After making some governmentwide changes, OPM is now calling on agencies that manage their own independent pay systems to review their policies, and make adjustments where they find pay inequities. The goal, OPM said, is to help address the current 5.6% pay gap between men and women in the federal workforce.

In a memo last week, OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver tasked agencies with other, smaller pay systems to conduct a review process similar to OPM’s recent reviews of the General Schedule, Federal Wage System and Senior Executive Service pay systems.

“Our work is not finished, and we need to do more,” Shriver wrote in a July 18 memo to agency leaders.

Specifically, Shriver told agencies to identify any areas where pay gaps exist in their policies, figure out the reasons behind the disparities, create a plan for reducing those gaps and then keep track of how the disparities change over time.

To try to help agencies through the required pay review process, OPM also published further guidance on how agencies should conduct their data analyses over the next couple months.

“In some cases, agency data analysis may need to probe deeper than the analysis conducted by OPM to fully understand the factors behind a gender or racial/ethnic pay disparity,” OPM wrote in the guidance. “For example, an agency may generate data for major occupations that show gender pay gaps by age groupings within each occupation.”

The new instructions from OPM stem from a 2021 executive order on advancing diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in the federal workforce. Part of the sweeping DEIA initiative tasked agencies with identifying strategies and eliminating barriers to equity in federal pay and compensation policies.

Agencies have until mid-October to complete their reviews and report back to OPM.

Federal workforce pay gap over time

The federal government is already a step ahead of the private sector when it comes to pay equity. The national gender pay gap is 16%, while the federal pay gap is 5.6%, according to 2022 workforce data. In other words, in the federal workforce, women make about 94 cents for every dollar men make.

The federal gender pay gap has also improved over time. The current 5.6% disparity is much smaller than the 24.5% pay gap that existed back in 1992.

But at the same time, pay inequity in the federal workforce continues to disproportionately affect women of color. Minority women in the federal workforce, on average, earn less in overall salary.

In numbers, some minority groups of women have better representation in the federal sector than in the private sector. But many minority demographic groups are still behind in pay and representation in leadership, according to several 2023 reports from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Currently, white federal employees make up a larger portion of the workforce from the GS-7 level, up through the Senior Executive Service. By contrast, people of color hold a higher portion entry-level positions between GS-2 and GS-6, according to a July 2024 workforce report from the Partnership for Public Service.

In its memo last week, OPM asked agencies to focus particularly where there are wider gaps in pay among federal employees.

“When we compare average salary of women and men in various racial-ethnic groups to the average salary of white males in the government, we find larger pay gaps that need to be addressed,” OPM wrote in a July 18 press release.

OPM’s ban on salary history in hiring

The new review requirements for agencies also come after OPM finalized regulations in January 2024, prohibiting agencies from using a federal job candidate’s previous salary history when setting pay in a job offer.

OPM has said its goal with the salary history ban is to address the federal pay gap by removing potential biases that can stem from a federal job candidate’s previous pay rates. In practice, considering past pay rates has often led to higher salaries for men than for women.

OPM’s regulation changes on salary history are expected to take effect for agencies by this October.

“The regulation further positions the federal government as a model employer that prioritizes fairness and opportunity. By helping to close gender and racial pay gaps, the rule is one more step to attract and retain a qualified, effective workforce drawn from the full diversity of America,” the Biden administration wrote in a February 2024 President’s Management Agenda update.

The Department of Justice Gender Equality Network (DOJ GEN), a federal employee organization, has been a long-time advocate of fully banning agencies’ use of salary history in the federal hiring process.

“DOJ GEN applauds OPM for delivering on its commitment to pay equity in the federal sector — first by issuing a robust regulation that bans the consideration of salary history in federal hiring, and now by pushing agencies to go even further,” DOJ GEN President Stacey Young wrote in an email to Federal News Network. “We urge agencies not only to conduct pay audits, but also to meaningfully address any inequities they reveal.”

The post ‘We need to do more’ to close gender-based pay gap, OPM says first appeared on Federal News Network.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says his department’s advancement in the federal government’s workplace rankings did not happen by accident.

Instead, Mayorkas said the Department of Homeland Security climbed out of the bottom of the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings over the past two years because officials have been “intensely engaged” on workforce issues.

“It is the product of significant focus on employee wellbeing and investing in our workforce in a number of different ways,” Mayorkas said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “We really have made the wellbeing of our workforce our top organizational priority.”

Several DHS components made improvements in their 2023 Best Places to Work rankings, most notably the Transportation Security Administration. TSA saw a more than 12-point boost in its employee engagement and satisfaction score, bolstered by a historic pay increase for airport screening officers that began in 2023.

On the other hand, several DHS components still struggle with employee morale. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance, are two major frontline organizations that continue to place close to the bottom of the Partnership’s subcomponent rankings.

Out of the 459 agency subcomponents on the Partnership’s list, CBP ranked as number 432, while ICE came in as number 437.

“I think we have to be very clear-eyed and fair in understanding some of the pain points,” Mayorkas said.

The Best Places to Work series, based on data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), shows that DHS performed well on questions related to the agency’s mission and supervisors, but received the most negative feedback from employees regarding their views on management decisions and performance recognition.

DHS jump teams aim to resolve problems quickly

Despite the uptick in its overall ranking, DHS is still struggling in a few key areas that the Partnership measures, such as employee input and recognition. Departmentwide, DHS received a score of 50 out of 100 on employee input, and 47.4 out of 100 on recognition. Both scores fall into the lowest quartile amid agencies featured in the Partnership’s rankings.

One way DHS is attempting to combat some of those ongoing challenges is by deploying “jump teams” to try to address concerns from frontline employees more quickly and effectively.

“Jump team members are responsible for helping to solve immediate issues, guide how funding is allocated and to assist in developing solutions to deliver support most effectively to our front line,” DHS explained in a May 20 press release.

Mayorkas, who’s responsible for initiating the jump teams, said the idea came after he visited a CBP facility in Miami, Florida, early in his tenure — a worksite that he called “woefully inadequate.”

“The employees who work there actually affectionately called it the ‘house of pain,’” Mayorkas said. “The lighting was poor, the connectivity was poor, some of the facilities were just awful.”

After the visit, DHS fixed the lighting, strengthened internet connections, along with adding many new amenities, such as a break room and fitness center, as well as upgrading the floors, ceilings, paint, furniture and roof. DHS held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new facility in April.

“The principle really underlying [that] is that we don’t have a monopoly on what the workforce needs,” Mayorkas said. “We want to hear directly from them and involve them as a team in addressing the challenges.”

Improving DHS recruiting and hiring

One of Mayorkas’ major priorities this year is improving the hiring process. Staffing has been a challenge at several DHS components, including CBP and ICE. The DHS inspector general last year reported on how staffing challenges at those agencies has led to burnout and morale issues amid rising migrant encounters at the southwest border.

Mayorkas acknowledged the hiring process at DHS can take a long time, especially for positions that require a security clearance and a polygraph exam.

“Without curtailing security thresholds, we can drive a far greater amount of efficiency in those processes,” he said. “And we lose candidates, sometimes because of the length of time it takes to onboard them. That’s especially true in the in the tech sector, but also in law enforcement and elsewhere. And also, a vacant position is a drain on morale, because the work needs to get done. And that means others are shouldering more.”

He said DHS is working on “innovative ways of recruiting talent.” During a recent two-day career expo in Chantilly, Virginia, DHS conducted more than 1,200 interviews and extended more than 400 tentative job offers. The career expo also let job candidates get started on some of the early steps of the clearance process, like fingerprinting, in an effort to reduce DHS’ time-to-hire by several weeks.

The department is additionally looking to hire from “places that we might not otherwise have gone to,” Mayorkas said. He pointed to DHS’ goal to have its law enforcement ranks comprise 30% women by 2030.

“We’re going to exceed that goal,” Mayorkas said.

Meanwhile, DHS has a long way to go toward improving “mobility,” or the ability of an employee to move between different jobs within the department.

“If somebody has been cleared, has received a security clearance in one agency, and they want to move to another agency, we still haven’t eliminated the redundancies entirely,” Mayorkas said.

DHS sees ‘tremendous’ interest in AI jobs

DHS is also putting all hands on deck to onboard more staff expertise in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

In June, the department announced its first “AI Corps” cohort, comprising 10 new recruits with various AI expertise. DHS has more plans on the way to expand the program, aiming to recruit a total of 50 experts by the end of the year.

“It’s been tremendous,” Mayorkas said. “We see a greater thirst for public service in the tech sector.”

So far, there have been about 6,000 “expressions of interest” in AI Corps positions at DHS, Mayorkas said.

Soon, there may be even more opportunities opening for a broader array of candidates who are looking either at DHS or elsewhere across government for AI-related positions. The White House is aiming to shift federal tech positions in the government’s main IT job series away from relying on degrees, and instead focusing more on skills-based hiring.

Supervisor scores driving upward

One key part of improving engagement and satisfaction scores from DHS employees has been focusing on supporting agency managers and supervisors.

“Engagement begins at the top and must cascade throughout,” Mayorkas said. “Whether it is your first-line supervisor, which is where the rubber meets the road, but [also] upwards and sideways and every which way, it has to be cascading.”

