TSP's G Fund Helps Delay Debt Ceiling
Sequester Hits Disaster Relief
Feds Respond to Oklahoma Tornadoes
Making Government 'Simpler'
OK Senator Wants Aid Offset by Budget Cuts
Boldly Go Where No Fed's Gone Before
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Kellie Lunney
Senior Correspondent
Kellie Lunney covers federal pay and benefits issues, the budget process and financial management. After starting her career in journalism at Government Executive in 2000, she returned in 2008 after four years at sister publication National Journal writing profiles of influential Washingtonians. In 2006, she received a fellowship at the Ohio State University through the Kiplinger Public Affairs in Journalism program, where she worked on a project that looked at rebuilding affordable housing in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NPR and Feature Story News, where she participated in a weekly radio roundtable on the 2008 presidential campaign. In the late 1990s, she worked at the Housing and Urban Development Department as a career employee. She is a graduate of Colgate University.
Justice Postpones Furlough Decision to Mid-April
March 29, 2013 Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday that he would postpone until mid-April a decision to furlough any Justice employees, according to news reports. The department in February sent letters to assistant U.S. attorneys notifying them of proposed 14-day furloughs during the rest of the fiscal year. Last week, Holder ...
Senior Execs’ Finances Should Not Go Online, Panel Says
March 28, 2013 This story has been updated. Congress should indefinitely suspend the online posting of senior executives’ personal finances, according to an independent panel of public management leaders. Making the financial information of top career employees publicly available in an online, searchable database imposes “unwarranted risk to national security and law enforcement” ...
The Commuter Benefit Chase
March 28, 2013 The sequester is squeezing nearly every agency’s budget. Managers are scouring the books to find all available savings, and that could include less generous public transit and parking benefits for federal employees. The Labor Department, for instance, has already decided to provide a maximum monthly transit subsidy of $125 to ...
Union Asks Pentagon to Cancel 22-Day Furloughs
March 27, 2013 A federal employee union is asking the Pentagon to use its appropriations flexibility from Congress to cancel 22-day furloughs scheduled for most of the department’s civilian workforce. The Defense Department has to slash $45 billion from its budget in fiscal 2013 under sequestration, and $5 billion of that total is ...
OPM to Senior Execs: Tell Us How You Really Feel
March 27, 2013 The Office of Personnel Management is soliciting candid feedback from departing senior executives about their job experience. The new exit survey, available online indefinitely, asks senior executives a range of questions, including why they are leaving their agency, where they are headed, and what they would change about their work ...
Obama Signs Off On Fed Pay Freeze
March 26, 2013 President Obama on Tuesday signed into law legislation that extends the federal pay freeze through the rest of 2013 and keeps the government running until the end of the fiscal year. Congress last week agreed on a continuing resolution to fund federal agencies through Sept. 30. Lawmakers extended the current ...
Furloughs Could Endanger Feds’ Security Clearances
March 26, 2013 A top Republican senator is concerned that furloughs resulting from the sequester could endanger some federal employees’ security clearances. Susan Collins of Maine has asked the agency that handles the government security clearance process not to rescind employees’ credentials because of financial problems stemming solely from being furloughed. “I understand ...
TSP Reconsiders Automatic Enrollment
March 25, 2013 The board that administers the Thrift Savings Plan is contemplating changes to the automatic enrollment program. Some officials have expressed interest in having new hires contribute a percentage of their basic pay to one of the TSP’s five lifecycle funds instead of the government securities fund. The TSP launched a ...
Congress Agrees to Extend Pay Freeze for Third Year
March 21, 2013 Congress on Thursday agreed on a measure to keep the government running through the end of the fiscal year. The bill, which also extends the pay freeze on federal employees, now heads to President Obama. The House put its stamp of approval on the $984 billion spending package that the ...
Politics Punctuate House Sequestration Hearing
March 19, 2013 A House hearing on Tuesday, advertised as a discussion on how some agencies are implementing sequestration, focused more on partisan politics than on government management. Republican lawmakers pressed agency officials on the necessity of furloughs, how much pre-sequester planning they did before the governmentwide spending cuts took effect on March ...
