The Mondays are usually hard enough as is. As the first day after a weekend, we tend to have a giant list of to-dos and not enough time on a Monday to do them. We decided to help compile a few noteworthy posts to make your life easier. Today’s DorobekINSIDER program will be your need-to-know reading list for the week.
- If you didn’t get to see the 50 State of the State addresses (or didn’t even know they existed), feel free to read the highlights of some of the governors’ overall managerial concerns for the year. Included are: improving accountability, criticizing unions, boosting public workers’ pay, and investing in infrastructure.
Agencies Can Seed Future Success With Creative Investment
- The rise of governmental prize competitions brings hope to government’s slow innovational turn-around. Federal research and development spending only accounts for about one percent of our total GDP. Read about how some agencies, like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have decided to host competitions to attract individuals from the private sector and academia to assist government to stay on top of innovation.
Retirement Backlog Jumps in January
- January saw an influx of new applications for federal retirement compared to December. This lead to a total increase of 73 percent in federal retirement claims backlog. Read how backlog is, in some cases, inevitable as the Office of Personnel Management may require more information to process aspiring retirees.
Speed Dialer Aims to Profit Off IRS’ Terrible Customer Service
- As tax season quickly approaches, we dread the phone calls to IRS’ customer service that will (most likely) consume multiple hours of our time. So, we can’t help but wonder if we should thank or fear a new software that helps route paying customers to jump the line to talk to a IRS representative.
The Coming Fight Between the F-35 and the New Bomber
- Want to know why our defense budget is so large? Probably because a lot of our modern, high-tech, military equipment costs so much to a) create and b) maintain. The new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the new Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B), and a new air refueling tanker have a game in the fight as they all require quite the substantial budget to continue moving forward. And the plot only thickens when three of the world’s largest defense companies are fighting to work on projects revolving around these new warfare systems.
Hopefully you found this list helpful. Have a great week and don’t forget to take the time to keep up with what’s happening in government!