But even at these robust hiring rates, which the department expects to rein in due to recent budget cuts, top leaders say it’ll take years to get to a healthy level of staffing.

The Foreign Service brought in one of its largest classes of new Foreign Service officers this month, but expects its class in September will be about half as large.

The State Department, like the rest of the federal government, may be on the downturn of a feast-or-famine budget cycle — especially if lawmakers follow through on budget caps agreed to as part of debt ceiling negotiations last year.

But Marcia Bernicat, director general of the Foreign Service and director of the Bureau of Global Talent Management told Federal News Network in May that the department plans to keep hiring above attrition.

“If you look at our hiring history, just over the past 40 years, it looks like a sine curve,” Bernicat said.

The Foreign Service has a very low attrition rate, and entry-level hires have a clear career trajectory for about the next 20 years. About a third of new hires will become members of the Senior Foreign Service, which allows them to serve for another 14 years. The Foreign Service has a mandatory retirement age of 65.

“That makes workforce planning easy, right? Except for the fact that we do not get adequate funding consistently,” Bernicat said. “So when we get funding like we had the last couple of years, we hire extensively.”

The Foreign Service is currently hiring about 1,000 new employees — its highest level of hiring since 2011.

If the State Department keeps hiring at these rates, it will take until at least fiscal 2026 or 2027 to close its current staffing deficit.

“At our current rates, hiring above attrition, I won’t close the staffing deficit that we have.

Congress cut the State Department’s overall budget by about 3% overall — but those cuts disproportionately hit the Foreign Service Institute, which provides training, the department’s HR office, the Bureau of Global Talent Management and its salaries account.

“That will require us to slow hiring a bit, so that we don’t hire more people than we can pay,” Bernicat said. “The goal is to continue to hire above attrition until we can close those gaps”

The State Department’s current hiring spree is part of ongoing efforts to reverse the effects of a 16-month hiring freeze that began in 2017 under the Trump administration.

“It doesn’t take much to have a big impact,” Bernicat said about the freeze’s lasting impact.

The department is looking at bringing in more mid-career experts through its Lateral Entry Pilot Project. But the State Department needs to keep hiring more employees just to stay on top of its consular workload.

“It is, by volume, the biggest work we do,” Bernicat said. “It’s very important to both protect Americans overseas and protect the American borders through the visa programs. And we need a steady number of people coming in to do that work.”

The State Department’s lack of staff to process visas, she added, would have been more noticeable at the start of the Biden administration, had it not been for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People stopped traveling. And so that meant the demand for visas and American Citizen Services dropped off precipitously, otherwise we would not have had enough people to meet those very critical needs,” she said.

‘We recruit widely’

As part of its hiring efforts, the State Department is also casting a wider net for talent, in an effort to shake its “pale, male and Yale” reputation.

“I hear debates and opinions that say that taking into account diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in recruitment and hiring practices is weakening national security or weakening the Department of State. And I really want your listeners to understand that our greatest strength as a country is our diversity,” Bernicat said.

“How do we not make sure that we’re taking advantage of that comparative advantage in our foreign affairs workforce, specifically in the people that we’re deploying overseas — to understand the world, interpret the world and make sure the world understands what we need?” she added.

The department’s hires from the past four years studied at more than 500 different colleges and universities, and come from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Those recent hires were more likely to have come from Colorado or Montana than New York City.

About 75% of that recent cohort, Bernicat added, was mostly likely to have attended a military service academy than attend elite universities like Harvard, Princeton or Yale. About 25% of the State Department workforce are veterans, and about 18% of them have a disability.

“We recruit widely. The idea is to spread the net as far as possible to make sure that we’re getting as diverse a set of recruits as possible, but we only hire on merit,” Bernicat said. “The idea is not to give people exceptions or carve-outs. It’s been shown that the wider you cast your net, inevitably, the more diverse your results will be.”

Rebooting training disrupted by pandemic

Large portions of the State Department’s workforce are relatively new on the job and didn’t get the traditional onboarding experience. About 20 percent of the Foreign Service and 30 percent of its civil service employees were hired since March 2020.

Many of them started the job remotely and missed out on core on-the-job training because of the pandemic. Now the State Department is taking a closer look at those training gaps and helping its workforce brush up on emerging fields like AI.

“For about two years, anyone who came in from March of 2020, through the summer of 2022, would not have had anywhere close to a traditional start to their career,” Bernicat said. “They probably worked completely remotely.”

Entry-level Foreign Service officers must do at least one tour of consular work.

“But with no one traveling, there wasn’t much work to be done in terms of issuing visas, or protecting Americans, or, for that matter more broadly, managing all the official travel that comes overseas,” Bernicat said. “These are core lessons to learn in your first couple of years in the Foreign Service. But for all of our workforce, they missed a normal start to their career.”

In the last two years, the State Department has added 250 training float positions for the Foreign Service and added about 140 training float positions for our civil service employees.

“Secretary Blinken recognized, as quickly as the world is changing now, that we need to develop more of a culture for learning that rewards people for learning that gives them time out of their day.

Foreign Service Institute has also added about two dozen courses that reflect new areas of expertise for diplomatic work. Those courses are meant to support the work the department’s newest bureaus on global health security and cybersecurity.

“Most people won’t have artificial intelligence as their central work requirements. But everyone in today’s world needs to be at least minimally conversant in AI, to understand how AI could help enhance the work they do,” Bernicat said. “So, we want everyone to be able to get at least minimal training in AI, we then would want some people to get more complex learning opportunities.”

The post State of the State Department: Hiring above attrition, training a new generation of diplomats first appeared on Federal News Network.

The National Association of Postal Supervisors, in a recent post on its website, raised the alarm about a “crisis in leadership retention.”

NAPS National President Ivan Butts wrote earlier this month that a “significant number of EAS employees are leaving the USPS for other federal agencies, enticed by better pay and less-demanding working conditions.”

“That’s work objectives they’re trying to achieve,” Butts said in a recent interview. “And then they’re being viewed by the leadership in these other agencies as superstars, just because of how they were so overburdened. Working at this agency, I guess, made them tend to go at it harder at what they do.”

Butts, speaking last year at a summit on labor issues hosted by the USPS Office of Inspector General, said USPS is losing candidates to private-sector businesses that can offer better starting pay and better hours, at a time when unemployment rates are historically low.

The Postal Service disputes NAPS’ claims. USPS spokesman David Walton told Federal News Network that the agency has a retention rate of more than 96% for management employees.

“Historically, we develop and promote from within the organization and have an excellent retention rate when it comes to our management employees, particularly our front-line supervisors and managers,” Walton said.

Edmund Carley, national president of United Postmasters and Managers of America (UPMA), said he’s seen some colleagues leave USPS to take jobs at other agencies, such as the Social Security Administration. However, he said USPS isn’t seeing problems retaining management-level employees.

“They take a little bit less money, but it’s steady hours, no weekend work, a lot less stress,” he said about managers at other federal agencies. “It’s not easy being an entry-level manager in the [Postal] Service. It never has been. The difference now, especially if you’re in D.C., there’s other opportunities to go into federal employment.”

Among its concerns, NAPS said USPS is promoting newly hired employees to EAS roles with little to no knowledge of USPS operations, and that supervisors are rapidly promoted into mid-level and senior leadership positions with little-to-no knowledge of agency operations.

Butts said new supervisors may get an initial two or three weeks of training before running operations.

“After that, they’re on their own. They need them on the floor to run their operations. They’re short-handed already,” Butts said. “As some of these people are coming in, they’re getting no training at all, and the first time they make a mistake, they’re being fired with no recourse.”

Carley, however, said nearly all USPS managers started off as craft employees — letter carriers, mail handlers and postal clerks — and understand the agency’s frontline work.

“Nobody walked in off the street,” Carley said, adding that supervisor skills are “something you have to learn on the job.”

“You can’t teach somebody. I don’t know how long a training course would have to be to qualify somebody to be a delivery supervisor. You’ve got to learn on the job. You’ve got to have some rudimentary knowledge of how carriers operate and how the routes are set up. And then you’ve just got to do it, and you have to learn by doing,” he added.

USPS supervisor vacancies shrinking

The USPS inspector general’s office, in a report released Friday, said the Postal Service saw a 7% vacancy rate nationwide in fiscal 2023, its lowest point in recent years.

The watchdog report states USPS is close to meeting its goal of hitting a 5% nationwide vacancy rate for frontline supervisors, but said vacancies can vary widely by region.

“Although the nationwide vacancy rate is relatively low, some locations are experiencing vacancy rates three times as high as the goal,” the report states.

USPS, for example, is seeing a 17 to 18% vacancy rate for supervisors who oversee processing operations in the Great Lakes, and a 15% vacancy for retail and delivery supervisors in northern Illinois.

USPS ended fiscal 2023 with more than 22,000 supervisors. About 88% of them oversaw customer services, distribution operations, maintenance operations and logistics.

The agency also hosted four virtual frontline supervisor job fairs and 55 career conferences for current employees to learn about frontline supervisor positions last year.

USPS added about 2,300 new relief supervisor positions in June 2023. Eligible facilities can receive a relief supervisor for every full-time supervisor authorized.

Relief supervisors are meant to cover for regular supervisors during their scheduled days off and annual leave and are meant to reduce USPS reliance on acting supervisors.

“Relief supervisors work a non-standard, flexible schedule to cover tours and facilities within a designated commuting distance, all with potential minimal advance notice,” USPS OIG wrote.

Carley said new supervisors often feel pressure to perform early in their positions, and that higher-ups now have more real-time data on how any USPS facility is performing.

“What technology has wrought is the ability for my boss, my boss’s boss, my boss’s boss’s boss and his boss too up in headquarters to get on a spreadsheet, click twice, and now they’re looking to my office and want to know why that carrier was sitting at that gas station for 22 minutes, when they should only have been 20 — and I need to know an answer right now, he said.

“The pressure is heightened. Now that’s a good thing, too, because now you can create efficiencies with your workforce, because they know they’re being supervised at all times,” he added. “The art is, how do you disseminate that information, without threatening people’s jobs — which they do way more often than they should, or making somebody feel less than.”

