the things that will be at the center of the health care debate and at the center of improving conditions for the American workforce."