Pentagon to reduce # of furlough days – Plus the DorobekINSIDER’s 7 stories

It’s Telework Week here on the DorobekINSIDER. Each day we will follow a telework trendsetter in the wake of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to end telework.

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• Telework Week is going strong here on the DorobekINSIDER, people on both sides of the debate have told us their impassioned reasons to telework or not to telework. But the Partnership for Public Service’s Tom Fox says telework shouldn’t be a black and white situation. Click here for the full recap.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. Washington Post: The Defense Department has reduced the number of furlough days for employees. More than 700,000 civilian defense workers will be forced to take 14 days of furloughs instead of 22 between April and the end of the fiscal year, officials said, softening the blow of the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration.
2. Washington Post: Vacancies in the top jobs in the national security and criminal divisions at the Justice Department are raising concerns among former officials and close observers of the agency. Lisa Monaco, former assistant attorney general for national security, was named in January to become President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, and there is no permanent replacement. The head of the criminal division, former assistant attorney general Lanny A. Breuer, left for private practice this month, and his job has no permanent replacement either.
3. Federal Times: A group of former federal information technology executives are calling on the administration to change the way it assesses the cybersecurity of federal networks. Currently, federal auditors — typically inspectors general — measure federal cybersecurity by answering a checklist of questions that oftentimes do not reflect their agencies’ most critical security needs. But three former federal IT officials issued a new report Tuesday calling on auditors to measure how well agencies reduce their security risks.
4. Federal Times: Two key lawmakers are accusing the Veterans Affairs Department of violating the law by having one person head both the office that verifies veteran-owned businesses can receive government contracts and the office that promotes veterans’ entrepreneurship.
5. Federal News Radio: The Postal Service is speeding up the closure of mail facilities in a cost-cutting scheme. It says 53 mail processing plants will either merge or shut down this year rather than next year. That’s on top of 18 others that it announced in January. The Postal Service told the American Postal Workers Union some career employees will be reassigned. The union said it was outraged. It predicted the closures would eliminate jobs, hurt communities and delay mail delivery. No Washington-area facilities are on the latest list, but some in Baltimore and Richmond are.
6. Federal News Radio: The Office of Management and Budget is overhauling how it does TechStat review sessions. CIO Steven VanRoekel estimates the deep-dive looks at how IT investments have already saved the government hundreds of millions of dollars. But now they’ll shift from how agencies buy technology to how they manage it. The reviews will examine ways to make IT more efficient. In a memo to agency heads, VanRoekel said he wants to strengthen the authority of departmental CIOs. And he wants to make progress on consolidating data centers part of the TechStat process.
7. And on GovLoop. You can now register for the April edition of DorobekINSIDER Live. We’ll be talking citizen engagement. Register for the free event here.