EPA cancels last furlough day – Plus the DorobekINSIDER’s 7 Stories

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• These days libraries aren’t just repositories for thousands of books, they have adapted with the times. We take a look at the re-imagined library with ICMA’s Ron Carlee.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life:

1. The EPA has canceled the final, mandatory furlough day for its employees, which was previously scheduled for August 30th. As reported by Federal News Radio, the organization has implemented enough financial cutbacks to reduce the number of furlough hours for each employee by eight, thereby eliminating the need for the final furlough day.

2. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs will be dedicating $7.8 million towards the provision of housing and clinical services for 1,120 currently homeless veterans. As announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, this funding represents the second round of financial support for local public housing agencies in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and is part of the federal government effort to end veteran and chronic, long-term homelessness in the U.S. by 2015.

3. The administration has recently released additional guidance for federal agencies on how to make government data more transparent and publicly available. The information guide provides tools and suggestions for measuring the number of files that are publicly available and encourages agencies to create a means for receiving feedback from consumers. As reported by the Federal Times, this information guide will help agencies to meet the November 1st deadline for establishing data inventories and a means for making this data public.

4. Congressmen are currently considering the implementation of the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is used to calculate the cost of living adjustments (COLAs) for federal and military retirees and for those individuals receiving veterans and Social Security benefits. According to Federal News Radio, the implementation of this chained CPI would reduce the potential increase in future benefits for retirees by approximately 0.3 percent annually. This would result in a loss of tens of thousands of dollars for retirees over a period of 20-25 years.

5. The NSA, by court order, has revealed that over the past three years they have accumulated as many as 56,000 emails and other forms of communication from Americans with no connection to terrorism. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has deemed such actions unconstitutional and has ordered that the NSA remedy its behavior. The NSA, according to Federal News Radio, has created new technology for filtering out data connected to U.S. emails and has implemented a protocol for limiting its access to this data, destroying it every two instead of five years.

6. The Small Business Association has named Jeanne Hulit to be the organization’s Acting Administrator following the resignation of the current Administrator, Karen Mills, who will be leaving her post at the end of this month. Ms. Hulit currently is the Associate Administrator for SBA’s Office of Capital Access, which handles loans for small businesses. Federal News Radio reports that the search for a permanent successor for Ms. Mills is continuing.

7. Amazon Web Services is attempting to file a permanent injunction to prevent the CIA from recompeting a $600 million cloud computing contract. The company claims that such actions by the CIA are not only “exceedingly overboard,” but also economically damaging. The injunction is in response to IBM’s successful protest of the $600 million contract with the GAO, which ruled that the CIA did not evaluate pricing for both companies fairly and therefore, should reopen the contract for bids. The Federal Times reports that the CIA has already reopened the competition for the cloud computing contract and has accepted proposal submissions from bidders.