NAPS is requesting access to “exit forms” EAS employees are required to submit before they leave USPS — to see how many supervisors the agency is losing to retirement, terminations or leaving for another federal agency — but Butts wrote that the group has been “thwarted in our attempts to validate this trend.”

“Those two kinds of narratives really point to a bigger problem,” Butts said. “One that leadership has the staff to do the job, and one that EAS leaders have in being felt like they’re valued in all aspects of their job.”

USPS management faces Reduction in Force

Butts said postal supervisors are also dealing with a Reduction in Force (RIF) that’s eliminating some positions.

Federal News Network first reported in May 2021 that USPS started sending layoff notices to non-bargaining unit employees after sending voluntary early retirement offers to its eligible management employees.

Management-level employees who receive a RIF notice, however, are able to apply for similar positions to avoid leaving the agency altogether.

“There are so many vacancies in the ranks of EAS and managers that there should be landing spots as we move forward,” Butts said.

The RIFs, he added, may affect about 70 to 80 supervisor positions. However, Butts said the association isn’t clear on the full extent of the RIFs, especially after USPS announced it would pause some network modernization changes until at least January 2025.

“They issued these RIF letters to these employees and disrupted their whole life. Then a week later, they issued rescinding letters to some of them, because their methodology was wrong. Now they say their methodology was right,” Butts said.

Walton said USPS “has a strong track record of finding job opportunities for RIF-impacted employees through RIF avoidance processes and we believe that will be the case with the current RIF process.

“As infrastructure and operating plans are made there is a need for staffing changes. We implement the changes in accordance with the federal Reduction-in-Force (RIF) regulations,” he added. “With the latest operational changes, there have been adjustments to the allocation of management employees in certain designated postal operations.”

Butts linked supervisor retention challenges to recent problems with on-time mail delivery in areas where USPS is modernizing its network modernization plans.

However, lawmakers representing regions that saw the worst of these delays — such as Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia — say on-time performance is improving.

“We’re not hearing much of anything like we were in the past, because we’re at the lowest volume period of the year,” Butts said.  “But my prediction is that when the fall mailing season comes in, all those issues that we had will rear their heads again, because the leadership of this agency has still continuously failed to address its staffing problem.”

The post USPS supervisors fear ‘exodus’ among their ranks, but data shows high retention first appeared on Federal News Network.

In a 6-3 ruling last month in the case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court eliminated Chevron deference — a legal precedent since 1984 that required judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of relevant laws when its regulations are challenged in court.

Legal experts are still puzzling out what will change for regulatory agencies following the court’s decision.  But Republican lawmakers aren’t wasting any time planning out subsequent steps to roll back the administrative state.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) is leading colleagues in letters to 101 agencies that have published more than 50 rules since 2000. The lawmakers are “demanding answers on how current regulatory processes will be handled following the Loper Bright decision.”

Republican senators are also backing the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, a House-passed bill that would codify an end to Chevron deference.

The senators have also launched a working group meant to explore other ways to challenge the administrative state.

Schmitt said these efforts are meant to “retake legislative authority away from administrative agencies and place it back where it belongs: the Article I branch.”

Meanwhile, the top Republicans on two House committees are looking for agency regulations that might be challenged following the court’s ruling.

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) joined House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) in asking the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Transportation and Homeland Security about regulations or regulatory decisions made under the Biden administration.

The chairmen say some of these agency rules are based on interpretations of the law that could be challenged following the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“The Biden Administration has promulgated far more major rules, imposing far more costs and paperwork burdens, than either of its recent predecessor administrations,” Comer and Graves wrote.

Despite lawmakers’ renewed interest in the topic, policy experts and former lawmakers say Congress currently lacks the necessary bandwidth to take back some of the regulatory authority they ceded to the executive branch over the years.

Former Sen. Toomey (R-Pa.) said lawmakers, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, may renew efforts to pass the REINS Act.

The bill, which passed the House in May 2023, would require Congress to vote on major agency regulations before they go into effect.

“At a minimum, you ought to have this rulemaking require the affirmative action of Congress. And then the American people can hold Congress accountable if it doesn’t like the rule. It can take that out on its member of Congress, as well it should. But what do you do when the EPA overreaches the Clean Water Act, or when the SEC decides it’s going to prevent a whole new technology like blockchain from even being able to take hold. And the list goes on and on,” Toomey said Tuesday.

Toomey, speaking at a “Life After Chevron” event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, said some agencies — including the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Securities and Exchange Commission — are taking on regulatory and enforcement activities that stray from what they’re authorized to do under the law.

“We have agencies whose leaders have decided they’ve got an agenda that they’re pursuing. They’re not there to impartially implement the laws that pertain to their jurisdiction. Rather, they’re there to implement a particular agenda. They hire very capable, very creative attorneys to go out and justify somehow what it is that they want to do,” Toomey said. “They discover some power that no one previously had discovered in authorizing legislation, and they say, ‘There you go, that’s what authorizes me.’”

But beyond reintroducing the legislation in the next session of Congress, following this year’s elections, Toomey said Congress likely doesn’t have the capacity to take on a greater role in the rulemaking process.

“Congress has other bigger problems,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect a big change in behavior in Congress. I don’t think the agencies will start to change their behavior. I think they’ll be a little less ambitious in this regard.”

AEI Senior Fellow Philip Wallach said lawmakers went on a “letter-writing blitz” following the Supreme Court ruling, with the goal of challenging agency regulations.

“Basically, the approach is to send out a letter and say, ‘Hey, now that Chevron is gone, you’d better go back and look at what you did and fix it, because we know that you were getting away with murder before, and now you’ve got to go back and clean up your act.’ Well, the spirit of that is wrong,” Wallach said.

“The thing we need most is for Congress to realize that it’s on them to shoulder their constitutional prerogatives,” he added. “There’s such a tendency for legislators, when they want something done, to write a letter to the executive branch and say, ‘I’m a congressman, listen to me. Do this with your executive branch authority. And even this, where we say you’ve been abusing your executive branch authority, the reaction is, ‘You go fix it, executive branch.’ Congress has to take it upon itself to fix it. You can’t just say, ‘Well I think you’re using the Clean Air Act wrong, let me shake my fist some more about it. Well, go ahead and rewrite the act, and be more specific about what you wanted.”

AEI Senior Fellow Kevin Kosar said the REINS Act could give lawmakers a greater say in the federal rulemaking process.

“It’s a way to force legislators out of this unhealthy dynamic,” Kosar said. “What they frequently do is they let the executive branch make policy decisions and then, if they like them, they cheer. If they don’t like them, they hoot at them until you get somebody new in the White House who decides to switch regulations on certain topics like immigration, for example. And again, there’s cheers from some, hoots from others. Inevitably, there’s a court case. That’s what happens when legislative power seeps away from the legislative branch. You seldom get a healthy resolution of a tough issue.”

However, Kosar said the REINS Act also creates the possibility that lawmakers don’t put pending rules to a vote — stalling them from going into effect.

“If they don’t put it on the calendar, does nothing happen? I think the answer is, yeah, nothing happens. So where does that leave the agency? Well, it’s in a weird limbo, where presumably, it’s going to go back and create a new regulation, which could be substantially similar. Or they could try to break it up into pieces and therefore get it under the limit and work it through,” he said.

Wallach and Kosar co-wrote a 2016 article proposing the creation of a Congressional Regulation Office, which would give the legislative branch the capacity to analyze agency rulemaking the same way the Congressional Budget Office reviews the federal government’s finances.

Absent that kind of legislative branch agency, however, Kosar said Congress doesn’t have the time to analyze the thousands of rules agencies propose every year.

“Regulation is a very tough thing, and if Congress is going to move it into its workflow, well guess what? Congress’ workflow right now is already kind of spilling over,” Kosar said. “If you’re going to lean in on regulation, you’re going to need help, because you can’t just pick this up and spitball it. It takes a lot of education, thinking, and expertise — and there’s just not enough of it on Capitol Hill. And as any congressional staffer will tell you, they don’t need anything more added to their work plate — they are plenty busy.”

Wallach added that the Supreme Court’s ruling — and the chief justice’s opinion — make it clear that agencies’ subject-matter expertise still matters when it comes to agency rulemaking.

“Expertise is not one thing. Agencies do have subject-matter domain expertise. The EPA has tons of experts on toxicity and all other sorts of aspects of environmental and health sciences. Agencies also have policy expertise and practical administrative expertise. But when you’re considering ambiguous statutes, you also need to think about legal expertise,” he said.

Roberts, in the court’s majority opinion, wrote that by overruling Chevron’s deference, “the Court does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.”

Rachel Augustine Potter, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, said the court’s Chevron ruling and the Trump administration’s promise to bring back Schedule F — making it easier to fire federal employees in policymaking positions — indicates a multi-pronged attack on agency expertise.

However, she doubts Congress is willing to devote more time and resources to play a more active role in agency rulemaking.

“There’s not a lot of confidence that Congress is going to take up the mantle on legislative capacity front and take up the project of more detailed statues. Instead, what we heard about is about different bills that have been introduced that would constrain agency authority,” Potter said.

Potter said agencies might decide to staff up on lawyers, and that policymaking federal employees might leave their agencies.

“We might also see more exits from agencies, as career civil servants look at this landscape and say, ‘Wow I thought I was coming into this institution, which for a long time has looked a certain way and might be really different going forward. My expertise … might not be the same as what I thought it was when I took this job.’ There’s a lot of different implications, and I think we’re going to spend the next couple of months and years figuring out what agencies actually do.”

The post GOP lawmakers see post-Chevron opportunity to ‘retake’ power from regulatory agencies. Experts doubt it’ll work first appeared on Federal News Network.

House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) says chief financial officers from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) told the committee Monday that they face a $2.88 billion shortfall for the rest of this fiscal year, and a nearly $12 billion shortfall for fiscal 2025.

The VA gets funding for its mandatory health and benefits programs a year before the current fiscal year to avoid any disruption from a government shutdown.

The CFOs, Bost added, attributed the funding discrepancy to increased hiring and pharmaceutical costs.

In a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, Bost said the $15 billion funding gap is the VA’s largest budget shortfall, “and a repudiation of the FY 2025 budget request that the Biden-Harris administration presented just four months ago.”