DHS’ efforts to support supervisory employees are gradually starting to pay off. Employees’ views of their supervisors across DHS have continually increased, on average, over the last several years. Currently, DHS has a score of 77.4 out of 100 when it comes to agency supervisors.

The ‘Patron Saint of Admin Leave’

Mayorkas has also been lauded online in places like the Fed News subreddit for his generous granting of administrative leave to DHS employees around the holidays. His affinity for giving extra time off to staff has even led some to jokingly dub him the “Patron Saint of Admin Leave.”

Most recently, Mayorkas doled out eight hours of paid administrative leave ahead of the Fourth of July holiday.

“It’s a small gesture of recognition and appreciation,” Mayorkas explained. “When one travels around the country and the world and sees how incredibly hard our people work and their unbelievable skill and talent, admin leave is a tool that I have to say, ‘We recognize that, we appreciate it. And here is an expression of gratitude.’”

The post Mayorkas details DHS workforce gains, future plans first appeared on Federal News Network.

Just how many people have been hired across the government over the past, say, five years?

Quick to FedScope we went.

If you’ve never used FedScope, it’s a treat. And I don’t mean that in a nice way. It takes a certain skillset, definite patience and some failures to get the hang of it. Luckily, Federal News Network’s Deputy Editor Jared Serbu has “mastered” that expertise.

The results of our search through FedScope were telling. Between October 2019 and September 2023, agencies hired more than 1 million new employees. There are more than 2 million in the federal civilian workforce in both the defense and non-defense agencies.

FedScope is limited in the data it provides, which is why we are only giving the numbers through September of last year.

We further broke down the data by other categories to give you a sense of how agencies are using the broad authorities to fill open positions.

Given the Department of Veterans Affairs’ push to address workforce challenges to improve its service to veterans, it’s no surprise the agency hired the most people over this five-year period. The biggest surprise may be the Interior Department making the top 10, but some of that may be for seasonal workers.

The Office of Personnel Management describes three types of hires in the federal government:
• Competitive
• Excepted
• Senior Executive Service

Let’s start with competitive service, which as the name suggests, is the way a majority of the new federal workers have been hired over the last five years. In all, OPM data shows 541,156 in total competitive hires.

Moving to Excepted hiring, OPM defines this approach where competitive status is not required. Agencies can hire an employee under excepted status through the Veterans Recruitment Appointment or being appointed to a position defined by OPM as excepted, such as attorneys. Since October 2019, OPM data shows agencies have hired 467,092 employees through this approach.

Finally, under SES hiring, agencies brought in 1,522 new leaders over the five-year period. There are only 8,222 members of the SES as of 2022, the most recent data available, which the Partnership for Public Service put together in June 2023. The Partnership found that on average about 200 new people come into the SES each year, but with the number of current senior executives eligible to retire — more than 62% through 2025 — there are more opportunities for agencies to bring new employees into leadership roles.

Obviously, there is a ton of more data to pull from FedScope. Tell me what you thought of this data dive and what other data would you like to see.

The post Nearly half of all civilian feds are new hires since 2019 first appeared on Federal News Network.

Several years after the end of a hiring freeze, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is still tackling ongoing staffing issues.

Hiring is a “substantial challenge” for USCIS, the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services ombudsman said in its 2024 report to Congress. Lingering effects of the hiring freeze that ended in 2021, as well as staff attrition and funding limitations, have hindered the agency’s ability to staff up, while workloads have grown for current agency employees.

USCIS’ current 21,267-member workforce is more than 3,000 positions short of the total staff size the agency is authorized to have.

“USCIS has said it continues its aggressive hiring to reduce the number of outstanding vacancies,” the ombudsman wrote in its report. “However, the agency is still at only 87.5% of its authorized capacity.”

Other signs, though, indicate that USCIS could be turning a corner for its current workforce. Employee engagement is on the rise. The agency was also one of the better-scoring Department of Homeland Security subcomponents in the 2023 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings from the Partnership for Public Service.

USCIS Director Ur Jaddou is looking to make further adjustments to support a workforce that’s been grappling with many intersecting challenges — and starting by leaning in on more support for supervisors.

“Even where there is great supervisory support, and people are very satisfied with their supervisors, how do we take some of the pressure off the supervisors so they can even do better?” Jaddou said in an interview with Federal News Network. “It’s a very small number of people who naturally are great managers of people. So it is important to provide the support, the proper training — and we do it — the question is, how can we make it even better? And how can we continuously grow our managers, so that they can best serve the people on their team?”

Compared with its Best Places to Work scores from the past couple of years, USCIS appears to be on an upward trajectory. A 4.3-point increase in the agency’s employee engagement and satisfaction score landed the agency at an overall score of 73.5 out of 100 in the 2023 Best Places to Work. That puts USCIS above the Partnership’s governmentwide average score of 72.1 for agency subcomponents in 2023, though it’s still in the middle of the pack compared to other subcomponents across government.

Of all the workforce categories that the Partnership measures, USCIS’ highest scores were in employees’ perceptions of agency supervisors, as well as work-life balance.

On the other hand, USCIS scored relatively lower in Best Places to Work when it came to employee input and recognition. And that’s another area where Jaddou is hoping to make a difference going forward.

To try to encourage more employee feedback, USCIS has made town halls a regular occurrence, hosting them about once per quarter. About half of the agency’s workforce has attended town halls, either in person or virtually.

“It’s an opportunity to listen. People want to know that they’re being heard,” Jaddou said. “If [an employee has] a good idea, then great, let’s adopt it. If we think it’s not a good idea, let’s investigate, and if it doesn’t make sense for the agency as a whole, then we need to get back to the individual and explain why. And I have found that when you do that, it really takes the temperature out of the room.”

Before each town hall, employees can submit questions months in advance to ask to Jaddou and other agency leadership. Those questions are then put to a vote amid the workforce to determine what officials will address during the quarterly meetings.

“It’s a little bit like crowdsourcing. What questions do people want to hear?” Jaddou said. “The highest-ranked questions are the ones that are chosen … Some are bigger picture, larger questions about ensuring that people have flexibilities at work, wellness questions [or] pressures on the work they’re doing every day, wondering about the metrics that they have measuring their production.”

But Jaddou said questions and concerns from employees can also be quite specific. As an example, one common concern from USCIS employees has been the listing of immigration officers’ names on various immigration forms.

“There were some concerns about privacy there for our workforce, and obviously concerns about security [and] safety,” Jaddou said. “People don’t want their name out there potentially on a negative decision, it makes them nervous.”

After getting that regular feedback from staff, Jaddou said the agency made the decision to remove the officers’ names, aiming to better protect employees.

Addressing ongoing USCIS staffing issues

Still, major staffing issues, coupled with a hefty case backlog, have continued to challenge USCIS for years. Recent levels for the agency are unprecedented: Over 1 million asylum cases were pending determination at the end of fiscal 2023, the agency’s inspector general office reported. More than 786,000 of “affirmative” cases — those not involving removal proceedings — have been pending for longer than six months.

“This occurred because USCIS did not have sufficient funding, staffing and planning to complete its affirmative asylum caseload,” the IG said in a July 3 report.

In the absence of direct congressional appropriations, USCIS primarily uses application fees to fund the agency’s work. But in 2023, the IG said the fee-based revenue alone wasn’t enough to support the staffing needed to manage the workload.

“This shortage forced USCIS to prioritize certain types of work over resolving its backlog of affirmative asylum cases and also resulted in USCIS setting performance goals at levels too low to timely adjudicate new claims within the statutory limits and address the existing affirmative asylum backlog,” the IG said.

Adding to the challenge, USCIS staffing in its asylum division is insufficient to address the existing workload, the IG said. the agency still managed to handle more than 40,500 requests for immigration benefits each day. Additionally, during 2023, USCIS reduced the immigration backlog for the first time in a decade, something made even more notable after three successive years of an increasing caseload, the ombudsman said.

“That USCIS was able to decrease its pending caseloads at all is testament to its commitment to increase operational efficiencies and the dedication of staff to the agency’s mission,” the ombudsman said in its report. “A renewed focus on its digitization efforts, years in the making, enabled more accessibility of benefit requests, despite some setbacks. A staffing increase helped as new hires onboarded and were trained.”

The ombudsman said USCIS has faced unprecedented challenges over the last decade, but recommended numerous adjustments, such as reforms to the agency’s structure and staffing models, that may help the agency moving forward.

At the end of the day, the ombudsman said, “USCIS’ strongest asset has always been its workforce.”

The post Amid hiring issues, USCIS’ Jaddou aims to boost current workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

It’s a demographic trend that has persisted for years, but there may be a few early signs of change, according to a July 1 workforce report from the Partnership for Public Service that uses data from FedScope.

Data from fiscal 2023 shows that 60% of the federal workforce is white, 19% of federal employees are Black and 10% are Hispanic. By comparison, for the nationwide workforce, 76% of employees are white, 13% are Black and 19% are Hispanic.

Breaking down diversity by GS level, the Partnership’s data report shows that white federal employees make up a much larger portion of the workforce at GS-7 and up through the Senior Executive Service, taking up many mid- and top-level technical roles as well as many supervisory positions.

By contrast, people of color hold a higher portion entry-level administrative positions between GS-2 and GS-6, the Partnership said.

