1998: Timeline of Events

1998: Timeline of Events

JANUARY

Jan. 2: President Clinton formally renounces his line-item veto of a congressional measure that would create a new open season to allow federal employees to switch retirement plans.
Jan. 6: President Clinton announces he will submit to Congress a balanced budget for fiscal 1999.
Jan. 7: Administration officials hint that they would like to reopen the retirement open season issue with Congress.
Jan. 8: Federal union leaders ask the Clinton Administration to consider proposing 6 percent pay raises for federal workers in 1999 and 2000.
Jan. 13: Census Bureau Director Martha Farnsworth Riche announces she will leave her post.
Jan. 21: Postmaster General Marvin Runyon says he is leaving the U.S. Postal Service to return to the private sector.
Jan. 26: Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review is reborn as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.

FEBRUARY

Feb. 3: Federal employees would receive a 3.1 percent pay increase in fiscal year 1999, but would lose the option to switch pension systems, under the Clinton administration's proposed budget.
Feb. 5: President Clinton appoints John Koskinen, former deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, to be assistant to the President on year 2000 conversion.
Feb. 6: Dr. Alan K. "Scotty" Campbell, the Office of Personnel Management's first director, dies at his home in Haverford, Pa. He was 74.
Feb. 11: The Air Force announces thousands of civilian and military job cuts and personnel realignments at facilities across the country.
Feb. 20: Americans' confidence in federal institutions is on the rise, a new poll concludes.

MARCH

March 3: The Supreme Court lets stand a U.S. Appeals Court ruling that allows the random drug testing of federal employees with access to the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House.
March 5: Congress' year 2000 overseer says that most federal computer systems will likely malfunction at the turn of the century.
March 13: President Clinton will nominate G. Edward DeSeve to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget for management, the White House announces.
March 17: The Army, Navy and Air Force can continue to mix male and female recruits in basic training, but not in housing, Defense Secretary William Cohen says.
March 20: Budget cuts, downsizing and reinvention efforts make the jobs of federal managers more difficult, according to a Merit Systems Protection Board survey of 9,700 federal managers and employees.

APRIL

April 6: Energy Secretary Federico Pena, the highest-ranking Hispanic in the Clinton Administration, announces he will resign.
April 7: The average woman in the federal government earns 20 percent less per paycheck than the average man, Labor Department statistics show. Vice President Al Gore directs federal managers to close the gap.
April 14: President Clinton announces that Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines will step down, saying he has tapped OMB Deputy Director Jacob (Jack) Lew to replace him.
April 20: The typical senior career civil servant is a pro-government Democrat or independent, has been in his or her job for more than 20 years and puts in more than 50 hours a week at work, according to a poll.

MAY

May 4: IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti tells the Senate Finance Committee that the nation's tax collection agency is in need of reform.
May 12: U.S. Postal Service Chief Operating Officer William J. Henderson, a career postal employee, becomes the new postmaster general.
May 26: Rep. Jim Traficant, D-Ohio, says that he may introduce legislation to turn the General Services Administration into an independent government corporation.
May 27: Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., introduces a bill that would raise a 32-year-old cap on supervisors' overtime pay, giving some managers double the hourly rate they currently earn working overtime.

JUNE

June 2: The General Services Administration cancels the lease on the Federal Communications Commissions' downtown Washington headquarters and orders it to pack up and move to a new complex across town.
June 3: Rep. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, gives the executive branch an F on his quarterly Y2K report card, down from a D- on his last report.
June 9: The Defense Contract Management Command's outpost on New York's Long Island wins the government's top award for quality.
June 19: The Defense Department selects U.S. Bancorp to provide DoD personnel with purchase cards, giving the bank the largest purchasing card account in the world.
June 29: The Federal Aviation Administration says it will cut 700 supervisors under the agency's labor agreement with its air traffic controllers.

JULY

July 1: Vice President Al Gore gives out the first of his new awards to federal employees who rewrite regulations in plain English.
July 2: Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merge, creating a federal consulting giant with business across a wide variety of government operations.
July 7: An executive order signed by President Clinton in the summer of 1997 that bans smoking in all federal executive branch facilities goes into effect.
July 8: Officials at the Labor Department's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) are sacrificing the health and well-being of some federal workers through poor management practices, employees from across the government testify at a House subcommittee hearing.
July 9: Congress passes a historic IRS reform bill, sending it to the President for his signature.
July 20: The House passes the 1999 Treasury-Postal appropriations bill, with measures affecting federal employees' financial, professional and personal lives.
July 28: Mourners gather around the flag draped caskets of two Capitol Police officers felled by gunfire as they guarded members of Congress, staffers and tourists.

AUGUST

August 3: The General Services Administration unveils the 1999 air fares for federal travelers.
August 7: President Clinton condemns the "cowardly attacks" by terrorist bombers that killed dozens of people and injured more than 1,000 in and around U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."
August 20: President Clinton approves a 3.6 percent average pay raise for federal civilian employees and military personnel in 1999, and will propose a 4.4 percent increase for 2000.
August 26: Federal employees' benefits are more generous than those of the average large private company, a new study finds.

SEPTEMBER

Sept. 11: The Thrift Saving's Plan's C Fund drops a whopping 14.5 percent in August, the biggest one-month fall since the creation of the TSP a decade ago.
Sept. 14: The Office of Personnel Management announces that premiums under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program will rise an average of 10.2 percent in 1999, the largest increase in nearly a decade.
Sept. 25: The IRS unveils its new mission statement to "reflect the agency's new emphasis on serving taxpayers."
Sept. 28: Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre orders all Defense Department agencies to conduct a review of information placed on publicly accessible Web sites.

OCTOBER

Oct. 2: The Pentagon formally opens the new 2,100-employee Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which was created from a merger of three arms control agencies.
Oct. 6: Pentagon officials say they will spend around $50 million to provide the impotence drug Viagra to troops and retirees.
Oct. 8: The House votes to approve bigger bonuses for federal executives but deny many top-level Senior Executive Service members a raise in 1999.
Oct. 14: The Education Department's student financial aid office becomes the first congressionally created performance-based organization, or PBO.
Oct. 29: The space shuttle Discovery lifts off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center, with retiring Sen. John Glenn, D- Ohio, aboard.

NOVEMBER

Nov. 4: Democrats celebrate the surprisingly successful performance of their candidates around the country in yesterday's midterm congressional elections.
Nov. 9: Federal agencies hire more than 1,000 former welfare recipients during the month of October and are 80 percent of the way toward meeting President Clinton's goal of hiring 10,000 people off the welfare rolls by the year 2000.
Nov. 16: The recertification process for federal senior executives is ineffective and consumes too much money and time, say personnel directors, agency performance review boards and Senior Executive Service members.
Nov. 20: One out of every three civil servants eliminated during the 1994-1996 federal downsizing effort was a manager, the Office of Personnel Management reports.

DECEMBER

Dec. 9: Federal year 2000 computer problem costs rise to $6.4 billion as agencies complete Y2K renovation on 61 percent of systems.
Dec. 10: Many federal workers say their agencies aren't reinventing themselves, despite Vice President Al Gore's admonitions over the past five years, a survey says.
Dec. 19: The House approves two articles of impeachment of President Clinton on largely party-line votes. The Senate plans to hold a trial to determine whether the President should be removed from office.
Dec. 19: U.S. and British air and naval forces attack more than 75 Iraqi military targets in the first two nights of bombing in Operation Desert Fox, Pentagon leaders say.