“Not only have your chief financial officers thrown out the dollar amounts requested for many key accounts, they have abandoned many of the estimates and projections that underpinned their budget. This is not just fiscal mismanagement; it is strategic whiplash,” he wrote.

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes confirmed the department’s projected budget deficits in a statement to reporters Thursday morning.

“VA is working closely with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to resolve these potential shortfalls in a way that prevents any adverse impacts on veterans — and allows us to continue to deliver care and benefits to veterans at record rates,” Hayes said.

The VA, he added, is delivering record levels of health care and benefits to veterans under the 2022 PACT Act, which expanded veterans’ eligibility for VA health care and benefits if they were exposed to toxic substances during their military service.

Since President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act, more than 710,000 veterans have enrolled in VA health care, a more than 34% increase compared to the same period before the legislation.

VBA also expects to break new records this year for the volume of disability benefits claims it’ll pay out to veterans.

“These important results for veterans and survivors exceeded initial expectations,” Hayes said.

The VA, in its FY 2025 budget request, planned to reduce its workforce headcount by 10,000 employees — with most of those jobs coming from VHA.

However, Bost said VHA is now looking at a staffing increase of 22,000 full-time employees over the same period. About 17,000 employees, he added, have already been hired, and VHA is looking to hire another 5,000 employees.

“Hiring quality health care workers is difficult enough without a constantly moving target,” he wrote.

VHA hired more than 61,000 employees last year — its fastest rate of growth in 15 years. The agency grew its total workforce by more than 7% and now has more than 400,000 employees for the first time in its history.

In addition, efforts to boost retention also led to a 20% decrease in turnover between 2022 and 2023.

McDonough told reporters in February that VHA is managing its workforce with a “tighter fiscal picture,” but added that the department is taking a more targeted approach to hiring, after the agency exceeded its hiring targets last year.

“Where we’re not hiring, it’s not because we haven’t been able to hire. It’s because we don’t have a need. Why would we not have a need? Because we just had a great year of hiring,” McDonough said Feb. 26 at a monthly press conference at VA headquarters.

VHA, in some cases, has rescinded tentative and final job offers it made to prospective hires. But the agency ordered a “strategic pause” on rescinding job offers in January, and later issued a memo directing VA health care facilities to only rescind job offers “as an action of last resort.”

VA officials have repeatedly stated the department isn’t under a hiring freeze. However, a lengthy hiring process — even by the federal government’s standards — is frustrating job applicants, especially those who have accepted tentative job offers, but have yet to receive a final job offer.

Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal told VHA employees, in a Feb. 5 email obtained by Federal News Network, that following last year’s record hiring, “we have the nationwide staffing level we need to accomplish this important mission — and we have the funding we need to care for veterans through 2024 and into 2025.”

“As responsible stewards of these funds, we must make thoughtful decisions about resource use at every level of the enterprise,” Elnahal wrote. “This means that we will not be hiring at the same rate we did last year but let me be clear: there is no hiring freeze, we will continue to hire in key areas, and we will do everything in our power to continue supporting our current workforce.”

Bost is asking McDonough if the VA is seeing “significant, unexpected changes in demand for in-house care” since Elnahal’s email to employees. If the agency isn’t seeing a sudden change in demand, he’s asking the department to explain the need for increased staffing.

“Given Under Secretary for Health Elnahal’s announced policy of nationwide hiring restrictions and managing by attrition, I think veterans and employees deserve a much better explanation of where these 22,304 FTE are being hired,” Bost wrote.

Bost said the VA has repeatedly shifted regular expenses out of its base budget and into the Toxic Exposures Fund, which was created under the PACT Act.

“VA’s budget has become increasingly complicated and reliant on gimmicks, apparently to compensate for the expiration of one-time, pandemic-related supplemental funding,” Bost wrote. “This has created a situation where one bad estimate or unanticipated event can create a shortfall in multiple accounts.”

The VA, for example, is seeing an increase in community care costs for veterans to receive health care outside the VA medical system.  But Bost said the department isn’t covering those increased costs in its base budget — “seemingly straining, if not breaking, the limits of what the Toxic Exposures Fund can pay for.”

Bost said VA’s compensation and pension costs are running below its budget projects, so far this fiscal year. But VBA typically sees those costs surge at the end of the fiscal year — especially with an increase in claims submitted under the PACT Act.

VBA processed 1.98 million disability benefits claims and issued $163 billion in total benefits in FY 2023. Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs recently told reporters that VBA is on pace to process 30% more claims in fiscal 2024 compared to last year.

The agency, so far this year, has awarded $112 billion to veterans and their survivors in compensation and benefits. VBA also recently granted its millionth benefits claim under the PACT Act.

VA told the committee it anticipates a more than $3.8 billion increase in pharmaceutical and prosthetics spending across FY 2024 and 2025.

Bost said VHA’s chief financial officer also suggested that the Change Healthcare ransomware attack may be to blame for some of VA’s budget shortfalls. The ransomware affected many public and private health care systems across the country.

The VA is shifting $700 million in medical collections from this fiscal year to FY 2025 because of the ransomware attack.

The post VA warns of historic $15B budget shortfall. House committee says more hiring ‘above all’ is driving up costs first appeared on Federal News Network.

An independent board created by Congress finds agencies are sitting on more real estate than they need, and could recover billions of dollars by selling off excess space.

Members of the Public Buildings Reform Board say agencies have a unique opportunity to offload some of their excess space, if hybrid work is here to stay for federal employees.

“The board views this current reality as an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the government to right-size its portfolio,” Paul Walden, the board’s executive director, said at a PBRB meeting last Thursday.

But time is running out. The board, under the FASTA legislation, is scheduled to disband by May 2025.

“The clock is ticking against us,” Walden said.

Lawmakers are looking to extend the board’s tenure through the end of 2026 and give it additional authority. But none of those bills are close to passing.

Dan Mathews, former commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service and the PBRB’s newest member, said the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact means federal buildings are even more underutilized than when the board first started its work.

“Congress got frustrated that they saw a need for disposals, yet nothing was going through the process — or almost nothing — in respect to the need. And that problem is, in a way, worse now, because there’s so much more need,” Mathews said.

GSA has sold 10 of a dozen properties on PBRB’s list of high-value recommendations, and expects to sell another property by the end of July.

Former Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), another member of the PBRB, said the board has had some “tremendous successes,” but still has a lot of work ahead of it.

“Today, it appears that much of the status quo has not changed,” Rahall said. “We have problems getting information, we have problems with a lot of the agencies and trying to convince them to really relocate or consolidate. But we’re going to do it — we’re going to get our work done.”

Board members see plenty of opportunities to sell underutilized office space in major cities across the country.

PBRB is looking at 27 high-value federal properties in cities with a strong federal presence. Those include D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Miami and Los Angeles.

The board finds most of this 11 million square feet of federal office space is underutilized, and that agencies could save billions of dollars in the long term by eliminating about 60% of this space.

If agencies got rid of nearly 7 million square feet of excess office space in these major metro areas, board expects that could save more than $3 billion over the next 30 years.

Walden says those savings include the sale of excess properties, as well as eliminating operating costs and maintenance of older, non-historic properties.

“We have all these buildings that are vastly underutilized, and the operating expenses are extraordinary, if you look at it on a per-person cost,” he said. “If you did some disposals and some consolidations, the savings are astronomical.”

Walden said the board’s analysis of these 27 federal properties isn’t part of any of its final recommendations and is currently a “hypothetical scenario.”

He also said the board isn’t looking at relocating federal employees out of the cities where they’re already working.

PBRB member David Winstead, another former PBS commissioner, said part of the problem is the federal portfolio is larger than what GSA can pay to keep in good working order.

That leads to office conditions that federal employees don’t want to work in.

“It’s a huge cost to the taxpayer to maintain these buildings that are no longer competent to be competitive, nice workspaces for federal employees. Many of the major historic ones we need to keep, and I think the board’s committed to that,” Winstead said.

GSA-owned buildings are, on average, over 50 years old, and showing their age. The agency is dealing with a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog.

Mathews says this problem is particularly apparent in downtown D.C.

“If we walked down Independence Avenue together, I’d point out over $4 billion worth of liabilities in the owned buildings before we get to the end of the street,” Mathews said. “That’s just in one street in one city.”

Another problem is that federal agencies don’t always want to relocate.

“We’re hearing from federal agencies that don’t want to move,” Winstead said. “GSA is still getting resistance from those agencies. Whether their names are on the building or not, it is not defensible for them to take a position like that now.”

Former Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Mass.), another PBRB member, said the board understands it’s not always easy to convince agencies to move.

“There is a debate right now as to whether GSA has the legal authority to require agencies to move. Some people say they do, GSA says it doesn’t,” Capuano said. “That’s one thing we should clarify whether they do or they don’t.”

The board is scheduled to submit its final round of recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget in December.

Walden says the board’s work has generated “quite a lot of interest” from lawmakers. PBRB members have briefed House and Senate committee members about a dozen times since this spring.

Walden says the board also recently convened a roundtable with commercial real estate to discuss the next steps.

“What do you think needs to happen going forward to effect change? Do you need to stand up a new commission? Do you need to give PBRB more authority, GSA more authority, OMB more authority? What needs to happen? What can we tell Congress to affect this transformation going forward?” he said.

Lawmakers are pressing agencies on underutilized space.

That’s because the Government Accountability Office found last summer that all agency headquarters buildings in the Washington, D.C. area had excess space, including 17 that had an average building utilization of just 25%.

PBRB went one step further. It estimates federal headquarters buildings operated at 12% of their estimated capacity, on average, between January and September 2023.

Mathews says agencies can’t justify having that much space, and not putting it to good use.

“What’s happening now is a completely indefensible amount of money is being spent on quantity of real estate, and quality is absolutely horrible,” Mathews said. “I don’t blame our federal employees who never want to come back into the office.

“It’s just the same thing over and over and over again. They’re empty, they have capital liabilities that are so far beyond the available resources,” he added. “There is no economic path forward for those buildings, period, bar none. So why aren’t we seeing more properties through the normal disposal process?”

Since 2020, GSA has shed about 8 million square feet of office space. It now oversees about 371 million square feet of federal real estate.

Elliot Doomes, the current commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, recently told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that GSA can deliver on their demands to sell or dispose of underutilized federal buildings.