The long-time workforce trend is beginning to change, albeit slowly, the Partnership said. Between 2022 and 2023, the percentage of people of color in the SES rose 1%, from 25% to 26%.

Similar trends occur when breaking down the workforce by gender. Overall, women make up 45% of the federal workforce, while men comprise 55%. But again, men make up a larger portion of higher-level GS positions as well as SES roles. There appears to be a similar trend toward a more equal balance between men and women in the SES, the Partnership’s report showed.

Over time, the SES has gradually become more diverse as it has grown in size, but it’s still not fully representative of the federal workforce’s overall demographics.

During 2023, the SES grew by 272 members, bringing the total up to 7,753 career SES employees governmentwide. It’s the largest year-over-year increase for the SES workforce in the last decade, the Partnership said.

Along with the net gain in size, the number of workers leaving the SES is increasing too, mostly due to retirements. At the end of fiscal 2020, 40.6% of SES members were eligible to retire within a year. But by the end of 2030, 79.8% of the SES will be retirement-eligible, the Partnership reported last year.

Some employee organizations view the likely retirement surge in the coming years as an opportunity to create a more diverse SES in the future.

“Agencies must recruit young talent and employees with the necessary skills for both current and future needs,” the Partnership wrote in its data report. “Ensuring a diverse workforce is essential, as is developing leadership capabilities within the organization, improving hiring processes and implementing policies to retain high-performing workers.”

Early-career employees in the federal workforce

Along with diversity trends, the federal government’s struggle to recruit and retain early-career employees has also gone on for years.

From 2008 to 2012, the percentage of feds between ages 20 and 29 hovered around 8-9%, a high point over the last two decades. But back in fiscal 2000, just 4.7% of federal employees were under 30 years old.

According to 2023 data, the most recent available, 7.4% of federal employees are under age 30, the Partnership said.

The federal workforce generally trends older than the nationwide workforce. While employees under age 30 represent 7.4% of the federal workforce, they make up 19.8% of the nationwide workforce. Employees between ages 30 and 49 comprise half of the federal workforce, and those over age 50 make up about 43%.

In its Workforce of the Future playbook, the Office of Personnel Management said early-career talent recruitment is a challenge in part because agencies typically view younger workers as short-term hires. That perspective leads to fewer positions being reserved for early-career employees, and less prominence of early-career recruitment as part of agencies’ workforce planning strategies.

Because of the long-term struggle, OPM in recent years has made early-career recruitment and retention a priority. For instance, OPM created an intern experience program in 2023, which it has continued this summer. OPM’s online internship portal, as well as updated Pathways Program regulations, also aim to ease the challenge of early-career recruitment.

As a result of those changes, OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said there have been early signs of a renewed and increased interest in federal job opportunities from younger employees.

“We want to bring the interns together to help them feel like they’re part of a cohort here, to show that there are people across the government who are working in internship opportunities,” Shriver said in a recent interview with Federal News Network. “[We also] make sure they’re having a good experience, so that they are our force multipliers — they are our recruiters-in-chief.”

In another effort to recruit early-career talent, the General Services Administration created the U.S. Digital Corps, a two-year program aiming to close the early-career technology talent gap in government.

The program, launched in 2022, brings small cohorts of young technologists into agencies, aiming to convert them into full-time positions by the end of their tenure. GSA’s first Digital Corps class graduated from the program on June 26.

“Over the past two years, you have proven yourselves in high-impact areas, whether it’s customer experience or public health, cybersecurity and more,” OPM Deputy Chief of Staff Margot Conrad said at the graduation ceremony. “This program exemplifies the broader work that we are pursuing at OPM to try and attract, develop and retain top tech talent for the whole federal workforce.”

The post Federal workforce diversity still lagging in more senior roles first appeared on Federal News Network.

• House lawmakers are demanding answers from VA officials, after they approved nearly $11 million in bonuses to ineligible career senior executives. The House VA Committee is calling on the under secretaries of health and benefits to testify at a hearing next week about the “bonus blunder.” The committee also wants to hear from senior HR and legal officials to explain why they didn’t flag these bonuses sooner. VA awarded the bonuses last fall and is still trying to recoup some of the money. Republican senators have called on some VA officials to step down because of the error.
  ( Chairman Bost Announces Oversight Hearing on VA’s PACT Act Bonus Mess - House VA Committee )
• Innovation in federal acquisition gets the spotlight in a new report from Office of Management and Budget. Agencies are using an assortment of innovative techniques and technologies to reduce the time to make contracting awards and lower costs for vendors. OMB detailed many of those efforts in a new congressionally-mandated report. In the Acquisition Innovation and Small Business Participation in Federal Procurement report, OMB said many of these tools — such as a market research bot, and hosting remote and interactive capability briefings with vendors to expand the field of bidders — have expanded opportunities for small businesses, including new entrants into the federal sector. OMB said agencies have been collecting and sharing these new approaches in the Periodic Table of Acquisition Innovations, which highlights 29 use cases that could help agencies increase speed, improve accuracy, reduce administrative cost, and lower risk across the acquisition lifecycle.
  (OMB details innovations that are speeding up acquisitions - White House)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is developing new physical security goals for critical infrastructure. CISA’s physical security goals come amid rising threats to the electric grid and other critical infrastructure. CISA is raising awareness about good security practices as it prepares for national safety month in June. “It’s time for us to focus on how we keep working environments safe and free from danger,” CISA Executive Assistant Director for Infrastructure Security David Mussington said. “When it comes to running workplace safety, planning is central to what we need to do to avoid foreseeable and unforeseeable risks.”
  (Amid rising threats to critical infrastructure, CISA developing ‘physical security’ goals - Federal News Network )
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is driving down wait times for veterans to receive health care. The Veterans Health Administration in April saw an 11% decrease in average wait times for new patients in VA primary care, compared to last year. It also saw a 7% decrease in average mental health wait times. Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal said these improved metrics come at a time when VA is delivering more care and more benefits to veterans than ever before. "We've been able to meet that increasing demand for care, all while we're seeing greater demand from our existing base of veterans, as they get older and get more chronic conditions and need more care," Elnahal said.
  (VA sees more patients, cuts wait times, despite higher workload - Federal News Network )
• Federal agencies are preparing for a busy hurricane season. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has opened up a new distribution center in Pennsylvania to ensure supplies can be deployed more quickly along the East Coast. FEMA is also updating its contingency contracts to support rapid response and recovery operations. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there is an 85% chance of above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic this year. NOAA is forecasting the potential for eight to 13 hurricane-strength storms. The hurricane season in the Atlantic runs from June 1 to November 30.
  (FEMA prepares for 2024 Atlantic hurricane season - DHS)
• African American men and women interested in working for the FBI will have a better opportunity to understand what it takes to join the bureau. A new memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the Blacks In Government (BIG) Future Leaders in America’s Government (FLAG), or the BIG FLAG program, will expand the collaboration and information sharing between the two organizations. The FBI will do more to share details about the variety of internships and programs open to college students, as well as hiring opportunities for seniors and recent graduates.  The members of the BIG FLAG program will have access to webinars focused on the FBI’s mission, awareness information, hiring and application processes.
  (FBI, Blacks in Government agree to expand access to job opportunities - FBI News)
• The Government Accountability Office is once again a Best Place to Work in the 2023 rankings from the Partnership for Public Service. This time around, U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro credits the agency's high score in part to its telework practices. GAO has been working with its union over the last year to implement a generous work-from-home policy. Many GAO employees are allowed to work fully remotely, and others can telework up to four days a week. GAO has maintained its spot as the number one midsize agency in the Best Places to Work rankings for four years in a row.
  (3 promising pockets of success in Best Places to Work - Federal News Network)
• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is back on the job after briefly relinquishing his duties over the weekend. The Pentagon said Austin transferred his authority to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks for a few hours on Friday night while he underwent a medical procedure at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This time, Congress and the White House were notified in advance, and Defense officials said there were not any complications. Austin came under fire in December after a separate health issue sidelined him for two weeks. In that case, lawmakers, the White House and the public were not notified that the secretary was in the hospital until complications emerged. After that, Austin and DoD promised to change the department’s transfer-of-authority procedures and make them more transparent.
  (Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin resumes duty after undergoing procedure at Walter Reed - Associated Press)

The post Scrutiny intensifies regarding VA ‘bonus blunder’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

VA maintained its fifth-place spot for large agencies in the 2023 Best Places to Work rankings, which the Partnership for Public Service published earlier this week. At the same time, VA raised its engagement and satisfaction score by 3.4 points, going from 68.4, up to 71.8 out of 100. It’s the largest year-over-year increase of the top five agencies in the rankings.

At a Best Places to Work event on Monday, VA Chief of Staff Kimberly Jackson said a lot of the score-improving efforts revolve around transparency — both in the work VA does, as well as transparency between employees and agency leaders.

“VA hasn’t historically had a reputation for being the most innovative and doing a lot of the coolest new things,” Jackson said in an interview with Federal News Network at the May 20 event. “We actually are. We do some really, really interesting research, for example, the work that we’re doing in psychedelics research. [We are trying to] leverage that and say, ‘Hey, you want to do really cool work that has immediate impact for a massive population of people? Come to VA.’”

