The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

Federal retirees are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars a year into an annuity offering at the Thrift Savings Plan. What is it, and why is it so popular? We turn to certified financial planner Art Stein of Arthur Stein Financial.

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The DoD's big cybersecurity program advanced earlier this month. A big rule to carry if out became effective. For what the rule means and what comes next in the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Program, we turn to the Deltek cybersecurity researcher Michael Greenman.

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After spending two decades in Afghanistan, the government has accumulated a lot of lessons learned. In fact, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, has published 13 chapters of lessons learned. The latest one concerns personnel practices in Afghanistan activities. Basically, everyone who ever worked there said personnel practices were terrible. We get more now from SIGAR's deputy director for lessons learned, David Young.

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Today on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

After years of falling short of recruitment goals, the armed services did manage to eke out a win in 2024 and meet them. The story of how the services turned things around largely boils down to having a path for previously disqualified recruits to join the military. Federal News Network's Anastasia Obis joins me for the year in review here.

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Federal contractors never expected Congress to get a full year appropriation done last week. So they're generally pleased about avoidance of a government shutdown. That gives the government 11 weeks or to deal with other lingering procurement issues. We check in with the executive vice president for policy at the Professional Services Council, Stephanie Kostro.

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Placing federal employees on paid indefinite administrative leave, that practice is about to end. The Office of Personnel Management published a final rule to cap federal employees to 10 days of administrative leave during personnel investigations. The final rule comes eight years after the Administrative Leave Act was passed. That was 2016 and just this year, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility or PEER filed a lawsuit to prod OPM to cough up that rule. Federal News Network's Drew Friedman got more from PEER Senior Counsel Peter Jenkins.

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Hospitals treat the sick and injured. But they can be dangerous places. A unit of the Health and Human Services Department aims to reduce patient and healthcare workforce harm by 50%. So it's set up a dashboard that aggregates safety information. Joining me with the details, the director of the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Craig Unsheid.

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A unit of Health and Human Services recently made grants to four academic and industry teams to do miracles. Enabling the blind to see. The awardees will work on technologies to enable transplantation of the human eye. For details, from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, program manager Calvin Roberts.

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Today on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.