That’s as long as Congress approves funds meant to relocate federal employees to new office space.

“We’re going to have to spend some money in order to save some money,” he said.

GSA is asking Congress for a $425 million “optimization” fund in next year’s budget. The funding would help agencies move out of underutilized office space.

Doomes said this funding proposal would help GSA improve building utilization.

“Although it’s agency by agency, I’ll tell you, the trend is agencies are giving up space. They understand,” Doomes told lawmakers. “We’re bringing our workspace experts to work with these agencies to say, ‘How often are people there? What kind of work do you do? Maybe you don’t need all that space.’ Let’s give some of that space back,” Doomes said.

The post Federal buildings board: Agencies can save billions by shedding ‘vastly underutilized’ office space first appeared on Federal News Network.

SBA is planning to upgrade its online certification platform, starting on Aug. 1. The agency wrote on its website that the upgraded system would be available for new applications by early September.

SBA says it will not accept new certification applications during the upgrade period.

“New and prospective applicants for federal small business certification are encouraged to wait until the upgrade is complete before applying,” the agency wrote on its website.

But Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee Ranking Member Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and House Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams (R-Texas) are calling on SBA to delay its upgrade of the platform until the end of fiscal 2024.

Lawmakers, in a letter to SBA Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman, say taking the certification platform offline in the final months of fiscal 2024 would create a “harmful timeline,” and cause problems for firms with critical year-end contracting deadlines that may need to recertify their small-business status to keep doing business with the federal government.

“Once again, the SBA is putting small businesses last and forcing them to navigate a bureaucratic mess,” Ernst and Williams told Federal News Network in a statement. “Shutting down the certification portal right before the end of the fiscal year, the busiest time for applications, without a clear timeframe for reopening is completely unacceptable.”

Federal agencies award a large portion of their contracts in September, just before the end of the fiscal year.

“While we agree with the decision to improve this critical technology platform, we are deeply concerned with the ill-conceived timeline and lack of consideration the SBA has shown towards small businesses in making this decision,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the agency. “Closing the certification portal during this critical juncture, especially as such upgrades do not appear to be time-sensitive or essential, displays a worrisome insensitivity to small businesses new to federal contracting.”

SBA wrote most small businesses already certified by the agency would not be impacted by the pause in applications. The agency said it would send guidance to small firms needing to renew their SBA certification during the upgrade period.

SBA is encouraging prospective small business applicants to wait until the upgrade is finished to apply.

Lawmakers, however, are concerned SBA hasn’t provided a set date, beyond “early September,” or shared any contingency plans, in case the upgrade project runs into unexpected delays.

“Lacking such information, it is unclear why the SBA needs to undertake this massive disruption in services in August,” they wrote.

SBA’s anticipated upgrade would impact all its socioeconomic set-asides contracting programs:

• Women-owned small businesses (WOSB)
• Economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses (EDWOSB)
• Veteran-owned small businesses (VOSB)
• Service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses (SDVOSB)
• Historically underutilized business zones (HUBZone)

SBA published a final rule last month that will eliminate self-certification for Service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses whose contracts or subcontracts with the federal government count toward its small-business contracting goals. The final rule will go into effect on Aug. 5.

“As SDVOSBs have recently been told that they need to apply for certification, new registrants may be dismayed to learn they are unable to do so,” Ernst and Williams wrote. “After serving our country with honor, America’s service-disabled veterans should not face unnecessary hardships or delays in pursuing contract opportunities as they seek new certification.”

In January 2023, SBA took over the work of certifying new veteran-owned small businesses through its Veteran Small Business Certification (VetCert) program. The Department of Veterans Affairs previously certified these firms, but Congress moved this work over to SBA in the FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.

As part of the transition, SBA brought over 13 former VA employees and made seven additional hires last year. It also brought over 50 contractor employees who previously worked at VA to handle application processing and operate its call center.

SBA chose not to migrate VA’s certification management system. Instead, the SBA brought all its certification and loan programs onto a unified digital platform called MySBA.

The lawmakers said it remains unclear if upgrades to the online certification platform would impact the VetCert or MySBA portals.

Ernst and Williams said SBA notified their committees about the certification system upgrade in a “last-minute call” on June 13.

“The sudden announcement of an impending certification shutdown does not provide enough time for small businesses to react or reorganize,” they wrote. “Many small businesses are likely to remain unaware of this development until the moment they seek to access the certification portal, only to discover it is nonoperational.”

The lawmakers also said SBA hasn’t done enough to make small businesses aware of the upcoming changes, or advise impacted firms on how to renew their small-business certifications ahead of the planned outage.

“It is unreasonable for the SBA to assume full public awareness by simply posting information buried on its website, less than six weeks prior to the system shutdown,” Ernst and Williams wrote. “It is also unclear whether the SBA has appropriately informed its resource partners, as it will impact the services those entities can provide.”

According to the letter, SBA assured lawmakers and their staff that “there was little need for concern, as SBA had an excellent technical team.”

However, Ernst and Williams said SBA Acting Chief Information Officer Stephen Kucharski was not on the call, and that SBA officials did not say if the agency was relying on external contractors to assist with the portal upgrade.

Among their requests, Ernst and Williams are asking SBA for alternative plans that would allow the agency to keep accepting and processing certification requests during the update, “as opposed to a full shutdown.”

The lawmakers are asking SBA for a full list of the intended upgrades to the certification platform, and how the upgrades will improve the customer experience for small firms going through the certification process, as well as flagging fraudulent applications.

Ernst and Williams are asking SBA to provide responses to their full rundown of more than a dozen questions by Friday, July 19.

SBA, over the past few years, phased out the ability for companies to self-certify as small, disadvantaged businesses that are eligible to compete for federal set-aside contracts.

The agency finalized a rule in 2020 that allowed some participants in its Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) program to self-certify their eligibility.

A provision in the 2015 NDAA mandated SBA put an end to the self-certifications.

The Government Accountability Office reported in March 2019 that about 40% of the WOSB-certified businesses in its audit sample were ineligible to participate in the program. GAO also expressed concerns about the performance of several third-party WOSB certifiers

More than one in four dollars spent on federal contracts go to small businesses.

The federal government exceeded its overall small business contracting goal in fiscal 2023. Ten agencies received an “A+” for meeting their small business contracting goals, and another two agencies received “A” grades.

The post GOP lawmakers demand SBA postpone IT upgrades amid year-end contract spending surge first appeared on Federal News Network.

Dave Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, which represents some FAA employees, said the agency is also short on technicians, which can result in longer equipment outages and more flight delays.

“Having fewer technicians than needed can result in inadequate shift coverage. This means we do not have the right person available to resolve a crisis when it occurs,” Spero told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s aviation subcommittee at a hearing Wednesday.

Spero said it can take a newly hired FAA technician years to fully complete their training.

The FAA is also dealing with a shortage of 3,000 air traffic controllers. Subcommittee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) said the FAA’s staffing issues are becoming more apparent with attrition outpacing hiring.

“You’re seeing great disparity with retirements in air traffic controllers and the hiring — meaning that they’re not keeping pace with the hiring pipeline with those that are retiring,” Graves said.

The Transportation Security Administration says a record 3 million people flew the Sunday after the Fourth of July, and that eight of the 10 busiest days for air travel took place after May 24.

“You look at the stresses today, you look at the industry today. In the future, this is just going to grow greater and greater,” Graves said.

Spero said the FAA analysis shows lower staffing of FAA technicians translates into more longer and more frequent maintenance issues.

A radar system problem in Chicago earlier this summer temporarily led to a ground stop of flights.

Spero said there was no technician on site with the skills needed fix the issue quickly, and that an off-duty technician had to be called in to fix the issue.

“Air traffic controllers were seeing multiple targets on their displays. The only solution at that particular point was to put a ground stop in place because they did not know where the aircraft were,” Spero said.  “That problem would have been resolved if they had the right number of people with the right amount of training. And that was a conscious decision made by the agency there in Chicago to say, we don’t need anyone on staff that has that training right now.”

Spero said the FAA is also using an “insufficient” staffing model for its aviation safety inspector workforce.

FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker recently told the Senate Commerce Committee that more inspectors are being sent to oversee Boeing and its suppliers, following the fatal crashes of two 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed more than 340 people.

Spero said PASS recognized the need for greater oversight of Boeing, but said this oversight work is spreading the rest of the FAA inspection workforce thin.

“We do not know where the agency is transferring these inspectors from and if the oversight of other manufacturers or airlines will be impacted,” Spero said. Simply moving inspectors from other manufacturing environments is not a solution.”

The FAA has been developing a technical operations staffing model for over a decade. Spero is urging the agency to focus on the retention of current employees and to provide them with opportunities for career growth.

“We lose people and we’re not able to replace them. And we don’t have that pipeline coming in. We’re not prepared to replace someone when they leave,” Spero said.

Ranking Member Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said the number of certified professional controllers has declined for more than a decade, and that most facilities across the country have a shortage of air traffic controllers.

The FAA, he added, is “slowly recovering” from a temporary suspension of training at its academy at the height of the pandemic.

“Historical staffing challenges facing air traffic organization technicians, such as increased workload without additional resources and training, exacerbate these ongoing workforce bottlenecks,” Cohen said.

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The Office of Management and Budget has designated 38 agencies and program offices as High-Impact Service Providers (HISPs).

Matt Mandrgoc, the head of U.S. Public Sector at Zoom, said optimizing the employee experience is key to improving their level of customer experience.

“When the employees are happy, they’re productive, they’re able to do their job. That can flow right over into the customer experience. We’ve seen with some of the HISPs, the biggest thing they have is that if those employees are working and they’re doing well, that experience flows right over into the customer experience,” Mandrgoc said.

Agencies setting a higher standard for customer experience focus are optimizing the time they spend with their customers — and making sure employees are addressing customer needs effectively.

“You want to have the opportunity to get the most out of the time that you’re spending with someone,” Mandrgoc said. “You have someone’s attention for a short period of time — how did you get that information? How did you disseminate the information, and did the customer receive it in the easiest and most simplistic way that they can?”

Improving the employee experience often comes down to giving the workforce the tools they need to do their jobs most effectively.