VA’s engagement and satisfaction score has remained above the governmentwide average since 2020, the Partnership’s data showed. While VA ranked fifth overall for large agencies, Chief Human Capital Officer Tracey Therit said she was also particularly excited about VA ranking third for employees’ views of senior agency leadership. In the 2023 results, VA’s senior leadership score increased from 59.9 to 65.3 — a 5.4-point increase in just one year.

“Employees feel like they are more satisfied, more engaged when they know that senior leadership is asking for their input, and when they’re using that input in decision-making,” Therit told Federal News Network at the Best Places to Work event.

Smaller efforts can often make a big difference in views of senior leadership. For example, Therit said, VA’s “I CARE” awards, which Secretary Denis McDonough hands out each year, play a role in demonstrating senior leadership’s attention to the workforce.

“We always want to make sure that we’re recognizing employees for those values and core characteristics they demonstrate every day,” Therit said.

The Partnership’s findings, more broadly, showed many employees’ views of senior leaders are on an upward climb as well. In the 2023 Best Places to Work rankings, the governmentwide score for senior leaders was 57.3 out of 100, representing a 2-point increase since last year’s results.

The Best Places to Work rankings are largely based on data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). But in addition to FEVS, Therit said VA uses several other data sources to understand, and respond to, employees’ concerns. Internal quarterly pulse surveys on employee trust, as well as an annual “all employee” survey, which the VA’s National Center for Organization Development runs, provide more specifics.

Last year’s “all employee” survey received over an 80% response rate, and this year’s version of the VA survey is currently out in the field.

“We want to make sure we continue to get a good response rate so that that data comes in,” Therit said. “We can use that data to make improvements and to know what our employees’ sentiments are.”

But on average, there are specific sectors of the federal workforce who are struggling more than others. The Partnership’s Best Places to Work data analysis showed that feds ages 30 to 39 scored the lowest of any age group for their views on senior leadership, workplace recognition, work-life balance and professional development. On diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, employees with disabilities and LGBTQ employees scored their agencies the lowest.

In reaction to the Partnership’s data, Therit said she plans to take a microscope to those cross-sections of employees.

“We’re really going to look at those demographic populations to make sure what we’re doing with our policies and our programs meets their needs and continues to engage those segments of our workforce,” Therit said.

One area of the workforce where VA is already focusing is on military spouses. The group of workers maintains one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, around 22%. Therit said right now, VA is partnering with the Office of Personnel Management to collect and analyze workforce data specifically on VA employees who are military spouses.

In the coming months, Therit said she hopes the collaboration with OPM will help her team better understand the recruitment and retention challenges specific to that segment of the workforce.

“We’re really excited,” Therit said. “Our survey data is expected to come out in July, so we’ll be able to use it between now and the end of the year to both make sure employees know their voices were heard, and to make some meaningful improvements.”

The post VA makes gains in engagement in Best Places to Work results first appeared on Federal News Network.

• By Friday, agencies have to name a senior career official to lead their presidential transition efforts. Additionally, by Friday, agencies have to share that main point of contact with GSA’s Federal Transition Coordinator. These are two of the three deadlines the Office of Management and Budget outlined in a new memo. The other date agencies need to keep in mind is September 15. By then, each agency shall ensure that a succession plan is in place for each senior non-career position. In the memo, OMB also laid out the eight responsibilities of the agency transition lead. OMB will hold the first meeting of these senior career officials on May 29.
  (OMB tells agencies to begin meeting presidential transition law requirements - White House)
• The General Services Administration is reinvigorating its open government efforts. GSA is looking for 20 federal and non-federal experts in open government and civil society to make up its new Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. GSA is seeking nominations of people with a strong background in open government themes, such as access to information, anti-corruption, digital governance, public participation, and improving the delivery of government services and benefits. The GSA Administrator will appoint all members of the committee, who will serve terms of one to three years. GSA Open Government Secretariat will host a virtual public Q&A session on May 10 to answer questions on the selection process and timeline.
  (GSA to energize federal open government efforts - Federal Register)
• The Department of Homeland Security has established a new Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. The CEOs of leading AI firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft, are all on the new board. The advisory committee will advise Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the development and deployment of AI in U.S. critical infrastructure. The board’s 22 members also include the heads of advanced computer chip firms, including NVIDIA and IBM. The group is expected to begin meeting later this year.
  (DHS fills out AI safety board with big tech execs - Federal News Network)
• Agencies are encouraging employees to collaborate in the office, but the office space itself isn’t lining up with that push. A recent Federal News Network survey found that feds feel mixed about how closely office space is actually meeting their needs on the job. Some survey respondents said working in cubicles is distracting and leading to lower performance. Other feds in the survey are asking their agencies to rearrange the office space to create more collaborative spaces for teamwork. And overall, the survey finds that a majority of feds feel more productive while teleworking.
  (Survey: Back in the office, feds feel mixed on office space functionality - Federal News Network)
• A group of senators is raising concerns about the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of searching through phones at U.S. border checkpoints. Both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement assert broad authority to search anyone’s phone at the border. But in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week, multiple senators said they are concerned CBP and ICE are overstepping their bounds. They are asking for more information about DHS authorities and how agencies use the data they gather from searching through electronic devices.
  (Peters, Paul, Wyden and Crapo press DHS on use of authority to download personal device data at borders - HSGAC)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it issued more than 1,700 notifications, as part of its Ransomware Vulnerability Warning Pilot last year. Under the program, CISA warns organizations when it finds an internet-connected vulnerability that could be exploited by ransomware gangs. About 7,000 organizations have signed up for the pilot program. Government facilities, which include schools, state and local governments, and federal agencies, accounted for more than a third of the notifications in 2023.
  (Cyber hygiene helps organizations mitigate ransomware-related vulnerabilities - CISA)
• The IRS Direct File pilot program is seeing positive user ratings after surpassing the Department of Treasury’s usage goal of 100,000 users. The tax agency said more than 140,000 taxpayers successfully filed their taxes using Direct File this year, leading to those filers saving an estimated $5.6 million in tax preparation fees. The IRS collected user-experience information from Direct File, with 90% of respondents ranking their experience as “excellent’ or “above average.” The IRS and Treasury Department will continue analyzing results in the coming weeks, before determining the future of Direct File.
  (IRS free file pilot surpasses user goals - IRS)
• The Office of Personnel Management is already well underway in its goal to ramp up pooled hiring. The recruitment strategy is a way for multiple agencies to make hires off the same list of job candidates. In just the past couple months, OPM has been working on six different pooled hiring actions. Three of those actions are currently available governmentwide for agencies to hire IT specialists, data managers and program analysts.
  ( Agency priority goal quarterly update - Performance.gov)
• As of this year, active-duty military service counts toward eligibility for the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Now the Office of Personnel Management is reminding agencies that military service also counts toward Paid Parental Leave. The change means some employees may reach FMLA eligibility more quickly. Feds become eligible for FMLA leave after completing one year of qualifying service. A list of reminders from the Office of Personnel Management details several other pay and benefits updates for 2024. Those updates all stem from the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
  (Recent pay and leave-related legislative changes - Office of Personnel Management)
• The Commerce department is moving forward on its effort to provide more access to government data for the public, and to make that data more interpretable. The department's AI and Open Government Data Assets working group issued a request for information (RFI) as it explores AI-ready data. Commerce wants public and private sector feedback to develop guidelines and best practices for AI data usage. The working group will host a public webinar today about the RFI, which will close to comments on July 16.
  (Commerce Department’s AI and Open Government Data Assets Working Group launches Request for Information - U.S. Commerce Department)

The post By Friday, agencies required to name senior career official to lead their presidential transition efforts first appeared on Federal News Network.

Congress is looking for details on federal telework as part of the latest government spending agreement — echoing months of return-to-office scrutiny from the House Oversight and Accountability committee.

Among its many provisions, the agreement congressional appropriators reached Thursday for the back half of fiscal 2024 government spending bills lays out six new requirements on federal telework and return-to-office for federal employees.

Within 90 days of the legislation’s enactment, the Office of Management and Budget will have to turn over all agencies’ return-to-office “action plans” outlined earlier this year, lawmakers said in an explanatory statement for the 2024 Financial Services and General Government bill.

The action plans, initially required as part of an OMB memo last April, detail agencies’ federal telework and in-office requirements, as well as measurements for workforce factors like productivity and employee engagement.

Now almost a year after OMB’s initial call for agencies to begin returning staff to the office at least 50% of the time, the White House has continued to press agencies who appear to be falling behind on the requirements.

As part of the appropriations package, agencies will also have to provide information on the average number and percentage of employees working in the office during a typical two-week pay period; their most recent policy on federal telework — including any agreements with unions; and how they measure productivity for teleworking employees.

In reaction to the new reporting requirements, the American Federation of Government Employees called on Congress to embrace federal telework and remote work as an important flexibility, which the union said improves morale, productivity, recruitment and retention.

“Language attempting to tie the hands of the administration when it comes to determining the correct balance of in-person and remote work at each of our federal workplaces is particularly frustrating,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

The National Treasury Employees Union, however, approached the provision and upcoming requirements for further information with a more hopeful mindset.

“We support a data-driven, fair analysis of the telework programs now in place for eligible federal employees across government,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement. “NTEU is confident that Congress will ultimately agree that telework is a benefit to federal employees, their agencies and the taxpayers they serve, and reject arbitrary caps and other measures that inhibit this proven workplace practice.”

