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President Obama rushed to fill nearly 100 federal government vacancies during a frenzy of appointments in his final few weeks in office. Since the new year, Obama has named 72 people to federal job openings and nominated another 17 for positions requiring Senate confirmation, according to CBS reporter Mark Knoller.

Making good on a promise to slash government, President-elect Trump has asked his incoming team to pursue spending and staffing cuts. Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through. At least two so-called "landing teams" in Cabinet agencies have relayed the call for cuts as part of their marching orders to shrink the flab in government. The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said. The spending reductions...

Making good on a promise to slash government, President-elect Trump has asked his incoming team to pursue spending and staffing cuts. Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through. At least two so-called "landing teams" in Cabinet agencies have relayed the call for cuts as part of their marching orders to shrink the flab in government. The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said. The spending reductions...

Could it be true? Federal Government layoffs? We see businesses doing it all the time while the bureaucrats seem to think they have a right to a job for life.

House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service. The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to propose amending an appropriations bill to single out a government employee or cut a specific program. The use of the rule would not be simple; a majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any...

As President-elect Trump readies to take control of Washington where he has promised a hiring freeze or worse, worried are federal workers are looking to a new $40,000 buyout program set up at the Pentagon but expected to be expanded to other departments. Several trade publications that cover federal workers and legislation said that the buyout, increased in legislation from $25,000, will likely be a hit in the Defense Department as the Pentagon moves to cut headquarters staff. The cash is available to civilian bureaucrats. It was included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. Some federal...

Thomas Lifson has correctly observed that reforming the Civil Service System ought to be a high priority for President-Elect Trump and the new Republican Congress. We need to understand why the Civil Service System first created as a reform in how the federal government operated. "To the victors go the spoils" was the way Andrew Jackson put it almost 200 years ago. Jackson expressed the view that the president has the right – legal and moral – to throw out government employees and replace them with cronies. The size of the federal government was proportionately much smaller then than today,...

Donald Trump leads the Republican field among federal employees, but many still say they would never work for him. One in four federal workers would consider leaving their jobs if Trump were elected president, according to a new survey conducted by the Government Business Council, Government Executive Media Group’s research arm. About 14 percent of respondents said they would definitely consider leaving federal service under President Trump, while an additional 11 percent said they might. The findings indicate those leaving government would come from agencies' top ranks, as a majority of respondents were in General Schedule positions GS-13 and higher.

Salaries of federal employees continue to lag behind those of similar private-sector jobs by 35 percent on average, an advisory committee has said in presenting what amounts to the latest data point in a long-running debate over how the two sectors compare. The 34.92 percent "pay gap" reported Friday essentially duplicates the 35.37 and 35.28 percent numbers reported the last two years by the Federal Salary Council and is close to those of other recent years.... Under a 1990 law, the numbers are supposed to be used to virtually close the measured differences with private-sector pay. However, no administration or...

African Americans make up 17.4 percent of the federal workforce, as compared to 10.1 percent of the civilian labor force. But the percentage of African Americans drops dramatically with each rise in job grade. They hold 27.6 percent of the lowest positions (GS 1-4), 25.8 percent of GS 5-8, 15.7 percent of GS 9-12, 10.9 percent of GS 13-15 and just 6.9 percent of Senior Pay levels. Advance Your Career Hispanics make up just 7.3 percent of the federal workforce versus 12.6 percent of the civilian labor force. They hold about 9 percent of the GS 1-4 and 5-8 job...

The largest federal employee union filed a class action lawsuit Monday against the federal personnel office, its leaders and one of its contractors, arguing that negligence contributed to what government officials are calling one of the most damaging cyberthefts in U.S. history. The suit by the American Federation of Government Employees names the Office of Personnel Management, its director, Katherine Archuleta, and its chief information officer, Donna Seymour. It also names Keypoint Government Solutions, an OPM contractor

The government is taking action to curb the long-maligned practice of putting federal employees on paid leave for months — and even years — while they wait to be punished for misbehavior or cleared and allowed to return to the office. In a memo last week, Office of Personnel Management director Katherine Archuleta told agency heads that the extensive use of administrative leave throughout government should be just the opposite: a “temporary solution,” only for problem employees who pose a danger to themselves or their colleagues. In other words, if someone poses a threat to his own safety or the...

When he arrived on Capitol Hill in January, freshman Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., discovered something he had no clue was going on. Hundreds of federal employees spend their entire workday -- not doing the business of the government, but working for their unions. Hice told Fox News he was shocked by what he found. "Waste on an egregious level by federal employees who are taking taxpayer monies and using it for purposes other than the reason they were hired," Hice said. It's called "official time," and it was sanctioned into law by Congress in 1978. Lawmakers voted to allow federal...

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today that President Obama knows how to run small businesses better than small business owners. Asked what the White House message to small business owners who are concerned Obama's proposed new mandatory paid sick leave policy could hurt their bottom line, Earnest replied, "I think the president would have a different view which is to say that this is good business and I think there are any number of examples I can site for you where businesses have chosen to put in place these policies and it's served to reduce the turnover...

The White House will announce a major push Thursday to require paid leave for American workers. In a blog post on LinkedIn Wednesday, Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to the President, said Obama will sign a memorandum to ensure federal employees have access to at least six weeks of paid sick leave when a new child arrives. The president will also call on Congress to offer six weeks of paid administrative leave. “We can't say we stand for family values when so many women in this country have to jeopardize their financial security just to take a few weeks off...

More than 25,000 federal employees will lose their health plans next year as insurance providers drop out of the government’s coverage network, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Affected workers will have the option of switching to other plans within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, but the number of disruptions will reach the highest level since more than 61,000 enrollees had to change plans in 2009. Insurance providers drop out of the federal workforce’s health program every year, so this year’s changes are nothing new. Companies generally leave the network because they have not attracted enough enrollees to...

The National Treasury Employees Union has a PDF document on its website which shows why any attempt to shrink the government is foredoomed. ”The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is an independent labor union representing approximately 150,000 employees of 30 agencies of the United States government. The union specializes in representation of non-supervisory federal employees in every classification and pay level in civilian agencies.” The document urges NTEU members to oppose a list of “bad bills” now before congress. Here is the list of “bad bills” verbatim. LEGISLATION PROPOSING REDUCTIONS IN PAY, BENEFITS AND THE SIZE OF THE WORKFORCE H.R....

For years, a particularly enthusiastic entrepreneur pitched his book that purported to show how Americans could get government cash for free — free except for the cost of his book, anyway. It turns out that getting free cash from Uncle Sam is even easier than he promised. The Commerce Department’s Inspector General did an investigation of the Patent and Trademark Office after receiving whistleblower complaints about waste, and discovered that dozens of employees got paid for years of arduous duty … such as watching TV, surfing the Internet, and doing their laundry.The best part? Some of them got thousands...

The Obama administration on Tuesday will publish a proposed rule that would give thousands of temporary and seasonal government workers access to the government’s health care program, even though current law would appear to prohibit them from using that program. The rule from the Office of Personnel Management would let these federal workers sign up for coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and also allow some of them to enjoy a government contribution to their insurance premiums. Both steps would be done through OPM’s proposed regulation, and not through an act of Congress. The proposed rule indicates that...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- From workers in Congress and at the White House to active duty troops, more than 318,000 federal employees and retirees owe just over $3.3 billion in back taxes, the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday. That works out to nearly 3.3 percent of all 9.8 million federal workers and retirees who are behind on their taxes, which is significantly lower than the proportion of delinquent taxpayers in the overall population. The IRS said it estimates that to be at least 8.7 percent...