“When you look at employee experience, it’s about productivity, it’s about having the right tools in place that allow them to get their job done,” Mandrgoc said.

Refreshing CX tools

Agencies are refreshing the tools and technology behind their customer experience, but Mandrgoc said they should also think about the resources employees need to deliver those public-facing services.

“An agency will say, ‘We need to use this solution for our customers because it provides the best experience. But you have to use this other solution internally for internal use only.’ And it sends a message to employees that for the customer experience, we’re going to use these technologies or these solutions to give the greatest optimized customer experience, but not allowing that to happen on the employee side.

Both federal employees and customers have higher expectations for the types of technologies agencies are using, and are less likely to engage with agencies if they aren’t making IT modernization part of their CX portfolios.

“The biggest challenge that agencies are running into right now are legacy systems and forced technologies that don’t allow that growth to happen, and be able to get it to the next level. And this is where it’s incumbent on industry to really share those best practices,” Mandrgoc said.

Federal employees, he added, are more likely to feel engaged in their work if they have the tools to effectively do their jobs and provide services to the public.

“If you don’t have the tools out there from the employee side, it doesn’t allow them to do the job and be productive. So they’re going to be more likely to look outside,” Mandrgoc said.

Gathering feedback through focus groups

To improve both the customer experience and the employee experience, Mandrgoc said agencies should think beyond survey data, and gather feedback directly from individuals in focus groups.

“While people are serving and doing things, you have to poll a segment of people who are doing the job out there, and the customers and their experience and asking them specifically, what did you like? What did you not like?” Mandrgoc said. “We all look at metrics as a way to do things. But metrics can also be changed. You can set a high bar, or you can set a low bar. It’s understanding what the feedback is from those experiences. What are they? What are they measuring, how are they measuring it.”

Mandrgoc said meaningful improvements in the customer and employee experience require agency leaders to keep making sustained investments in what’s working.

“Impactful changes sometimes can take time. You have to realize that you sometimes can be fighting against internal challenges or battles on what culturally is going on in that space. You could also be fighting around legacy or forced technology that is being pushed on groups to do things in a certain way,” he said.

Creating better experiences in a hybrid world

Agencies scrambled to develop a largely remote work culture at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But agencies are still figuring out how to effectively hold virtual meetings — with some employees in the office, working at home, or hundreds of miles away in another office.

“Too many times you go into meetings, in a virtual or hybrid environment, and people don’t have cameras on. So you can’t see their reactions, you can’t get the human connection with those individuals who know what’s going on,”

Hybrid meetings between employees in the office and others working from home can also create challenges.

Mandrgoc said agencies can do more to provide employees with an engaging experience, regardless of how they join meetings.

“You’re in a conference room, and it looks like you’re way far way at the end of the table. How do you arrange these rooms a little differently, to create a more immersive experience?” he said.

Mandrgoc said an agency client, using Zoom solutions, recently hosted a virtual job fair that put recruiters directly in touch with top candidates.

“Instead of just taking somebody’s name and a number and calling them back, they will take them directly from the virtual hybrid environment that they were in, and into a breakout room, to provide more details about this recruitment,” he said.

By taking on this engaging approach to hiring and outreach, the agency was able to identify more than 30 strong candidates.

Mandrgoc added that a HISP agency is also using Zoom solutions to reach out to customers who live in regions without high-speed internet.

“They were showing farmers all of the different things they’re doing for funding that they need to go forward in their business. A lot of them work and live in low-bandwidth environments, you go across there, it allows them to engage in that space,” he said.

The post Transforming customer experience in government through empowered employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

The IRS has collected $1 billion in overdue tax revenue, after launching a crackdown on millionaires not paying what they owe.

The agency last fall announced it was going after 1,600 wealthy individuals with more than $1 million in annual income and more than $250,000 in tax debt.

IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told reporters that audit rates for high-wealth individuals and complex partnerships fell over the last decade and have been at “historic lows.”

But the IRS is tapping into tens of billions of multi-year modernization funds in the Inflation Reduction Act to rebuild its workforce and beef up its enforcement operations.

“Our message for these taxpayers is that now that we are resourced, we can do the job of ensuring that they pay,” Werfel said in a call Wednesday.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called the initiative a “huge success,” and said the IRS has “shown that it can successfully launch strategic new initiatives and achieve the greatest return on investment.”

Yellen said that if the IRS can sustain ongoing enforcement, technology and data investments it will be able to recover an additional $851 billion in additional revenue over the next decade.

The IRS expects to recoup even more overdue tax revenue from high-income individuals.

The agency mailed 25,000 notices to taxpayers with more than $1 million in annual income. Another 100,000 notices went to taxpayers with $400,000 to $1 million in income.

“The amount of non-filing involved in these mailings is deeply concerning,” Werfel said.

IRS personnel are still following up with taxpayers who received these tax notes. The agency expects to have an update on the amount of tax revenue collected through this initiative this fall.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the taxpayers that we reach out to either don’t respond, or we end up in a situation where there’s a lot of back and forth to determine and to convince the taxpayer that they owe, and it’s in their best interest to pay,” Werfel said. “Ultimately, these cases get closed out typically after a lot of back and forth between the IRS after that initial letter is due.”

Werfel said that before the Inflation Reduction Act, IRS employees were “stretched too thin to get to all these cases.”

“Too often during the past decade, the IRS didn’t have the resources or staffing to pursue high-income earners who our compliance teams knew owed taxes,” Werfel said. “The tax bill wasn’t even in dispute. The taxes were clearly owed by these people, but we didn’t have the people or the resources to follow up with them.”

The agency is using artificial intelligence tools to help identify high-income individuals and businesses that are not paying what they owe.

“AI will help us ensure that we are not reaching out to taxpayers that are following the rules. It helps us be more precise in reaching out to those taxpayers that are most likely not playing by the rules,” Werfel said. “And this will create less stress for taxpayers who don’t want to get a letter from the IRS, especially if they’re playing by the rules. And it will provide more value to the taxpayers, because we will have better precision in who to reach out to make sure they’re paying their debts on time.

Werfel said the agency is also ramping up hiring to build out its enforcement capabilities.

The post IRS recovers $1B in crackdown on taxes owed by millionaires first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Veterans Benefits Administration is shifting to a system of mostly voluntary overtime where employees can work for a maximum of 20 hours of overtime each month.

VA Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs told reporters VBA has relied on mandatory overtime for the past seven years to keep up with its increasing workload.

“We’re producing and delivering veteran benefits at a very high level. But as I’ve said before, I have never thought that mandatory overtime is a sustainable operating practice,” Jacobs told reporters in a call Tuesday.

VBA has delivered record-breaking level of benefits to veterans for the past three years, and is on track to break yet another record by the end of this fiscal year.

The agency processed 1.98 million disability benefits claims from veterans and their survivors in fiscal 2023 — a nearly 16% increase from the year prior. VBA issued $163 billion in total benefits in FY 2023.

VBA is seeing a higher volume of claims because of the PACT Act, a 2022 law that expanded VA health care and benefits eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service. VBA recently granted its millionth benefits claims under the PACT Act.

Jacobs said VBA is on pace to process 30% more claims in fiscal 2024 compared to last year. The agency, so far this year, has awarded $112 billion to veterans and their survivors in compensation and benefits.

VBA currently has a claims backlog of about 277,000 — nearly 30% of its total inventory of claims.

VBA is also growing its workforce to keep up with demand.  Since October 2022, VBA has grown its workforce by nearly 33%, to more than 34,000 employees.

“Our growing workforce has gone above and beyond to deliver these earned benefits, and we remain focused on achieving our primary mission, which is delivering timely, high-quality and equitable decisions for veterans and their survivors with a world-class customer experience,” Jacobs said. “At the same time, we’re laser-focused on ensuring that our workforce can achieve these outcomes sustainably in the long term.”

Jacobs said VBA ended mandatory overtime, based on feedback from VBA employees and his own “personal concern about the ability of our workforce to sustainably deliver benefits at the scale that we have been doing for a very long time.”

“My goal is to leave this organization better than I found it. And I was concerned that a continuation of mandatory overtime perpetually would be very problematic for our ability to continue delivering at the levels we have been,” he said.

Jacobs said VBA plans to keep growing its workforce until it reaches 36,000 employees — but added that the agency is “constantly evaluating our numbers.”

“We are very focused on evaluating incoming receipts, the total production, and then making sure we revalidate that our assumptions and our goals remain accurate,” he said.

The Veterans Health Administration is becoming more selective with its hiring, after it saw record workforce growth last year. The agency is also seeing higher workforce retention.

VA is also looking to shed about 10,000 jobs in its fiscal 2025 budget request. Most of those job cuts would come from VHA. VA expects to achieve the reduced headcount through attrition.

Jacobs, however, said VBA has the funding it needs to continue workforce growth.

“We are fine from a discretionary perspective. We have the funds that we need to deliver the historical level of benefits that we have been delivering,” he said.

Jacobs said VBA is also seeing higher retention rates for its employees, compared to its six-year average retention rate. He added that as VBA continues to hire, employees have had opportunities to advance into higher positions.

“As we’ve increased hiring, that hiring has both come from employees outside of VBA, but also employees within VBA,” Jacobs said. “As we’ve provided more opportunities, more employees have chosen to stay — in addition to the mission.”

VBA will keep mandatory overtime in place for some employees. That includes workers who process claims for military sexual trauma, radiation exposure, Camp Lejeune contaminated water and pensions.

“We have a workload that requires more timely decisions, and so we want to focus on continuing to bring that work, the total inventory down to improve the timeliness,” Jacobs said.

“As we’re training those new employees, we’re going to continue the mandatory overtime,” he added. “We will assess, as we watch our work in those areas progress, if and when we can make changes to that policy, and transition them to voluntary overtime. But right now, our assessment is that we need to maintain that policy, to continue making improvements for veterans who have filed those claims.”

VBA held a national quality stand-down and wellness day last month, with a focus on addressing burnout and the mental health of its workforce, as well as improving overall work quality. Jacobs said the agency is also rethinking training for its new employees and “refresher” courses for existing staff.

“Investing in our employees matters and can ultimately yield significant returns for our veterans and survivors. Because we know what’s good for our employees is good for those we serve. This stand-down was a necessary part of our effort to improve the accuracy of our claims decisions and support our employees. But it’s certainly not going to stop there,” he said.