Reporting requirements on federal office space

In the spending agreement, lawmakers are also setting requirements for agencies to provide more information to Congress about federal office space. The federal footprint has been steadily declining, but agencies still holding onto excess and underutilized office space is a main reason the Government Accountability Office has kept federal real property management on its High-Risk List for over 20 years.

Agencies that have an office space utilization rate of less than 60% will have to submit to Congress a description of their current efforts to reduce their physical footprint. Agencies will also have to detail the total office space costs, the average utilization rate and the estimated cost of underutilized space, the lawmakers said.

The federal telework and office space reporting requirements come after nearly a year of the Oversight committee calling for more information and better data on telework, remote work and in-office requirements, as well as impacts on productivity and services to the public.

Staff for Oversight committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) did not immediately respond to Federal News Network’s request for comment.

At the same time, the Office of Personnel Management has said telework supports federal recruitment and retention, and offers agencies opportunities for cost savings, according to OPM’s latest telework report to Congress.

The new requirements also aren’t limited to civilian agencies. The Defense Department 2024 spending bill directs GAO to submit a report on telework to the congressional defense committees within 180 days of the bill’s passage, lawmakers said. That report should detail DoD’s adherence to telework and remote work policies, as well as details on the number of DoD employees who telework.

Lawmakers said the report will also have to weigh the cost and efficacy of telework and how it compares with in-person work, especially considering impacts on training and development of employees, and organizational cohesion.

DoD recently updated its telework policy for the first time since 2012, creating a more flexible policy that now addresses both telework and remote work.

As the 2024 spending agreement nears the finish line, the Biden administration is also already looking ahead to funding levels for 2025. Part of the administration’s plans for the coming fiscal year outline further studies on federal telework and the government’s hybrid work posture.

“OPM is conducting and disseminating three research studies on the future of work, assessing the effect of telework, remote work and hybrid work on hiring, engagement and retention, as well as a project to improve accessibility of organizational health and organizational performance data for agency leaders through toolkits and dashboards,” OMB said in a 2025 budget request document.

Bureau of Prisons, other federal pay reforms

At the top line, the Financial Services and General Government bill provides $13.7 billion in appropriations, which is $1.1 billion, or 4%, below enacted 2023 funding levels — and $5.7 billion below the White House’s 2025 budget request.

The package gives OPM about $412 million for salaries and expenses, and another $36 million for OPM’s inspector general office. That’s 12% below the Biden administration’s request of $465.8 million in discretionary spending for OPM in 2025.

The spending agreement also aims to address major staffing challenges at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Congress is calling on OPM to work with BOP and consider possibilities for reforming or modifying the General Schedule to address pay rates for federal correctional officers, who currently have a 40% staffing shortage nationwide.

Lawmakers are also telling OPM to create a direct hire authority for all BOP facilities, and report back to the appropriations committees on the efforts within 90 days of the legislation’s enactment.

Earlier in March, Congress agreed to the overall budget for BOP in its first spending minibus. While staffing levels and salaries for BOP remained the same, the agency’s facilities maintenance budget decreased by 38%, putting the agency $110 million below the 2023 enacted level.

“While we wish more funds were included to address staffing and safety issues across the Bureau of Prisons, we are pleased that Congress directed the administration to research ways to improve pay for correctional officers and staff,” AFGE’s Kelley said.

A couple long-standing provisions for federal pay will also remain intact under the new funding agreement. For one, prevailing rate employees paid through the Federal Wage System will continue to see limits on their pay raises, ensuring they don’t exceed the raises for feds on the General Schedule.

A pay freeze will also remain in effect for the vice president, ambassadors at large, non-career members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) and other senior political appointees positioned at or above level IV of the Executive Schedule.

Despite significant cuts for some agencies and federal programs, the White House is urging a quick passage of the appropriations package, according to a statement of Administration Policy from OMB.

The post Congress calls for more details on federal telework in 2024 spending package first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Biden administration is asking Congress for $1.63 trillion for defense and non-defense discretionary accounts in 2025, which is $11 million, or 0.7%, over the enacted levels for 2023. The new spending proposal breaks down to $895 billion for defense spending and $734 billion for non-defense spending, 4.3% above and 3.4% below the enacted 2023 spending levels, respectively.

Given the current climate on Capitol Hill, the 2025 budget request is unlikely to find its way through Congress unscathed. But the White House’s proposal, released Monday, is considered the opening bid for government spending next fiscal year. It’s also a major indicator of what the administration will focus on over the next year.

For federal employees, what may be one of most impactful parts of the President’s budget request is next year’s federal pay raise.

For 2025, the White House is pushing for a more modest 2% federal pay raise for the roughly 1.5 million federal employees on the General Schedule.

If enacted, most civilian federal employees would see the boost to their paychecks starting in the first full pay period of January 2025. Military members would receive a 4.5% raise next year, according to the budget request.

The percentage adjustment would be the smallest pay raise since President Joe Biden took office. Federal employees received raises of 5.2%, 4.6% and 2.7%, in 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively. In all three years, Biden’s federal pay raise proposals were finalized without intervention from Congress.

The Biden administration said it opted for the smaller raise proposal for 2025 due to financial constraints agencies are expected to face over the next fiscal year.

At the same time, more long-term fixes to the federal pay system remain a priority for the administration, the Office of Management and Budget said. Now a year after Biden hinted at plans to fix the pay compression Senior Executive Service members, higher-level General Schedule employees, and blue-collar workers on the Federal Wage System experience, the White House pointed to a couple possible options to pursue. Those include increasing Executive Schedule rates, removing pay caps in the Federal Wage System and modifying how pay rates are adjusted each year.

“The administration continues to prioritize federal compensation and also looks forward to working with Congress to address long-standing issues of pay compression, which impact employees at various levels throughout the government,” OMB said in the budget documents. “By continuing to pursue structural improvements and use of flexibilities, we will enhance the competitiveness of the federal pay system.”

The budget request does not detail how the raise would break down between the across-the-board percentage and locality pay adjustments. If tradition stands, the federal pay raise would likely comprise a 1.5% base raise for feds, plus an average of a 0.5% locality pay boost. But the administration will not finalize that breakdown at least until Biden releases an alternative pay plan in August.

The federal pay raise proposal in the budget request is only the first step of the process for finalizing the amount federal employees will see added to their paychecks next year.

Each year, a president will typically submit an alternative pay plan to Congress in August, which incorporates the initial proposal from the budget request. The President will then sign an executive order by the end of the calendar year to make the pay raise official for the following January.

A 2% federal pay raise is also well below what some House and Senate Democrats are calling for next year. The Federal Adjustment of Income Rates (FAIR) Act is proposing a 7.4% raise for civilian federal employees in 2025.

“While every pay raise is a step in the right direction after decades of disinvestment in the federal workforce, our legislation remains the best option for ensuring federal employees are fairly and properly compensated for their service,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who introduced the FAIR Act, said in a statement to Federal News Network.

Other workforce priorities in 2025 budget request

Of course, the federal pay raise proposal is far from the only priority for the federal workforce contained in the 2025 budget request. In the proposal, the Biden administration pointed to new goals for improving the federal workforce, as well as its plans to strengthen existing goals.

For one, the budget request calls on agencies to improve the federal hiring process, in part through scaling up the use of shared certificates and pooled hiring. Shared certificates let federal job applicants submit one application, which multiple agencies can then consider for common positions that aren’t specific to one agency. The budget request touted success of the recruitment strategy for hiring 6,100 feds through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Additionally, the budget request maintains a focus on early-career federal hiring, which has been a priority at agencies for several years. Currently, less than 7% of the federal workforce is under age 30.

The new proposal particularly emphasized the importance of expanding access to paid federal internships and promoting early-career job opportunities in government.

Just last week, Biden signed an executive order telling agencies to also make better use of registered apprenticeships as another pathway into federal service. Now the administration is asking Congress for $335 million — an increase of $50 million over the enacted 2023 level — to invest in the Labor Department’s registered apprenticeship program.

“This investment would also be used to increase the number of workers from historically underrepresented groups, including people of color, women and people with disabilities, who participate in registered apprenticeships,” the budget request said.

The administration also emphasized investments in more general recruitment and retention goals, for example, through the Office of Personnel Management’s Hiring Experience Office.

“As the government faces increasingly complex challenges, the need for federal leaders, managers and frontline staff with the right skills in the right jobs has never been greater,” the budget request said.

The White House is also proposing further investments in the “Trusted Workforce 2.0” strategy, which aims to bolster cybersecurity and personnel vetting procedures governmentwide.

Some agencies would also see specific investments for frontline employees working in government. Notably, the budget request pushes for a permanent pay raise for federal wildland firefighters, as well as other workforce reforms for the frontline employees, including more staffing, better health services and improved housing for federal firefighters — totaling $135 million above the 2023 enacted level for the Interior Department, and $387 million over the 2023 enacted level for Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.

The investments “would help address long-standing recruitment and retention challenges, increase … capacity to complete critical risk mitigation work, and further the administration’s commitment to build a more robust and resilient wildland firefighting workforce as the frequency and intensity of catastrophic wildfires continue to increase due to climate change,” the budget request said.

