Federal Newscast

Just over 7,800 federal employees retired last month, the lowest amount so far in 2025. The Office of Personnel Management says more than 33,500 federal employees retired in first quarter of 2025 compared to 29,700 hundred during the first three months of 2024. OPM's retirement backlog dropped to 16,700 hundred, almost 4,000 less than March. On average, OPM is processing retirement claims in 54 days, but those applications that took less than 60 days for the agency to get OPM the paperwork were processed in 33 days on average.

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Defense Secretary Hegseth has launched the development of a new National Defense Strategy — a major policy document that sets the Pentagon’s strategic goals and priorities. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who played a key role in crafting the 2018 National Defense Strategy during Trump’s first term, will lead the new NDS effort. Hegseth said, “The NDS is the single most important document to ensure the Department is operating in accordance with the President’s and my intent." 

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The international stock index I fund was the big winner among Thrift Savings Plan funds in April. Its monthly return was 4.16%. That also leaves it as the highest year-to-date, at an even 9%. The government securities G fund and fixed income investment F fund both also showed positive returns last month, at 0.35% and 0.39 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the common stock index C fund and small cap stock index S fund - both tied to major stock indexes - stayed in the red in April, and have negative year-to-date returns. All lifecycle fund returns were positive.

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Federal firefighters within the Defense Department continue to struggle with significant workforce shortages. The DoD has been operating below the minimum required staffing level for firefighters since 2019. That’s according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO says the staffing gaps partially stem from worse pay and work schedules than those offered by local fire departments. To address the issue, GAO says DoD should analyze the factors affecting staffing challenges, and make a department-wide workforce plan.

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Agencies received a record 1.5 million Freedom of Information Act requests in fiscal 2024. That’s according to the Justice Department Office of Information Policy’s latest summary of federal FOIA data. Agencies nearly kept pace by processing one-point-four-nine million FOIA requests last year. Still, the governmentwide FOIA backlog increased to 267,000 cases by the end of fiscal 2024.

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President Donald Trump has appointed new members to a group that will recommend reforms to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump on Monday formally appointed 20 members to the FEMA Advisory Council. They include Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Robert Fenton, Junior, the regional administrator for FEMA Region 9.  The council is co-led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It has yet to meet more than three months after Trump set it up. 

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed all members of the Defense Department’s advisory boards. Joe Kasper, Hegseth's former chief of staff, launched a review of all advisory committees in March, required them to justify their existence. Kasper instructed the committees to explain how their advice “benefited the DoD, the Federal Government, and the United States,” and how it aligns with President Donald Trump’s goals and Hegseth’s priority of “restoring the warrior ethos.” This is not the first purge of advisory boards at the Pentagon in February 2021, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin fired all members of the advisory boards as part of a “zero-based review” of their operations. 

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More than two dozen Republican lawmakers want NASA to move its headquarters out of Washington DC and to Houston, Texas. Texas lawmakers Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Brian Babin are leading an effort to relocate NASA to Johnson Space Center when the lease on its current headquarters building expires in 2028. The lawmakers tell President Donald Trump in a letter that NASA is disconnected from the day-to-day work of its centers and hindered by bureaucratic micromanagement. They believe Houston is well suited for NASA’s headquarters because of Johnson Space Center's substantial involvement in nearly every part of NASA's mission as well as because it has the largest NASA workforce, accommodates extensive research and development partnerships and houses Mission Control, the NASA astronaut corps, and the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility.

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A bipartisan group of governors is sounding the alarm about Space Force leadership “aggressively pushing a plan” to move Air National Guard units to the Space Force without states' consent.  While the move has not occurred, there are indications that the units will be shifted to the Space Force by the end of the year. Colorado Governor Jared Polis and Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt said that there has been “no formal notification to, coordination with, or consent obtained from the impacted states.” The statement revives a Biden-era fight

over the future of Air National Guard space units and whether they can be moved to the active-duty Space Force without obtaining approval from state governors as required by law.

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