VBA expects its employees to work in the office at least five days per two-week pay period, adhering to a VA-wide policy and the Biden administration’s goal of bringing federal employees back to the office at least 50% of the time.

The post VA ends mandatory overtime for most employees processing benefits claims first appeared on Federal News Network.

“We’re going to have to spend some money in order to save some money,” Elliot Doomes, commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s transportation and infrastructure subcommittee on Tuesday.

GSA is asking Congress for a $425 million “optimization” fund in next year’s budget. The funding would help agencies move out of underutilized office space.

Doomes said this funding proposal “would enable GSA to continue improving building utilization rates and provide better services to federal agencies and the community they serve.”

“Although it’s agency by agency, I’ll tell you, the trend is agencies are giving up space. They understand,” Doomes told lawmakers. “We’re bringing our workspace experts to work with these agencies to say, ‘How often are people there? What kind of work do you do? Maybe you don’t need all that space.’ Let’s give some of that space back,” Doomes said.

GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan told Congress last November that the agency is seeing a “huge opportunity” to cut federal office space by as much as 30% in the coming years.

While the Biden administration is calling on federal employees to return to the office more often, most agencies are still allowing many employees to work from home for a least a few days each two-week pay period. That hybrid work schedule is reducing agencies’ needs for office space.

GSA recently launched a Workplace Innovation Lab that lets teams for other federal test out alternative workplace designs. It’s also freed up space in its own downtown D.C. headquarters building to serve as a co-working space for federal agencies who work at other agencies.

“We keep offering these tools to agencies, and a lot of agencies, once they see the opportunity to shrink their footprint, they look at this as operational savings,” Doomes said. “We’re trying out these new things to tell agencies you can shrink your office space.”

In addition, about 50% of all GSA leases are expiring in the next five years, which gives the agency additional opportunities to consolidate.

Doomes said GSA has overseen about 89 projects where agencies consolidated office space over the past eight years. But agencies have also missed about 120 opportunities to consolidate office space because of a lack of funding.

When agencies relocate offices, they pay for furniture, fixtures, equipment and moving costs out of their budgets.

“They have their own separate appropriation process to request those funds. And if an agency doesn’t have that those funds, we can’t move them out and help them consolidate,” Doomes said.

GSA’s $425 million optimization fund, he added, would make it easier for agencies to consolidate office space, even if they can’t afford the move on their own.

“For the first time ever, we’re proposing that we’re going to ask for the money,” Doomes said. “And then we’ll be able to go to the agencies and say, ‘You can amortize the cost that it’s going to take to move and get new furniture. We’re going to move you out of this space, and we’re going to move you into additional spaces.’”

The Government Accountability Office found last summer that all agency headquarters buildings in the Washington, D.C. area had excess space, including 17 that had an average building utilization of just 25%. Doomes told lawmakers thinks the GAO report’s results are “concerning.”

Management of the federal government’s real estate portfolio has been on the Government Accountability Office’s list of high-risk programs since 2003. GAO has found GSA and its tenant agencies don’t have effective mechanisms to determine how much office space they need to meet their missions.

“Better managing this portfolio can mean real savings for federal agencies and ultimately, for the taxpayers. This is a serious challenge. But I think we can also look at it as a huge opportunity for GSA,” Subcommittee Chairman Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said.

GSA shed about 8 million square feet of office space since 2020. It now oversees about 371 million square feet of space.

“It’s progress, but we can do more,” Doomes said. “And that’s why these legislative proposals are so important. “We’re going to have to spend some money in order to save some money.”

GSA stepped up efforts to get rid of unneeded real estate last November, when it added 23 federal buildings to its sale and disposal process.

Among the properties, GSA is looking to repurpose the Department of Homeland Security’s former headquarters. GSA expects the properties to amount to a potential reduction of 3.5 million square feet from the federal government’s real estate portfolio, and a $1 billion cost avoidance over 10 years.

“We want to get people out of that space and move them into existing space,” Doomes said. “Sometimes we’re moving them into [GSA] owned space, because oftentimes, that’s the most cost-effective. And then there are some opportunities where we’re saying, ‘The lease rates are so low, we want you to move out of this space and move you into a much smaller space.”

GSA is also asking Congress to get full access to the Federal Buildings Fund, where it keeps rent payments from tenant agencies. Lawmakers have diverted about $1 billion from the fund annually for more than a decade to cover other costs.

Doomes said Congress, since 2011, has skimmed more than $10 billion from the Federal Building Fund.

“As a result, necessary repairs have been unfunded and have had to be resubmitted again,” Doomes said, adding that 13 of 17 major repair and alteration projects in GSA’s budget this year were resubmitted from previous years’ budget requests — but didn’t receive funding from lawmakers.

Doomes said delays in carrying out these projects have driven up the total cost by about $300 million, and prevented agencies from moving forward with consolidation efforts.

Doomes said full access to the Federal Buildings Fund in next year’s budget would allow GSA to “address necessary capital improvements like these in a timely manner, resulting in increased taxpayer savings and safer building conditions.”

He said it would also accelerate GSA’s efforts to sale and dispose of underutilized federal buildings that agencies no longer need.

The Public Buildings Service maintains office space for more than 100 federal agencies and more than 1 million federal agencies.

“Managing this portfolio requires GSA to be dynamic and flexible, including being prepared to repurpose or dispose of properties which have outlived their purpose. This is an increasingly difficult task,” Kelly said.

GSA is the in the middle of plans to move most occupants of the Capt. John F. Williams Coast Guard Building into the nearby John F. Kenney Federal Building in Boston.

Doomes said the $20 million consolidation project would avoid $30 million in repair liabilities and would save $1 million in annual operation and maintenance costs.

Lawmakers are pressuring federal agencies to make better use of underutilized office space, often by demanding that employees return to the office more often. A top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee added language to one of the fiscal 2025 spending bills that would set new requirements for agencies to publicly report their policies on federal telework and office space.

Congress passed the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act (FASTA) in 2016, which created an independent board meant to recommend high-value, but underutilized federal properties GSA should sell or get rid of.

The Public Buildings Reform Board has completed its two rounds of recommendations. But so far, GSA has only sold 10 of the properties flagged by the board.

“We have an overall ineffective way to dispose of ineffective buildings,” Subcommittee Ranking Member Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said.

The PBRB is currently set to disband in May 2025. But the FASTA Reform Act, introduced by Cramer, would extend the termination date of the PBRB to Dec. 31, 2026, and would give the board additional authority.

“This process has shown a lot of promise, but it needs reform,” Kelly said. “Both sides of the aisle are looking for solutions to help us advance these efforts.

Doomes said GSA is in the process of selling one of the PBRB’s recommendations — a property in Laguna Nigel, California. Doomes said GSA received a $125 million bid for the property.

“We’re excited about that, and selling that property and others,” he said.

The post GSA says more funds needed to offload unneeded federal office space first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Supreme Court, in a trio of decisions, is redefining the extent to which federal agencies can interpret laws passed by Congress, and pass regulations that put them into effect.

In a 6-3 ruling on June 28, the court overturned a 40-year precedent that gave agencies more latitude in crafting regulations, allowing them to fill in the gaps when the legislation text is ambiguous.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court eliminated Chevron deference — a legal precedent from a 1984 case that required judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of relevant laws when its regulations are challenged in court.

Two other Supreme Court decisions further compound the effect of eliminating Chevron deference.

Former agency officials and legal experts say the full impact of overturning Chevron isn’t immediately clear, but agreed that agencies could soon see an uptick in legal challenges — especially to older regulations previously sheltered from further legal scrutiny.

Regulatory agencies, however, are continuing with their own goals. The Biden administration released the latest version of its rulemaking agenda last week, outlining hundreds of rules agencies intend to advance.

Here’s what the experts say will change for agencies post-Chevron — and what won’t.

What else did the Supreme Court decide? 

The Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. But in an earlier ruling, the Supreme Court extended the timeframe businesses have to challenge federal regulations in court.

In Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the court determined that agency regulations are no longer exempt from legal challenges six years after going into effect.

Rather, the court’s conservative majority determined that the statute of limitations is actually six years after a plaintiff suffers injury from the regulation in question.

Caroline Wolverton, former senior trial counsel for the Justice Department Civil Division’s Federal Programs Branch — now senior counsel at the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld — said the court’s ruling in Corner Post “opens up regulations that have been on the books for many years to new challenges.”

“It opens the possibility that people who disfavor particular regulations, for whatever reason, can form a business and they know that the nature of the business is going to conflict with the regulation — will adversely affect the business complying with the regulation. Then all of a sudden, they’re going to be able to challenge that rule. So you might see more manufactured challenges, in that sense,” Wolverton said.

In a third case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the court ruled that the SEC’s standard practice of issuing fines through administrative proceedings violated the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. The ruling is likely to rein in the authority of administrative law judges across the federal government.

What agencies are most impacted?

Wolverton said agencies are likely to see an uptick in legal challenges to their regulations — especially those that impact the environment and health care.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, she added, have a lot of older regulations on the books that are once again vulnerable to legal challenges, following the Supreme Court’s Corner Post ruling.

“Those could be areas where you see upticks in litigation,” she said.

Wolverton said she expects agencies will see the greatest uptick in older regulations

“Agencies have been trying to move away from relying on ambiguities in anticipation of deference from courts. But that wasn’t the case before the court’s inclination to overrule Chevron became clear,” she said.

Harley Geiger, counsel at the law firm Venable, wrote in a blog post with his colleagues that the court’s ruling are likely to have a “seismic effect” on digital security policy, because many federal regulations involve interpretations of older statutory authorities that predate modern cybersecurity practices and threats.

Geiger wrote that digital security regulations will be more prone to court challenges where agency interpretations have unclear statutory backing, and that future rulemakings and enforcement actions will need to hew more closely to statutory authority to avoid judicial modifications.

“The Supreme Court’s reversal of Chevron likely sets up an influx of cases challenging agency decisions. While the full impact will unfold over time, it is apparent that industries accustomed to navigating legal frameworks shaped by agency interpretations now confront a landscape where judicial scrutiny will alter the consistency and scope of regulatory guidance and enforcement actions,” Geiger told Federal News Network

Former OIRA Administrator Susan Dudley, a distinguished professor of practice at the George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration, said agency rulemaking — at least up until now —kept up with the pace with technology changes more than Congress and its ability to pass legislation.