The Transportation Security Administration would receive an additional $1.5 billion to continue funding the TSA pay equity initiative. The initiative gave TSA employees a pay raise beginning in July 2023.

“The TSA workforce deserves to be fairly compensated at rates comparable with their peers in the federal workforce,” the budget request said. “TSA has already seen an 11% reduction in attrition, and is making gains in retaining what has historically been a workforce with high turnover.”

The Federal Aviation Administration would get $17.5 billion in its discretionary budget authority, according to the budget request. It’s an increase of $2.1 billion above the 2023 enacted level. The funding would go toward more hiring and training of air traffic controllers, modernization investments and increased safety capabilities, the budget request said.

The budget request is also targeting recruitment for AI jobs in government. The Biden administration is proposing an investment of $32 million for the U.S. Digital Service, General Services Administration and OPM to continue working toward a governmentwide AI talent surge, first launched in October 2023.

Since this year is a presidential election year, the 2025 budget request is the last proposal for the first term of the Biden administration. But with only half of congressional appropriations bills so far determined for 2024, the path to reaching a spending agreement for agencies in 2025 may remain uncertain for months to come.

On March 9, Biden signed a $460 billion package of spending bills just in time to avoid a partial government shutdown. The House and Senate now have a deadline of March 22 to reach a spending agreement for many other agencies — before getting around to considering agency funding and priorities for fiscal 2025.

The post Biden proposes 2% federal pay raise in 2025 budget request first appeared on Federal News Network.

We’re in a new year, and that means federal employees working across the country are about to get a sizeable raise added to their next paychecks.

President Joe Biden made the average 5.2% raise official right before Christmas. But while most career feds on the General Schedule will get a raise somewhere around that percentage, thousands of those in the uppermost ranks of the GS pay system will see their paychecks short-changed.

That’s because of an arbitrary pay cap that exists for General Schedule pay rates. Salaries of career GS employees, according to federal statute, cannot exceed the pay for political appointees and others at level IV on the Executive Schedule.

For a long time, the pay cap impacted only the longest-serving and topmost-ranked GS-15s. But just in the last year or so, pay compression has extended down to some GS-14s as well.

The salaries of these senior-level feds do increase with annual federal pay raises, but the pay ceiling means they don’t reach their “full” raises — and that has impacts lasting well into retirement too (more on that later).

For 2024, any GS grade or step that would be put above $191,900 due to the pay raise will see their pay compressed down to that amount.

The grades and steps that pay compression affects also vary nationwide. Depending on the locality pay area, exactly whose pay gets compressed looks a little different.

Using Office of Personnel Management data, Federal News Network compiled the chart below showing exactly which steps and grades are impacted in each of the locality pay areas that experience pay compression.

(Story continues below)

With the latest 5.2% raise, pay compression now applies to the majority of locality pay areas, affecting 35 of the 58 total areas to some extent. That means in 60% of the existing locality pay areas, at least one step of at least one pay grade is hitting the arbitrary pay ceiling.

By comparison, there were 25 locality pay areas in the pay cap club in 2020 — the last time Federal News Network conducted a locality-by-locality analysis.

Over time, after years of pay raises for most GS employees, coupled with no or reduced raises for others, the problem of pay compression is getting worse.

In 2024, GS-15, step 10, employees in Albany, New York, and Austin, Texas, will begin experiencing pay compression for the first time.

Adding to the troubles, the pool of federal employees whose pay has been capped expanded within six different locality pay areas this year.

Pay compression is noticeably worse in one region in particular: the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, California, locality pay area. It’s the only area where the pay ceiling is low enough for GS-14s to hit it, now reaching steps 9 and 10 on that pay band.

The next step down in the Bay Area — GS-14, step 8 — is just a couple thousand dollars below the $191,900 pay ceiling too. For 2024, employees situated there will get a salary of $187,598.

In a couple other geographic regions, some feds are just a few metaphorical inches from the pay ceiling. For example, GS-15, step 7, employees in Denver, Colorado, are just $136 shy of the cap this year.

On the other end of things, some senior-level feds have had their pay compressed for years.

“I consider GS-15, step 10s, like me, to be well-compensated in the grand scheme of things — with that said, it’s more about the principle,” one FNN reader wrote in a recent email to me. “The deal is supposed to be that federal employees get promoted from grade to grade as they show potential and take on greater and greater responsibility, and then, within their grade, receive step increases based on years of experience.”

The pay caps not only limit an employee’s take-home pay during a given year, but could also cost future annuitants during retirement — particularly when calculating their “high-three,” the average of the highest three consecutive years of salaries that help determine federal annuity payments.

The pay cap can make a difference of thousands of dollars in retirement annuities, according to Federal News Network’s analysis from 2020.

“I recognize that the last couple of years, we have received a greater proportion of the raise, but even if the cap was raised to $300,000 next year, we will never be made whole for what we were promised and have already lost,” the anonymous fed said.

The Senior Executives Association — an advocacy group that’s been particularly vocal about pay compression — pointed to ripple effects of the pay challenge as well.

“This issue does not incentivize federal employees to pursue senior executive positions in the government and contributes to morale challenges, as evidenced by the recent Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results indicating just 57% of federal employees are satisfied with their pay — down 10% from 2020,” SEA President Marcus Hill said in a Dec. 27 statement. “Despite a bipartisan recognition of this problem, pay compression remains a real issue.”

OPM declined to provide Federal News Network with data on how many federal employees experience pay compression nationwide, but by some estimates, about 30,000 GS employees and 2,500 Senior Executive Service, Senior-Level, and Scientific and Professional employees are affected by pay compression, said Jason Briefel, partner and director of government and public affairs at Shaw Bransford & Roth.

“The joy many federal employees felt will quickly turn to frustration when tens of thousands of feds realize they will not receive this raise because their pay is capped,” Briefel wrote in an email. “This serves as a major disincentive to promote and advance within the government and causes many excellent federal employees to leave for other sectors each year, often to government contractors where they can earn double or more the salary while still working on the same mission.”

In the fiscal 2024 budget request, the Biden administration hinted at plans to issue a legislative proposal aiming to address the worsening challenge of pay compression. But so far, no proposal has been made publicly available.

“We are continuing to work through those issues, through our channels in the government,” OPM Deputy Director Rob Shriver said in a recent interview. “We hope to have more to be able to tell you about that soon.”

And even after a potential legislative proposal from the Biden administration, it would still be up to Congress to actually make the change.

The post For General Schedule employees, pay compression got a little worse in 2024 first appeared on Federal News Network.

Most recently, federal employees who work temporarily above their pay grade will soon get paid at a higher rate for longer, according to a Dec. 27 proposed rule from OPM.

Generally, agencies can assign employees work that’s technically meant for more senior feds. And in those instances, employees working above their pay grade do get paid more. But currently, there’s a 120-day cap on how long feds can receive a higher pay rate — even if the work extends beyond that four-month period.

Under OPM’s new proposed rule, both bargaining unit and non-bargaining unit workers would be paid at a higher rate for the entire duration that they perform the work of a higher-graded position.

The proposed rule comes after the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) petitioned OPM and called on the agency to address what the union said was “significant unfairness” for employees performing more senior-level work. The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) similarly called on OPM to address the issue in 2022.

More than 20 years ago, federal employees were often given full backpay when told to perform senior-level work, without a cap on how long they could receive the higher pay rate.

But a decision from the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) in 2004 — based on an advisory opinion from OPM at the time — added a 120-day cap for the higher pay rate.

The new proposed rule aims to correct what NTEU said is an error in the interpretation of the regulations.

“OPM believes the proposed modification is a reasonable solution to address those situations where an agency may assign higher-graded duties to an employee without using competitive procedures and where a collective bargaining agreement requires a temporary promotion,” OPM said in its proposed rule.

OPM is accepting public comments until Feb. 26 and will subsequently finalize the rule after reviewing any comments.

But beyond these new regulations, there are plenty of other pay tweaks OPM has made in recent months.

Shifting the onus for approving pay bonuses

In a proposed rule from November, OPM figured out a way to offload some transactional work, while also trying to help agencies speed up the federal recruitment process.

OPM’s proposal specifically focused on the procedures for offering recruitment and relocation pay incentives for federal employees.

Currently, agencies can offer annual pay bonuses equal to 25% of an employee’s base salary for up to four years — without the need to go through OPM. Agencies can also offer larger bonuses, but OPM has to approve the higher rate before an agency can pay it out.

Now, OPM is proposing to transfer the required sign-off for approving the higher pay bonuses instead to individual agencies. After getting a signed waiver, agencies can approve annual bonuses of up to 50% of an employee’s base salary for two years.

The proposed rule, in other words, would increase the size of bonuses that agencies can internally approve for their own employees.

The goal, in part, is to “reduce administrative burden on agencies and increase the efficiency of using recruitment and relocation incentives,” OPM said.

Banning the use of salary history in hiring

Earlier in 2023, OPM proposed another tweak to federal pay, this time to address potential pay inequities that can occur during the hiring process.

An OPM proposal from May aimed to bar agencies from using a federal job candidate’s previous salary history when setting pay as part of an employment offer.

The goal is to address a pay disparity between men, and women and racial minorities, in the federal workforce.

