The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) needs people with the expertise to oversee so-called crypto assets like bitcoin. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the SEC needs to update its workforce planning strategy in order to ensure it has the crypto experts it needs. For more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with GAO's Director of Financial Markets and Community Investment, Michael Clements.

GAO Report

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Unless Congress says otherwise, federal contractors will have a raft of new disclosure requirements imposed by the Biden administration. Specifically climate, ESG and cybersecurity. With how companies might deal with it all, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin has an in-studio conversation with the Head of Public Policy at Grant Thornton, Greg Wallig.

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On today's episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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The State Department is calling on mid-career experts in the private sector to join the Foreign Service.

Rather than start out at an entry-level rank, the Foreign Service, through its new, Lateral Entry Pilot Program, is looking to hire these experts at mid-level FP-03 and FP-02 ranks.

The congressionally mandated, five-year pilot is a departure from the Foreign Service’s focus on recruiting prospective hires early in their careers, and retaining them for the duration of their career.

Lucia Piazza, the deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Global Talent Management, said the department under the pilot is taking a new approach to filling in some of its workforce gaps.

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Contractors are questioning how the White House could ask for compliance with a procurement rule that is not even formally proposed yet. Last week, a guidance memo came out, having to do with small business participation in government-wide acquisition contract. The action raises a lot of questions. For more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the President and CEO of the Professional Services Council, David Berteau.

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The recent National Defense Industrial Strategy highlighted the erosion of U.S. industry's capacity for making things, which includes printed circuit boards (PCB) at the complex end of electronics. Such boards are the types of parts needed for advanced weapons systems or artificial intelligence processing. Now there are signs the domestic PCB industry is awakening. For a rundown on recent developments, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin had an in-studio conversation with the Executive Director of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America, David Schild.

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The IRS has made measurable progress on customer-service staffing over the last couple of years. If it was a hospital patient, it might be out of the intensive care unit, but still in the hospital. For a review of the IRS's top challenges as it hits the 2024 filing season, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talks with Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins.

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On today's episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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Federal agency scores plummeted on the 17th Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) scorecard. The reason for the drop in grades: Continued struggles to implement best practices for moving workloads and services to the cloud.

But oversight leaders say the decrease in grades is not only expected, but not indicative of the progress agencies have made over the last decade.

The scorecard, released today by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), co-author of FITARA, showed double the amount of “C” grades with 10 “Cs” and three “Ds” for the first time since July 2022.

At the FITARA scorecard roundtable today on Capitol Hill, Connolly and Carol Harris, the director of cybersecurity and technology at the Government Accountability Office, were quick to downplay the drop in grades.

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The Defense Department is sending a signal that it wants to build a workplace culture accepting of remote work and telework and it’s setting preconditions to make it happen.

DoD recently updated its telework policy for the first time since 2012. The policy is a permissive one and reflects lessons learned and knowledge gained during the pandemic about working remotely. The biggest change is that the document now addresses both remote work and telework.

The new instruction is clear – telework is a workplace flexibility and not an entitlement, and a remote work arrangement won’t be approved unless it meets all of the telework eligibility requirements. At the same time, it instructs the DoD components to “actively promote” telework and remote work, and to eliminate barriers to program execution through education and training.

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