In the 1980s, for example, the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture Department, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation began to contemplate their role in regulating the emerging field of biotechnology and gene modification.

“’How do we do it?’ Do we need a brand-new statute, because this is so novel?’ The agencies got together and realized that actually, they didn’t, because their existing statutes, the pesticide laws, the food and drug laws, all focused on the product — to make sure the product was safe for public use,” Dudley said. “By focusing their regulation on the product, they were able to do it. That has survived and in fact led to a lot of exciting new products that have improved our lives.”

“Maybe if they focus on the outcomes, they’d like to see — products that are safe for human consumption — that will be sufficient to give some agencies the wiggle room they need to apply their expertise, without having to create new legal authority from something that wasn’t there,” she added.

Will agencies see more legal challenges? 

Dudley said she expects an uptick in legal challenges of agency rules — at least in the short term.

“There’ll be a lot more discussion about whether that’s the most reasonable rather than it is simply a reasonable interpretation,” she said.

However, courts and regulatory agencies anticipated an end to Chevron deference before this Supreme Court’s ruling this summer.

Dudley said lower courts were already citing Chevron less in their decisions before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision.

“It’s probably not as significant as either their proponents or the opponents make it out to be,” Dudley said, regarding the magnitude of the Supreme Court’s rulings. “Proponents of changing Chevron really hope that it will make Congress step up and do their job — legislate more, and pass the buck less. And opponents use phrases like, ‘It’ll kneecap the administrative state, prevent agencies from protecting your air and water quality and food safety.’ I don’t think either of those are likely to be true. And it’ll take a while to sort out, because it’s certainly a change in jurisprudence. But I don’t think the impact on the state will be as dramatic.”

Wolverton said agencies have anticipated a Supreme Court challenge of Chevron deference, and that more recent regulations adhere to the text of authorizing statutes much more closely.

“Agencies knew this was coming, the government knew this was coming. They have been moving away from relying on ambiguities in statutes, finding ambiguities and claiming that they are interpreting what the statute should mean in those areas. So it’s not a huge change, in that respect,” Wolverton said.

The Associated Press reports that the Supreme Court hasn’t invoked Chevron in any of its rulings since 2016, although lower courts have continued to do so.

“You don’t see government attorneys arguing so much, at least in the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court,” Wolverton said. “At least in those higher courts, you don’t see as many arguments that courts should be deferring to agencies in their interpretations of the statute.”

“I have seen agencies not relying on their interpretations of a statute as being ambiguous, as at least a primary rationale for whatever rulemaking they are engaged in. Maybe they’ll have it as a backup, to the extent that there is an ambiguity, we think that our rule makes the most sense for these policy reasons. But the agencies are trying to insulate themselves from a Chevron overruling, have not been relying on any ambiguity in statutes,” she added.

How is the Biden administration responding?

The Biden administration is moving ahead undeterred with its own regulatory wish list.

The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) last Friday released its 2024 spring regulatory agenda, highlighting the major regulations agencies plan to advance later this year.

OIRA Associate Administrator Sam Berger, in a blog post last Friday underscored how agencies are “hearing directly from those most affected by an issue or problem” when crafting regulations.

“Improving public engagement is an important and ongoing effort, and agencies and OIRA will continue to identify opportunities for supporting meaningful public engagement in the regulatory process,” Berger wrote. “Hearing from the people, businesses, and other stakeholders most impacted by a particular issue or problem can help agencies better understand how to effectively address that issue, leading to better, more targeted rulemaking that is more responsive, effective, durable, and equitable.”

Agency expertise still counts

In legal challenges to agency rulemaking, Dudley said courts “will still defer to the agencies’ expertise” — including technical, scientific and economic analyses.

“That will not change,” she said. “When agencies justify their regulation, it starts with, ‘Here’s our statutory authority.’ It has to start there. But the bulk of that regulatory impact analysis, the preamble of their regulation, is all these other factors — the alternatives they considered and why this is the best alternative, given their expertise.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion in Loper, specified that agency experience and expertise in regulated areas is relevant to statutory interpretation.

“Roberts said that they still should, or may, look to the agency’s expertise [and] experience and use that in the court’s independent interpretation of this statute,” Dudley said.

“Agency expertise is still relevant,” she added. “You might see courts looking to that and relying on that more in science-heavy or tech-heavy areas — FDA regulations come to mind. I think courts might hesitate to second-guess the way the FDA views the Food and Drug Act, when it comes to medications, things like that.”

A chilling effect on new regulations? 

When it comes to proposing new regulations, Dudley said agencies may be a “little less ambitious,” and that they may “think twice before finding some novel authority in an older statute.”

“What will change is there will be a greater focus on that first step — what does the law say? What are we authorized to do?” she said.  “We may see agencies engaging the Department of Justice and the White House counsel, the cross-cutting legal parts of the government, on those questions before they go down a path. There may be earlier engagement on that.”

Wolverton said agencies may take an extra level of precaution when drafting rules.

“Agencies do generally take great care in issuing regulations as a general matter. But maybe now recognize the importance of taking that care is even more important, or it’s heightened now,” Wolverton said. “But in terms of not taking on particular areas of regulation, I would have a hard time believing that an agency that feels that there is a need for a particular regulation just wouldn’t issue it at all. I think that they’ll be more careful in how they justify it.,” Wolverton said

“Agencies give input to Congress, and agencies might be pressing for more express delegations of authority to issue regulations in particular areas,” she said. “That’s a way that Congress can explicitly recognize that there is going to be a gap, and that it wants the agency to fill that. Agencies might be pressing for language that does explicitly authorize them to fill gaps.”

The post Agencies ‘knew this was coming.’ What does — and doesn’t — change after Supreme Court’s Chevron ruling first appeared on Federal News Network.

Not all claims, the agency expects, will have merit. A recent annual report finds the IRS Whistleblower Office received hundreds of “purely speculative” claims that don’t lead to any enforcement action.

Whistleblowers also submit credible leads that, in time, result in the IRS recovering substantial funds from tax cheats.

The IRS Whistleblower Office, since 2007, has helped the IRS recover nearly $7 billion in taxes owed — and whistleblowers whose tips initiated these cases have gotten a more than $1 billion cut of the money.

It’s no quick payday. The IRS states whistleblowers wait, on average, between 10 and 11 years before receiving a financial award for their disclosure to the agency, depending on the claim type.

Stephen Kohn, a whistleblower attorney at Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, said the IRS needs to invest more resources and overcome “bureaucratic obstacles” to ensure credible tips keep coming into the agency.

“They have to look at the way they do their enforcement actions to ensure that the whistleblower who triggered it isn’t an afterthought,” Kohn said. “They have to be on their minds. The whistleblower gave them the case. The whistleblower risks their job, and it’s unfair to make them wait 11 years. That’s intolerable.”

The time it takes for the IRS to pay out whistleblower claims depends on legal challenges raised by the taxpayers who are the subject of an investigation, and whether they take their case to the IRS’ Independent Office of Appeals.

“The IRS pays awards from proceeds collected and as such, award payments cannot be made until the taxpayer has exhausted all appeal rights and the taxpayer no longer can file a claim for refund or otherwise seek to recover the proceeds from the government,” the report states.

Whistleblowers eligible to receive an award from the IRS generally receive about 15% of the revenue collected from their disclosure, but no more than 30% of what the IRS recovers.

Among the proposed reforms, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), co-chairman of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus, introduced the IRS Whistleblower Improvement Act in March 2023.

The bill requires the IRS to pay interest on whistleblower awards if they’re not paid within one year of receipt of proceeds collected from whistleblower disclosures.

“The IRS is a strange agency — they’re totally money-driven. It’s all about collective revenue, counting the change. So this mechanism will force the top-level people to say, ‘OK we don’t want to pay that interest. Let’s get the awards out.’ It’ll be a financial incentive to treat whistleblowers fairly,” Kohn said.

The bill would also allow whistleblowers to remain anonymous in tax court proceedings.

The IRS is looking to further improve its Whistleblower Office, as part of the Strategic Operating Plan it released, detailing how it will use the billions of dollars in multi-year modernization funds it received in the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The IRS Whistleblower Office is an active participant in the IRS transformation effort,” IRS Whistleblower Office Director John Hinman wrote in the report.

Among its goals, Hinman said the IRS Whistleblower Office is “increasing our capacity to use high-value whistleblower information effectively, awarding whistleblowers fairly and as soon as possible, keeping whistleblowers informed of their claim’s status and the basis for IRS decisions on claims, and strengthening our collaboration with stakeholders of the IRS Whistleblower Program.”

“While we are pleased that the number of submissions increased in FY 2023, our fundamental goal is to increase the number of actionable submissions received and decrease submissions that are unlikely to result in an enforcement action,” he wrote.

The IRS, he added, receives hundreds of whistleblower claims that are “purely speculative in nature.”

“The Whistleblower Office uses significant resources responding to these claimants (often repeatedly), maintaining records, and engaging in litigation to defend an administrative enforcement decision not to pursue the information provided,” Hinman wrote. “The administrative burdens of these claims far outweigh any benefit of the information to the IRS.”

The IRS Whistleblower Office received 6,455 submissions in 2023, which generated nearly 17,000 claim numbers.

The IRS Whistleblower Office had nearly 50 full-time employees in 2023, “with decades of experience from a broad array of IRS compliance programs.”

Hinman wrote in the report that his office is “monitoring for the collection of several billion dollars in additional amounts assessed attributable to information submitted by whistleblowers.

“The continued success of the IRS Whistleblower Program is dependent on people who become aware of tax fraud and tax non-compliance and report that information to the IRS Whistleblower Office, and on the dedicated IRS workforce that supports this important program,” Hinman wrote.

The IRS paid nearly $89 million to 121 whistleblowers in fiscal 2023, from a total pot of $338 million collected through whistleblower tips — about 26% of what the IRS recovered. That’s more than double the nearly $38 million paid out to whistleblowers the previous year.

Common whistleblower allegations include tips of unreported or underreported income, overstated or false deductions, and failure to file a tax return or information return.