Currently, OPM’s regulations do not require job applicants to share their salary history for an agency to make a hiring decision. But the regulations do let agencies request an applicant’s salary history, and then use that information to help set the applicant’s starting pay rate.

“Relying on a candidate’s previous salary history can exacerbate preexisting inequality and disproportionally impact women and workers of color,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said.

Under OPM’s proposal, agencies would not be allowed to consider an applicant’s salary history at all when setting pay for newly appointed federal employees.

While the gender and racial pay gaps in government are smaller than those in the nationwide workforce, OPM’s proposed regulations were a step toward the agency’s goal of completely closing the pay gap in the federal government.

Creating new regions for locality pay

Additionally, some 33,300 federal employees are about to see higher paychecks, due to OPM’s finalization of four new locality pay areas, as well as the inclusion of various new counties to existing localities.

The new localities are:

• Fresno-Madera-Hanford, California
• Reno-Fernley, Nevada
• Rochester-Batavia-Seneca Falls, New York
• Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d’Alene, Washington-Idaho

Previously, federal employees working in these areas were part of the “rest of U.S.” locality pay area. Under the new localities, they’ll receive higher pay raises than the average 5.2% for 2024.

Federal News Network has detailed more of the intricacies and history of locality pay in this story.

A desire for broader reforms remains

Although OPM has pushed forward attempts to fix several areas of the often-complicated federal pay system, larger problems still lie ahead.

For years, the President’s Pay Agent — a three-person panel of government pay leaders — has called for “major legislative reforms” to a pay system that many say has been broken for decades.

Many annual pay agent reports have pointed to flaws in the current locality pay system.

“The current pay comparison methodology used in the locality pay program ignores the fact that non-federal pay in a local labor market varies substantially between different occupational groups,” the pay agent said in its October 2023 report. “As currently applied, locality payments in a local labor market may leave some mission-critical occupations significantly underpaid while overpaying others.”

Other advocates of federal pay reform, such as the Government Managers Coalition (GMC), have called specifically for a fix to pay compression as well. A pay cap affects senior-level feds on the General Schedule and in the Senior Executive Service (SES), since their pay cannot exceed that of Level IV on the Executive Schedule. Pay compression impacts more and more feds each year.

GMC’s leaders warned that pay issues will only worsen until the administration proposes reforms for the federal government’s various pay systems and to address pay compression.

In its budget request from March 2023, the Biden administration hinted at a goal of fixing pay compression. But there is not yet a proposal publicly available from the administration.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Daisy Thornton

A new study suggests languages that developed in warmer climates tend to be louder, and those that developed in colder climates tend to be quieter.

Source: Atlas Obscura

The post 4 ways federal pay has changed in the last year first appeared on Federal News Network.

Just about a year ago, Joe Lewis took the plunge into the Senior Executive Service.

It was a leap of faith in many regards because while taking an SES position is good for your ego, good for your career, in some respects, and good for your agency, it can be hard on you, your family and eventually your checkbook if you get caught in the pay compression challenge.

Lewis, who joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as its chief information security officer in January 2023, said obtaining the SES level always has been a career goal.

“I didn’t do this for ego reasons, but more because I felt like I could improve the quality of the work environment for a greater and larger number of people. As I ascended through different levels of my career, my sphere of influence grew, and my ability to improve relations for larger groups of people grew as well,” Lewis said in an interview with Federal News Network. “By virtue of that, the Senior Executive Service was always an ultimate goal. I believe that being a member of the Senior Executive Service gives you, probably, the greatest ability to affect the largest number of people in a positive way. It was a very early career aspiration of mine, and one I’m really proud to have achieved.”

Lewis’ decision is one many senior federal executive leaders are weighing. Many employees at the GS-14 and 15 levels are wondering if the move into the SES is worth it. Does the pain of management outweigh the gain of reaching the pinnacle of your career?

The decision for many GS-14/15s may be coming sooner than they thought as the number of SESers leaving federal service reached a four-year high in 2022. The Partnership for Public Service found in new data released in July 903 members of the SES left in 2022, which was second only to the 906 who left in 2018 and the second highest since 2005. Add to that, the fact that 38.6% of all SESers are 55 years old or older, more turnover in the SES is coming.

Federal News Network executive editor Jason Miller talked with Lewis about his year in the SES and why it was one of the best decisions he ever made. The following are highlights from that conversation to inform and educate other federal employees who are considering the move into the SES.

The application process

Most SES positions heavily favor the five-page resume format that covers both the executive core qualifications (ECQs) and the MCQs, the mandatory technical qualifications, for a position. It’s a fixed format. It has very, very specific guidelines. You build in how you meet not only the ECQs, but some of the sub competencies that exist there as well. First and foremost, if you’re at all considering an SES position, I would highly recommend searching out that five-page resume format and then working from that. In many cases, a lot of people hire writers to work on these five-page resumes because they’re so hyper specific, and they need to be individually tailored to the position you’re applying to much like every other federal job application that you do. That was kind of qualifier number one was getting that five-page resume making sure I could demonstrate that I could pass the ECQ as well as hit the technical competencies that were required.

Then you just apply like everybody else. I know a lot of people think that SES is all about who you know, but I was a cold applicant off the street. I applied and then there is a review of the resumes by an executive board. The executive board determines whether or not you’d have you meet the criteria to that would potentially pass OPM certification. Only those that have the potential get referred to the hiring manager. I applied in June and in early August I got to note that I had exceeded the qualifications by the executive review board, and then I was referred to the hiring manager. About a week and a half later, I had my first interview. It was a panel interview, and it was daunting, to say the least, being able to demonstrate core competencies from the ECQs perspective, but also demonstrate that I had the technical progress and the right perspective to be an executive was a real challenge.

I guess it went well because I got invited back for a second interview, completed the second interview, and then I was asked to have a conversation with the chief operating officer of the CDC, which I did a few weeks later. Then, most like everybody else, I got a tentative job offer. They let me know that I’d been tentatively selected, but the difference between the executive service and the general schedule is the tentative selection starts the process by which you write your ECQs. You do all these other things where all of your internal approvals have to be done first, before they’ll ever send your package to the Office of Personnel Management. My ECQs were sent to OPM and I got certified on the first pass. I will tell you that writing ECQs is no picnic. Plainly put, writing ECQs is almost like taking credit for the entire class’s worth of schoolwork when you’re in fifth grade. You cannot mention that you were on a team. You can’t mention the contributions of the others that were participating. It’s almost like you have to take credit for all of it. And it’s really, for me, it almost felt disingenuous that I couldn’t acknowledge the inputs and the successes of the team. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s very much about you telling your stories on how you meet or exceed the executive board qualifications. It’s a really challenging process.

In this case, I absolutely hired a writer. The way the writing works with ECQs is you meet with a consultant. I actually had drafts of my ECQs written so I provided those first, and this is really about telling stories and each ECQ you want to tell two specific stories about how you met or exceeded the core qualifications. I provided my first draft, the writer read them and then they came back with questions. It was like an interview and they asked me a ton of questions. Then they disappeared. They called me back and had more questions. I think we did this probably three or four rounds before I ever saw the first draft of my ECQs. But when it came out, I was actually frankly, very impressed because the ECQs are written in my own voice. It’s really, really kind of disconcerting, right, honestly, that they’ve gotten to know me that well in this period of time that they could write as if they were writing from my perspective. We refined, we iterated, we did some things and then we turned them in. The process is expensive. Hiring a writer is not cheap. Without quoting numbers, it was definitely in the thousands of dollars. But you’re making an investment at that point because you’ve already been selected for a position and if you don’t pass OPM certification, you cannot accept the job. So for me, I had already got selected for the job. This was my dream job. This was the job I wanted, so paying the money made the most sense in order to expedite the review has also made sure that I didn’t risk losing the position.

One year later

I think the biggest takeaway from my first year as an executive is, I can no longer be the smartest person in the room. The sheer breadth and depth of information that I would have to know in order to be a subject matter expert on all the areas in which are my responsibility, I would go crazy trying to be the smartest person in the room on all this. Instead, what I think I learned is that not only am I not the smartest person or I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room, I want to surround myself with good people that are subject matter experts who might have developed a bond and trust with that can advise me in order to inform my decision making.

The other thing is you need to think very strategically at this level. It’s easy to get caught in the hype or tactical, I’ve got this one problem that I need to solve. If I just do this one thing, I do that thing that I can solve that problem. If you’re not thinking strategically, that’s a tactical problem, and the way you solve it could have negative effects on other aspects across the office, across the agency, in my case, since I’m making decisions at the agency level, for the cybersecurity of the agency. So thinking strategically is a must. Having good GS-15 branch chiefs or direct reports is another must. One of the questions I’m often asked, and I think this is really good for people to know, is what makes a good GS-15? How do you be a good GS-15 that reports to an SES? How do you help enable an SES as a good as a GS-15? What I tell people to be a good GS-15, you need to be able to straddle the strategic and tactical realms. Simultaneously, you are operationally focused because your job is to implement, but you also need not to lose sight of the strategic because your decisions have the ability to affect others as well. So being able to be nimble and go back and forth from that operational to strategic is really key, as well as understanding how to build and maintain relationships with your peers, partners and stakeholders. Because if not, you’ll never be able to appreciate their equities and how your decisions will affect them. So learning to trust my GS-15, building that bond of trust understanding their subject matter expertise and then being okay not being the decision maker on everything and pushing the decision making down to the lowest level where it’s possible and then trusting people to do the job and then holding them accountable if they don’t.

