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Musk and Ramaswamy ended up leading the government’s efficiency drive

Online Niel November 14, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump is creating a new Department of Government Efficiency to lead wide-ranging structural reforms within agencies. Trump appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE. The new organization is not an official department. He is tasked with working from outside the government to provide “advice and guidance” to the White House and will work with the Office of Management and Budget. Trump said in a post on X that DOGE will help eliminate the massive waste and fraud that exists in the federal budget. DOGE’s work will be completed by July 4, 2026.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is making more than 300 layoffs today as it struggles to meet budget constraints for fiscal year 2025. The cut represents about 5 percent of JPL’s total staff, mostly in the lab’s technical, business and support components . Today’s staff cuts are the latest in several rounds of cuts at JPL. In a message to employees on Tuesday, JPL CEO Laurie Leshin said he believed this round of layoffs would be the last.
A bill to repeal the Waiver of Exceptions Provision (WEP) and Compensation of Government Pensions (GPO) has reached a new milestone. The House passed the Social Security Fairness Act on Tuesday night by a vote of 327 to 75. Passage of the bill brings federal annuitants one step closer to eliminating the WEP and GPO. The two provisions reduce and in some cases completely eliminate Social Security benefits for certain federal retirees and other public sector workers. The companion Senate bill has 62 co-sponsors, but so far there has been no action toward a vote.
Federal employee groups highlight how commercial data brokers can endanger national security. In a new letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), groups including the National Federation of Federal Employees are urging the CFPB to better highlight national security risks as part of its ongoing data privacy regulation. They said sophisticated foreign adversaries can use commercial data to profile members of the military and law enforcement, as well as federal employees. The CFPB is targeting potential abuses by data brokers under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Ann Lewis, director of the Technology Transformation Service (TTS) at the General Services Administration, is leaving after nearly two years in the role. Lewis’ last day will be November 22. Her deputy, Mukunda Penugonde will serve as interim director. Lewis did not say where he will go next. During his tenure as TTS director, Lewis oversaw a major overhaul of the cloud security program known as FedRAMP and the restoration of trust in the Login dot gov platform. This was Lewis’ second stint in federal service, having worked for the SBA during the Obama administration.
A federal court ruling brings a nine-year Secret Service overtime trial closer to an end. The US Court of Federal Claims denied the federal government’s motion for summary judgment in the lawsuit. The case dates back to 2015 and challenged an Office of Personnel Management policy that required Secret Service agents to work two consecutive hours of unscheduled overtime to receive overtime pay. A federal appeals court overturned that policy in a separate case, and the Secret Service updated its pay policies to comply with the appeals court ruling. The agency said it has yet to compensate more than 1,800 agents who may have worked overtime in recent years.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is hiring a Chief Information Security Officer. SEC uses direct hiring authority to recruit for this position. Applications will be valid until November 22. The SEC increasingly oversees key cybersecurity issues among publicly traded companies, including through a cyber incident disclosure rule finalized last December. The regulatory agency has also faced security issues of its own: The SEC’s X account was hacked earlier this year.
The Postal Service is retrofitting tens of thousands of blue collection boxes with electronic locks, making them harder for thieves to break into. But his inspector general’s office said the agency needs to do a better job of managing the handheld scanners employees use to open these new mailboxes. The watchdog notes that inclement weather has affected the performance of scanners in some locations. It also recommends that some USPS facilities do more to train employees on how to use these scanners and ensure they are loaded properly.
After a five-month prototype phase, the Foreign Military Sales – Army Case Execution System program is moving into the execution phase of the Software Acquisition Pathway. This milestone represents a significant change for defense integrated business systems as it moves from a traditional waterfall approach to a dynamic agile methodology for software development. The new system will enable the foreign military sales community to have modernized end-to-end execution and case management capabilities, as well as logistics, financial management, audit compliance and data visualization tools. The program plans to deliver a minimum viable capability version (MVCR) to end users within a year, with continuous updates to follow.
Defense Contract Management Agency employees can now access a dictionary-like tool for key Department of Defense acronyms and phrases. Dubbed the Information Dictionary, the tool secured second place for its innovative approach at the agency’s IT Training Summit Innovation Competition in August. The team that created the dictionary used Power BI to simplify the process of compiling and organizing terms and definitions. The next step is to automate the process of updating the ever-changing DoD terms and acronyms to ensure the dictionary remains up-to-date.