The Do’s and Don’ts of Contests, Cloud in Intelligence, Is Acquisition boring for Millennials? by GovLoop Insights
On today’s program for April 2, 2012
- Apps for the Environment… it is one of the more successful challenges that the government has conducted. What worked… and what didn’t? The EPA has put together their lessons learned — pretty cool in and of itself… and we’ll talk to a program analyst for EPA’s Apps for the environment.
- The intelligence community is leading the charge on cloud computing. Why? We’ll talk to Bob Gourley, the former CTO for the intel community.
- Pushy, innovative and impatient — what the millennials bring to the government’s acquisition world. You’ll hear from a few of the best and the brightest from the next generation…
The stories that impact your life for Monday the 2 of April, 2012… your government world in 120-seconds…
- The Senate has confirmed four new bank regulators. The confirmations come after months of bickering over the candidates. Financial Times says Thomas Curry will take over as the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And Thomas Hoeing, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will join the FDIC board.
- The National Security Agency is using big data to help break codes. NextGov says it’s part of the Pentagon’s plan to find needles in all those data haystacks that the NSA creates. And the NSA is reaching out to industry for help. The NSA wants a tool that can help decipher and organize the data into meaningful trends.
- The Defense Department is trying to get the right people in the right jobs faster and they’re hoping a new tool can help. Federal News Radio says agencies are trying to fill vacancies within 80 days. But that’s been hard for the DoD. The Air Force said its new onboarding tool — the USA Staffing Onboarding Manager — should reduce the number of documents that Air Force HR staff have to manually process. The service will phase it in this month.
- The cost of hiring new federal employees — and getting their security clearance — is going up, up and up. The Government Accountability Officefound that government spending on background investigations and security-clearance checks ballooned to almost $1.1 billion in the last fiscal year, a jump of almost 79 percent over six years. The Government Accountability Office blamed the increase on a lack of reliable data and accounting by the Office of Personnel Management, which conducts most background investigations for the federal government.
- The Congressional Budget Officesays a new bill ending Saturday mail delivery might be enough to save the Postal Service. The cut could save the Postal Service 20 billion dollars over the next decade. Government Executive says The bill, shepherded by Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, would also transfer about $11 billion in surplus retirement contributions into the Postal Service’s coffers, decrease the agency’s contribution to employees’ health and life insurance premiums, and restructure the payments the Postal Service is required to make annually to prefund retirees’ health benefits.
- The best weapon in the police department’s arsenal might be your cell phone. Police are using the phones as a convenient surveillance tool to track not only your calls and texts but sometimes find your exact location with GPS. It’s a fast and easy tool to use especially in emergency cases like a kidnapping or drug deal. But the New York Times says civil liberties advocates are concerned. They say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. Cell phone tracking is still in murky waters in the court systems. Not all states require a warrant to access records.
- And over on GovLoop we’ve got your 8 simple rules for handling the roller coaster ride known as budget time. It’s a lighthearted looks at the 8 things you shouldn’t say to a government employee during budget season.