Work-life balance

I’m very deliberate about my work-life balance. I carve out my own time, and work-life balance for me is good. It comes in waves, for sure. There are times where it’s worse than others. But I’m certainly not working 60 hour work weeks or anything like that.

Political appointees

Working with political appointees is interesting because they end up speaking with authority that maybe the career SESers don’t have. So what really ends up happening is that things happen faster when you’ve got a political appointee involved in something. They say, ‘Hey, wow, I worked for the deputy secretary, and she’s really interested in this’ and all of a sudden you’ve got resources, you’ve got commitments, things end up happening faster. So they are all well-intentioned people and usually, agents of change in a good way.

Advice for others considering the SES

First and foremost, be honest with yourself. Do you have the capacity, the capabilities to do the job? And remember, SES is a billet, it’s not a job. You’ve got to think about what’s the job you want and can you reasonably do that job? I think that we lack self-objectivity, a lot of times and really being brutally honest with yourself. I did not apply to a SES position two years before I started, when I was asked to apply because I didn’t think I was ready. So I think you should have that hard conversation with yourself.

Part two, be prepared to spend the money to do it the right way, hire the writer, get the resume, and get the ECQs done well. But also recognize that, in some agencies, SESers are preselected, as people know who’s going to get that job. And much like every other federal position, you may apply and never hear anything ever again, so it can be a little demoralizing and it can be a desensitizing. But perseverance is key if you truly have aspirations, then you should stick with it.

The last thing I’ll say is this, do it for the right reason. Don’t join the SES because you want to paycheck increase; don’t join the SES because you get to tell people what to do; don’t apply for SES jobs because you think that it’s going to look good on our civilian resume in a few years. Do it because you believe in the mission, believe in the organization, or like for me, do it because you want to make people’s lives better. You do it because your sphere of influence grows and you have the ability to make life better for more people.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

80% percent of jobs are gained through networking and not a resume.

Source: Careerorigin

The post In reaching his career goal, Lewis shares how to navigate the path to the SES first appeared on Federal News Network.

Despite a massive push to advance diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in the federal workforce, new findings from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission show that the road ahead is still a long and tough one.

Specifically for women working in the federal government, the topline numbers look much different than they do when you slice the data by specific demographic groups.

“The barriers faced by different groups of women are sometimes hidden in larger data,” Dexter Brooks, associate director of EEOC’s Office of Federal Operations, said in a statement.

Compared with the nationwide workforce, certain minority groups of women are relatively better represented in numbers in the federal sector. For example, American Indian and Alaska Native women comprise 0.8% of the federal workforce, more than double their representation in the nationwide workforce. African American women make up 11.7% of the federal workforce, and just 6.6% of the nationwide workforce.

But notably, three of EEOC’s latest reports reveal that these demographic groups, as well as Hispanic and Latina women working for the government, are behind in two key areas: pay and leadership positions.

“This is where we start seeing that they are underrepresented as executives, managers and supervisors compared to representation in the federal sector overall,” Mxolisi “Mike” Siwatu — whose research focused on American Indian, Alaska Native and African American women in government — said in an interview with Federal News Network.

African American women, for instance, represent 7.3% of all executives in government, while women overall comprise 38.5% of federal executives.

African American women in the federal workforce:

Women overall in the federal workforce:

“Line employees, supervisors, managers and executives have different levels of influence and responsibility in the workplace,” the EEOC report said. “Participation in supervisory, managerial and executive positions is one way to measure workforce advancement.”

The findings, however, were slightly different for EEOC’s report on Hispanic and Latina women in government.

“Hispanic women and Latinas are underrepresented in the federal workforce,” Karen Brummond, author of EEOC’s report on Hispanic and Latina women in government, said in an interview. “While they made up 6.2% of the civilian labor force nationwide, they only accounted for 4.5% of federal employees.”

Aside from general underrepresentation of Hispanic and Latina women, some levels of leadership positions are seeing more positive trends than others for that demographic group.

“Hispanic and Latina women held first line supervisory positions in the federal agencies at a higher rate than their participation in the federal workforce,” Brummond said. “But like American Indian and Alaska Native women and African American women, they were underrepresented in the higher leadership positions — they were underrepresented as managers and executives.”

Pay falling short of overall federal workforce

The workforce challenges for these groups don’t end at leadership representation either. African American women generally earn less in overall salary. Specifically, they make about $26,200 less than all federal employees, and $22,800 less than all women.

Similarly, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) women working in government earn less, on average, than American Indian and Alaska Native men, women overall and employees overall.

Wage amounts paid above American Indian and Alaska Native women in government:

Hispanic and Latina women working for the federal government also experience a pay disparity compared with other, larger sectors of the government’s workforce.

“We do see a substantial gap,” Brummond said.

In general, the gender-based pay gap has improved pretty dramatically over time. The current 5.6% average pay gap significantly smaller than it was 30 years ago — 24.5%.

In other words, women currently make 94.4 cents for every dollar men make in the federal workforce.

The gender pay gap in the federal sector is also smaller than the current 16% gap in the private sector.

Of course, despite improvements, racial and gender-based pay gaps are still prevalent in the federal workforce. Figuring out where exactly the remaining pay disparities come from is complicated. The General Schedule, the government’s pay system for about 1.5 million federal employees, is relatively stringent and, to some extent, can hedge against gender-based pay gaps more so than the private sector.

But the rigidity of the General Schedule pay system is also a double-edged sword. According to federal pay experts, in addition to helping move the government toward smaller racial and gender-based pay gaps than the private sector, the pay system can cause persistent pay inequity in the federal workforce as well.

Previous research from the Government Accountability Office in 2017 found that differences in occupation tend to explain the current racial and gender-based gaps, but EEOC experts said more research is necessary.

“Within the federal government, we do still find persistent disparities across the groups with respect to pay,” Siwatu said. “Currently, we don’t have an explanation for why that’s the case.”

In fact, GAO attributed much of the government’s gender pay gap to “unexplained factors,” such as promotions and career choices, which it can’t entirely measure.

Discrimination can play a role, too, GAO has said. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, agencies may tend to choose women for certain occupations and men for others.

In May, OPM took a step to try to close that pay gap a little further. Looking to eventually fully close the gender-based pay gap in the federal workforce, OPM proposed a rule that would bar agencies from using a federal job candidate’s previous salary history when setting pay as part of an employment offer. The proposed rule is still making its way through the federal regulatory process and has not yet been finalized.

There were other factors measured in the EEOC reports, but Siwatu said the top two most telling factors were pay gaps and drop-offs in leadership positions. But getting to the root cause will take further research.

“We see that the pay gaps are there now — we acknowledge that as an emerging issue,” Siwatu said. “Then it becomes a question of why is that there, and what to do about it.”

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

In 1916, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman in US history elected to the House of Representatives.

Source: National Park Service

The post How diverse are the executives, managers and supervisors working in government? first appeared on Federal News Network.

President Joe Biden named 232 Senior Executive Service (SES), Senior-Level (SL) and Scientific and Professional (ST) members across 31 agencies who will take home an award in recognition of their extensive contributions to public service.

“Public servants are unsung heroes — working to better the lives of families across America,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said Thursday. “They do everything from making sure you get your tax refund, to helping you set up your small business, to keeping us all safe at home. They get things done with grace and skill and first and foremost to serve the American people.”

Like every year, the winners hail from a wide array of agencies and many different disciplines. The work of some of this year’s recipients, for instance, range from research on the disinfection of viral aerosols and detection of viruses at the Environmental Protection Agency, to the design, development and testing of batteries on manned space missions at NASA.

Within the PRA program, there are two categories of awards: the Distinguished Rank Award and the Meritorious Rank Award.

In any given year, about 5% of the entire senior career federal workforce will receive a Meritorious Rank Award. Only 1% earn a Distinguished Rank Award.

The winners also typically receive a cash bonus as part of the award. The Distinguished Rank Award offers a one-time bonus of 35% of the recipient’s base salary. Meritorious Rank Award winners receive a bonus equal to 20% of their base salary.

The annual Presidential Rank Awards program began in 1978 as part of the Civil Service Reform Act. The goal was to recognize the outstanding efforts of career senior leaders in the federal workforce.

The PRA program saw a brief hiatus in 2020 when President Donald Trump canceled the awards for one year due to what he said was economic uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic. For the last few years, the program has been operating virtually.

In 2021, Biden became the first president in about 15 years to publicly recognize the PRA winners.

The Office of Personnel Management helps run the PRA program by developing the criteria for agencies to submit nominations and evaluate the nominees. OPM then sends its recommendations to the president for final selection.

“Every day, tens of thousands of dedicated federal employees are solving the nation’s most pressing challenges and developing new technologies to improve the lives of millions,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said. “The Presidential Rank Awards highlight public servants who exemplify integrity, exceptional leadership and a relentless commitment to the American people. Congratulations to all the awardees. The federal government and the American people are safer and better off thanks to your hard work and dedication.”

The full list of the 2023 Presidential Rank Awards winners is available on OPM’s website.

The post President Biden names 232 winners of the 2023 Presidential Rank Awards first appeared on Federal News Network.