March 7, 2008
A summary of daily news relevant to
the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.
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Submit Your Nominations Today for the 2008 Service to America Medals: Only Four Days Remaining
Remaining!
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 (extended deadline).
For more information, please send an email to awards@ourpublicservice.org or
call Kristin Esham at 202-775-9111.
Partnership for Public Service Creates Leadership Institute for Innovation
Federal Computer WeekBy Florence Olsen
Thirty-two career federal employees will begin a seven-month leadership development program today at a new executive training institute
created by the Partnership for Public Service (PPS).
Established with a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the institute will help federal agencies find innovative solutions to some of their most
perplexing management problems, officials said at the launch event.
Members of the first class will work to develop new approaches to problems such as hiring and retaining mission-critical employees, ensuring food
safety and improving homeland security measures. "We're calling it an innovation leadership laboratory," said Tom Fox, the institute's director.
Federal agencies provide many excellent executive training programs, Fox said. The challenge for PPS was to create a program that did not
duplicate those efforts. Fox said the team focus of the Annenberg Leadership Institute sets it apart from other federal executive training programs.
"We met with over 100 individuals in the public, private and nonprofit sectors to get a real sense of what’s out there and what the gaps
[are] and where can we really add value," Fox said.
For example, the program will teach midlevel career federal employees new approaches to basic supervisory and management responsibilities. For
that portion of the curriculum, the institute will use private-sector management experts at Lockheed Martin as instructors, Fox said. They've
developed courses that don't just cover how to fill out a basic performance management form, he said, but rather how to set clear expectations and
motivate high performers to even greater levels of achievement - and how to have those difficult, candid conversations with employees who aren't
doing their work.
The institute will also expose the 2008 Annenberg Fellows to innovation experts from IDEO, a design firm that created the first computer mouse for
Apple. "They basically committed their expertise to help this group of 32 midlevel federal employees from seven different agencies learn those same
sorts of skills and figure out how they can apply them to real issues confronting their agencies," Fox said.
The institute's inaugural class consists of six teams of five members each from different organizations within the same agency. The teams
represent the Energy, Agriculture and Homeland Security departments; and the Veterans Health, Small Business, and Food and Drug administrations. Two
officials from the Office of Management and Budget are also part of the class.
Among the 2008 fellows are physicians, law enforcement officials and research pharmacists with Ph.D degrees. The gender ratio is 55 percent female
to 45 percent male. Most of the participants selected for the inaugural class are in their 30s to early 40s. About 40 percent of the class members
live outside the Washington metropolitan area. Most are GS-13 and GS-14 career civil service employees.
One of them is Christine Edie, a clinical pharmacy specialist in pharmacoeonomics at VHA in Cincinnati who has worked at VHA for more than 10
years. "I felt I was at a point in my career where I needed to do more, and this is really going to be an awesome springboard," Edie said. Her team's
project will be finding innovative ways to recruit physicians, nurses and pharmacists needed to fill mission-critical positions at VHA.
Agencies participating in the institute's first-year program will pay no tuition or fees for their employees to be in the
leadership program, Fox said. "We want to use this year to figure out how can we provide the absolute greatest value to these agencies at the lowest
possible cost."
A Plea for Paid Parental Leave
The Washington
Post
By Stephen Barr
Last summer, Amy S. Costantino suddenly went into labor and gave birth to twin sons -- 3 1/2 months premature. Each weighed less than two pounds,
and they spent 90 days in a neonatal intensive-care unit.
She soon was confronted with a stark choice: use the sick leave and vacation time she had accrued over her 16-year career as a federal employee to
be with her sons in intensive care, or go back to work and save the paid leave so she could be at home when her sons were released by the hospital.
Costantino, 39, decided to save the leave for when her boys came home. But, she said at a House hearing yesterday, "I often wonder if I made the
right decision," especially when she thinks about not being at the hospital to feed and comfort her babies at their most vulnerable time.
Her account of trying to juggle family and work responsibilities wrapped up a hearing on legislation that would provide federal employees with
eight weeks of full pay and benefits for the birth or adoption of a child. The hearing was held by the Joint Economic Committee and the House federal
workforce subcommittee.
Too often, federal employees are forced to choose between their paycheck and their new child, said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), vice chairman
of the joint committee, noting that "even the best-prepared workers face difficult choices when children need their care."
Maloney has championed paid parental leave for federal employees for the past eight years, hoping to make the government a role model for the
nation's employers.
Studies show that the United States has not kept pace with other industrialized countries when it comes to providing paid family leave, and a new
report by the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee found that the federal government "lags far behind Fortune 100 companies," she said.
