Agency Leaders Protected Lying Teleworkers

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• Government Executive: Report: Agency Leaders Protected Teleworkers Who Lied About Their Hours- “Employees of the Patent and Trademark Office, who’ve long enjoyed status working for one of the top agencies for telecommuting, awoke on Monday to a Washington Post exclusive that casts a shadow over some 4,000 patent examiners who work from home. According to the Post’s Lisa Rein, who obtained an internal investigation report, “Some of the 8,300 patent examiners, about half of whom work from home full time, repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in, and many were receiving bonuses for work they didn’t do. And when supervisors had evidence of fraud and asked to have the employee’s computer records pulled, they were rebuffed by top agency officials, ensuring that few cheaters were disciplined, investigators found.

• Nextgov: Lesson Learned from Healthcare.gov Rollout: WH Launches US Digital Service- “Last year, the government kicked off HealthCare.gov with much fanfare — and the health care exchange website immediately crashed, irritating millions of visitors and calling into question the government’s competence in building large-scale technology projects. It took a team of tech experts from across industry and government to fix the website, and it seems the government is determined to not let the same mistakes that plagued HealthCare.gov reoccur.”

• Federal News Radio: US Postal Service loses $2B this spring- “The U.S. Postal Service lost $2 billion this spring despite increasing its volume and charging consumers more money to send mail, officials said Monday. The loss for the spring quarter, which ended June 30, was significantly higher than the $740 million loss for the same three-month period last year. The agency blamed increases in compensation and benefit costs for the red ink and said it would be unable to make a congressionally mandated payment of $5.7 billion this September for health benefits for future retirees. The loss came despite a 2 percent increase in operating revenue compared to last spring.”

• AP: Energy Secretary Vows to get NM Nuke Dump Working- “Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is vowing to get southeastern New Mexico’s troubled nuclear waste dump back in operation as soon as possible after a mysterious radiation leak that has indefinitely shuttered the nation’s only permanent repository for waste from decades of nuclear bomb building. During a town hall meeting packed with state and community officials, and many supporters of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, Moniz said, “If you stick with us, we’re sticking with you.”

• FCW: OMB launches digital services team to guide IT projects- “The Obama administration has launched its long-promised U.S. Digital Service, a team of experts based inside the Office of Management and Budget to improve IT procurement and agencies’ efforts to design public-facing online services. The team will be headed by Mikey Dickerson, a former Google engineer who served on the team that triaged and repaired HealthCare.gov, after its disastrous October 2013 launch. Dickerson will have the title of administrator of the U.S. Digital Service and deputy federal CIO.”

• NPR: Two Ways President Obama Could Act On Immigration- “Sometime before the end of summer, President Obama is expected to take executive action to address the nation’s broken immigration system. The president’s decision has in some ways been years in the making. It is built on his own action two years ago to defer deportation for so-called Dreamers — young people brought to the country illegally as children. And it is built on congressional failure to pass a sweeping immigration overhaul, a DREAM act or even an emergency funding measure to deal with all the unaccompanied children arriving at the border.”

• Defense News: The U.S. Needs More Drones- “Al-Qaeda is morphing and metastasizing, spreading like a cancer in an arc of jihadism from the deserts of Northern Mali through Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Islamic extremists continue to gain ground in Iraq, and President Barack Obama has authorized more than a dozen airstrikes as fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant threaten to take Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Meanwhile, the Defense Department is cutting one of the most vital tools against this threat: loitering unmanned aircraft, aka drones, to provide persistent surveillance of terrorist networks.”