In Brief

EXECUTIVE MEMO

IN BRIEF

• More Buyouts, Please. The General Services Administration has asked the Clinton administration to back its request for a law permitting GSA to offer retirement and resignation incentives of up to $25,000 for five years starting Oct. 1, 1996. More than 4,100 GSA employees signed up during the buyout window that ended in March 1995 for civilian agencies.
• Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development won't have to tell the agency whether they've sold or used drugs or filed for bankruptcy. A federal judge quashed HUD's attempt to elicit the information from anyone working with "sensitive" databases.
• GOP Un-Hatches MSPB. Congressional Republicans must think employees of the Merit Systems Protection Board will support local GOP candidates. How else to explain why they included a section in the fiscal 1996 Intelligence Authorization Act allowing the Office of Personnel Management to lift restrictions barring MSPB staffers and others from actively participating in local partisan elections? Spies covered under the law are subject to other restrictions, so OPM can't "un-Hatch" them.
• PMA Gets New Chief. The Professional Managers Association has a new executive director, Lynn Olsen. Olsen, a former assistant to the IRS education director, has spent 25 years in government, 18 of them as a manager. She succeeds Sharon Armstrong, who returns to the IRS.
• Moving On. Karen Nussbaum, director of the Labor Department Women's Bureau, is leaving government to return to the world of organized labor as director of a new Working Women's Department at the AFL-CIO. Nussbaum co-founded 9to5, the organization for working women, in 1973 and led the group until 1981, when she became founding president, District 925 of the Service Employees International.