Maloney's proposal has encountered resistance, in part because of a lack of enthusiasm by the Bush administration, which says federal employees
already have ample and generous benefits that can be used for maternity leave.
Employees, for example, 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 over up to six weeks of annual leave into the next year.
Yesterday, the administration offered Maloney and Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), chairman of the federal workforce subcommittee, an alternative
approach.
Nancy H. Kichak, an associate director at the Office of Personnel Management, said the administration recognizes that many employees cannot afford
to take several weeks of unpaid leave and that there is a "gap in coverage."
But she said the administration does not believe fully-paid time off is the best way to help employees, saying that OPM favors a short-term
disability insurance program for workers who wish to voluntarily purchase such coverage.
OPM is working on how to design the benefit, she said, and estimated the insurance would cost an employee about $40 per pay period. Kichak said
this kind of program would be attractive to a broad range of employees because it would provide income when they could not work because of
non-job-related accidents, illnesses and childbirth.
Costantino, who works for the Health and Human Services Department, said her supervisors did everything permitted by law to help her cope with the
premature arrival of her sons, who she said are healthy and active.
She had accrued enough leave to take off for two months with pay, she said, noting that taking unpaid leave under the 1993 Family and Medical
Leave Act was not an option for her family financially.
The twins have required a substantial amount of follow-up care, including three surgeries, Costantino said. Paid parental leave becomes even more
critical if a child requires follow-up care, she said.
Asked by Davis whether the legislation proposing eight weeks of paid parental leave would have led her to make different decisions, Costantino
responded with a "yes."
She would have used paid leave to be with her sons in intensive care, and her accrued leave to be with them after they came home, she said.
In other words, she would not have been forced to make a choice.
Threats up Against Federal Judges, Lawyers
USA TODAY
By
Kevin Johnson
Threats against federal judges and prosecutors are on pace to rise for the fifth consecutive year, according to statistics from the U.S. Marshals
Service.
In response, federal officials are expanding their surveillance efforts to include suspects who have threatened state and local authorities and
who represent a possible danger to federal court officials.
The U.S. Marshals Service, the agency assigned to protect 2,000 federal judges and more than 5,000 prosecutors across the nation, tracked a 69
percent increase in "inappropriate communications" with federal officials from fiscal years 2003 to 2007. Those can include outright threats or a
pattern of suspicious mailings. The numbers rose each year even though investigators in 2007 began counting multiple threats from the same suspect as
one case.
This year is on pace to exceed 2007, logging 503 threats through Feb. 9.
Authorities say they increasingly are seeing suspects begin by lashing out in public venues such as city council chambers and then escalating
their activities to target federal judges and prosecutors.
"Historically, there was an expectation that you didn't mess with judges, prosecutors, jurors and police officers," said Michael Prout, the
Marshals Service's deputy assistant director for judicial operations. "That tradition has been chipped away."
The February 2005 murders of a Chicago federal judge's husband and mother, and the slaying less than a month later of a state court judge in
Atlanta, helped spur more intensive efforts to monitor judicial security, Prout said. He said the increase in threats makes identifying suspects
quickly even more critical to preventing additional violence.
An expected rise in legal disputes related to the home foreclosure crisis likely will spawn more threats against judges and other court officials,
he said.
David Sentelle, chairman of the security committee for the Judicial Conference of the United States, said the threats are a significant security
concern to his colleagues, although there is no evidence they are driving jurists to quit. Sentelle, who also is chief judge of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said his colleagues have become "exposed" as court dockets fill with more volatile disputes.
U.S. marshals have joined the investigation into the Feb. 7 shooting deaths of five people, including two police officers and two city council
members, during a council meeting in Kirkwood, Mo. Ten days before the attack, the shooter lost a federal lawsuit in which he alleged that Kirkwood
officials unfairly restricted his free speech rights during meetings.
"Was his next step going to be the federal judge? That’s the kind of thing we're looking at," Prout said.
The increasing threat activity comes as the Marshals Service is under pressure by the Justice Department. A report last year by the department's
inspector general said the Marshals Service failed to assess threat information quickly enough and did not adequately monitor possible security
incursions at judges' homes.
Prout said the agency "appreciated" the inspector general's findings but suggested the report did not give enough credit for its recent work,
including the hiring of investigators to focus exclusively on threat inquiries.
By next year, Prout hopes to begin expanding a federal database operated by the Secret Service to include suspects who have histories of
disrupting local public meetings or threatening municipal government officials.
"It's critically important for the security of judges that we get this information before a person walks into the courthouse," he said.