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Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a lawsuit Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, urging OPM to complete the long-awaited guidance on the Administrative Leave Act.

“The defendants’ nearly seven years of refusing to comply with the congressional mandate is inexcusable,” the lawsuit states.  “It has directly harmed, and continues to harm, numerous federal civil servants. The defendants’ refusal also has imposed great and unnecessary costs on federal taxpayers.”

Congress passed the legislation as part of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, and gave OPM until September 2017 to implement guidance.

Under ALA, agencies can put employees on investigative or notice leave for up to 10 days, but can extend that period incrementally up to a 90-day maximum.

The legislation also lets agencies ask an employee on investigative leave to perform similar work duties through telework.

OPM issued proposed regulations in 2017, but has yet to finalize them. Because OPM hasn’t issued final regulations, agencies don’t have the guidance necessary to properly enforce the law.

“Notwithstanding passage of the ALA, many civil servants since 2018 have been left dangling on administrative and/or investigative leave for several months and, in several cases, for years,” the lawsuit states.

Federal employees placed on administrative leave can sometimes spend months — if not years — with their careers on hold, as their agencies investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

“Agencies do continue to abuse administrative leave, because OPM has not done its job, and that’s a problem,” Jason Breifel, a partner at Shaw Bransford & Roth, told Federal News Network on Wednesday.

“What this law had intended to do was to force agencies to manage their workforce. If someone truly needed to be out while an investigation happened, it was trying to keep agencies on a path to getting that done on time,” he added.

The Government Accountability Office found in 2014 that more than 260 federal employees had spent one-to-three years on paid administrative leave, costing agencies about $31 million.

The watchdog office also found that between 2011 and 2015, the Department of Homeland Security placed 116 employees on administrative leave for a least a year — for a total cost of nearly $20 million.

According to data PEER received in Freedom of Information Act requests, the National Park Service used more than 530,000 hours of paid leave between fiscal 2018 and 2020 — with a total cost of more than $10.5 million.

“The amount of leave used annually increased over those three years,” PEER wrote.

Federal employees continue to get paid during administrative leave, but Briefel said a prolonged absence from their day-to-day work often wreaks havoc on careers.

“People might perceive it as a paid vacation at home. Rest assured, it is not,” he said. “If you’ve been accused of having done bad things at work that you might not have actually done, and you’ve been locked or frozen out — for years on end sometimes, not being allowed to do your job, but you’re a decided professional — think of what that does to you. What it does to your family,” Briefel said.

The lawsuit cites examples where federal employees were put on paid administrative leave for months or years, and later cleared investigations that found no evidence of wrongdoing. During this period, however, these employees saw their careers suffer during this indefinite pause.

Dr. Ruth Etzel served as director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Children’s Health Protection, but was put on administrative leave for six months, starting in September 2018.

While on administrative leave, Etzel was unable to communicate with her colleagues or staff, continue with her work or give a scheduled speech at a national pediatric conference.

The EPA later stated that its investigation didn’t find any cause for discipline and that there was insufficient evidence to support the allegations that caused her to be placed on leave.

However, while on leave she was demoted and reassigned to a newly fabricated position as a “biologist” within the EPA Office of Water, where she continues to be employed, but for which she is vastly overqualified.

“Her distinguished 30-year career in pediatrics and public health was decimated and she suffered severe emotional distress,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit also claims Jenifer DeAndrade, a Postal Service manager in Rhode Island with more than 20 years of service at the agency was put on administrative leave in May 2020.

USPS allowed DeAndrade to return to work nearly three years later, in January 2023.

“During that time, she was improperly excluded from promotion opportunities; then, when she returned she was effectively demoted,” the lawsuit states. “Her collegial relations with her staff and colleagues were destroyed during her absence and she also has suffered severe emotional distress.”

The lawsuit describes DeAndrade as a manager who “performed at a high level, received a number of awards for her work, and had never been subject to any personnel action/discipline.”

Federal News Network reached out to OPM for comment.

PEER urged OPM to finalize the regulations through a citizen petition last fall.

According to the lawsuit, OPM General Counsel Webb Lyons told PEER during this process that the agency would take additional steps by June 2024, but has yet to do so.

“Those regulations would, if they had been implemented in 2018 by the federal agencies as was required, have resulted in sharply curtailed and better regulated periods of administrative and investigative leave,” the lawsuit states.

PEER Senior Counsel Peter Jenkins told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin in an interview last summer that the organization would sue OPM if it continued to miss its deadlines.

“We think there’s good case law that agencies can be forced to issue regulations that they’ve sat on for years, years and years when Congress directed them with a timeline. Congress said this should have been done by September of 2017,” Jenkins said.

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The lawsuit claims VA’s new Oracle-Cerner EHR doesn’t work with assistive devices, such as screen readers that allow visually impaired users to access information on a computer screen.

Laurette Santos, a licensed social worker who’s worked at the VA for over a decade, is leading the lawsuit, which she filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month.

Santos works as a Visual Impairment Services Team coordinator for the VA Medical Center in White City, Oregon. It’s one of six VA sites currently using the new EHR. Full deployment of the EHR would bring the system to more than a hundred VA locations.

Santos said in an interview that she provides therapeutic counseling to veterans who are experiencing vision loss or blindness.

“Any disability is difficult, but blindness is particularly isolating. My veterans, mostly who are visually impaired or legally blind, are older,” she said Tuesday. “So they’ve experienced seeing, and now they’re experiencing loss, bit by bit, and it’s very difficult for them to transition,” Santos said. “It is critical that they have a bridge from where they are, to where they want to go.”

Santos understands what many of these veterans are feeling. She’s legally blind from a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which allows her to perceive light, but she’s been unable to read text since 1988.

Santos said she uses the VA’s EHR to gather data from veterans’ medical records — such as their diagnosis, what items they have received from other VIST coordinators, and their particular challenges.

“It could be anywhere to not having a family, to being alone and blind, to lots of medical complications — physical, mental, emotional, combined with blindness,” she said.

Santos relies on the screen-reader software Job Access With Speech (JAWS), which reads out loud the text that’s on a computer screen. Santos said she’s been using JAWS for more than 20 years.

When the VA hired Santos as a VIST coordinator in 2019, her facility was still using the VA’s legacy Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), which is also called VistA.

VA’s legacy EHR is compatible with the screen-reader technology Santos uses, and allows her to independently perform the essential functions of her job, with only limited assistance from a sighted assistant.

“In my work, JAWS was very effective,” she said. “I could connect with other providers, which is a huge part of health care for veterans — that support of people who work with them to make sure all of their needs are met, such as pharmacy, social work, and primary care. I need access to all of those, I can no longer do that independently.”

StatNews first reported details of the lawsuit last Friday. VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes told Federal News Network that the VA is unable to comment on pending litigation.

Federal News Network also reached Cerner’s parent company Oracle for comment.

‘They took my eyes away’

The VA launched the new EHR in White City in June 2022, but Santos said she raised accessibility concerns before the launch that the department didn’t resolve.

“My screen-reading software cannot read anything in the Oracle Cerner platform,” Santos said. “I can’t even sign in,” Santos said. “Essentially, they rendered me disabled again. They took my eyes away. My screen reader was my eyes.”

Before the go-live, Santos said Cerner personnel asked her to provide feedback on the accessibility features back in 2019.

“It was requested of me to see how it interacted, which I did. And I immediately told them it doesn’t work. The codes that were written did not even recognize that there was another software in there,” she said.

According to the lawsuit, VA’s contract with Cerner required the EHR system to be compatible with accessibility-related software and assistive technology devices, including screen readers, screen magnifiers and speech recognition software.

Eve Hill, a partner with the law firm Brown Goldstein & Levy, which is representing Santos in the lawsuit, said the VA failed to ensure that Cerner was compliant with Section 508 before entering into the contract for its procurement and after its rollout.

“The fault here legally lies with the VA. Section 508 requires the VA to only purchase, use and develop accessible technology,” Hill said. “Anything since ages ago, when 508 was passed, they have to only buy things that are accessible. And they went and bought the Cerner system without it being accessible. And they might say, ‘We didn’t know,’ but they’re obligated to know.”

The lawsuit claims the Cerner EHR requires users to operate a computer mouse, which Santos and other blind employees are unable to use. The VA was also made aware that all training simulating the Cerner EHR was not Section 508 compliant.

Between November 2020 and November 2021, the VA’s Section 508 Office conducted several audits and found the Cerner EHR was inaccessible.

The lawsuit claims the Cerner EHR has “disastrous consequences” for Santos and her ability to do her job independently.

“I’ve gone through a million feelings, from really being angry to being really depressed and really hurt,” she said. “I knew that I would get what I needed and be a very successful employee, which I was. And then, in a blink of an eye, it was gone.”

Santos says she can no longer independently complete her clinician job duties, such as receiving and making referrals, or placing orders for devices, software, and other items for veterans.  Instead, she must delegate these tasks to sighted employees.

“Delegating such tasks, particularly to non-licensed staff, potentially jeopardizes Ms. Santos’s clinical license,” the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, the VA allows Santos to keep using the legacy CPRS, but in a read-write-only format with assistance from sighted individuals.

“This response does not allow Ms. Santos to independently perform the essential functions of her job, nor has it allowed her to handle anything close to the workload she previously completed,” the lawsuit states.

Santos said the new EHR is also presenting new challenges to veterans with visual disabilities.

“My veterans, consequently, are suffering, because they can no longer interact with this platform, either, and that’s my largest concern,” Santos said. “Yes, this is really frustrating for me, as an employee. But my goal is to be able to provide the veterans that I work with bridges that can help them transition into a different way of living. One of the things that I was able to do with them was let them know, ‘You can do this. We can do this, and I can help you.’ Well, I don’t feel like that anymore.”

“They’re depending on me to be able to do an excellent job and to support them in their endeavors to climb these militants that are theirs right now. And I can’t do it,” she added.

The VA is currently in a “reset” period and has put all future go-lives on the Oracle-Cerner EHR on hold until it addresses persistent problems at sites already using the system.

“I would really like to see them work on the 508 compliance. However, no new codes have been written for 508. They’re busy trying to put out the fires in the rest of the system,” Santos said.

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