The Buzz

Chow Time's Your Time

At first glance, one of the provisions in the Federal Workforce Flexibility Act passed last year is fairly straightforward: It allows employees to earn compensatory time off for work travel outside of normal business hours. But, it's in the implementation that things get tricky.

The Office of Personnel Management issued interim regulations in January and will take comments on them until March 27. OPM officials took pains to try to explain nuances in the rules, including:

• Comp time is available only if travel time is not compensable in any other way.
• It's up to agency leaders to decide what counts as "usual waiting time" during travel.
• Agencies should not credit employees with comp time for travel if they are able to use their waiting time for their own benefit or entertainment. That includes eating "bona fide" meals.
• The regulations apply only to workers who are defined as employees under Title 5 regulations. This excludes Senior Executive Service personnel and Foreign Service Officers, among others.
• There is no hard cap on how much compensatory time off that eligible employees can earn.

Benefits vs. Weapons

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter stepped into a minefield last month, openly discussing the "tension that we have in the defense budget" between entitlement spending and military modernization.

The Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor fighter is one of several big-ticket weapons systems on the chopping block in the fiscal 2006 budget request. Proponents of the high-performance jet say it is needed to maintain air superiority. But "it costs a lot of money," Hunter said.

So do military benefits. In recent years, the Pentagon has increased family separation pay, medical pay and health care benefits for members of the National Guard and Reserve. The Defense Department's $419.3 billion budget request for fiscal 2006 and its $82 billion fiscal 2005 supplemental request continue the trend.

Hunter, a vocal proponent of increased investment in military weapons and technologies, said the Pentagon must strike the right balance between entitlement spending and modernization. "We have to balance this requirement," he says, adding that the military should strive to give the best of both worlds to its personnel, providing benefits to troops as well as cutting-edge technologies.

Confirmed Reservations

President Bush has had little difficulty earning Senate approval for his new Cabinet nominees. But that's not surprising: The Senate has voted to reject a Cabinet nominee only 12 times, and three of those were the same man in one day.

In 1843, President John Tyler was so infuriated by the Senate's refusal to confirm Rep. Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts Whig, as Treasury secretary that he submitted Cushing's name two more times only to see the nomination defeated both times. The Senate went on to block three more Tyler nominees the following year.

* Candidate was a recess nomination and subsequently rejected by the Senate.
** Senate voted down Stanberry's renomination.

Source: U.S. Senate and CongressDaily research.

Free Money!

Matthew Lesko-you know, the guy in the question-mark suit who runs all over Washington in cable-TV commercials hawking his books like Free Money to Pay Your Bills!-makes his living purporting to show folks how to uncover piles of federal dough. But apparently the New York Consumer Protection Board isn't enamored of his work. Earlier this year, the board issued a press release lumping him in with telemarketers who peddle phony government grants.

Lesko is apoplectic, and says he was sucker-punched by the folks in New York. "We helped them for months," he says, "giving them confidential information and doing what we thought was getting rid of the scam people. And then the report came out and hit us like a brick between the eyes."

Lesko says he's only trying to spread the word about the benefits of government grant programs to people who could benefit from them. "What the Consumer Protection Board says about me hurts," he says, "mostly because I feel that I am one of the few people who has spent a career saying good things about government executives."