The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) received 18,000 tips from would-be whistleblowers in 2023. Since starting its whistleblower program in 2011, the SEC has paid tipsters some $6.3 billion. Federal Drive Host Tom Temin's guest has some insight on all of this. He's whistleblower attorney and partner at Youman and Caputo, John Crutchlow.

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You may not wake up thinking about Cislunar-space situational awareness, but people at the Air Force Research Laboratories. In fact, AFRL has had two programs for such awareness. Two programs they have brought together. The resulting program is called the Oracle family of systems. To find out more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talked with two of the project leaders: Mission Lead Jaime Stearns and Investigator James Frith.

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On this episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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As agency leaders approach another opportunity to share their biggest pain points in workforce planning, the Office of Personnel Management has pointed out some common challenges agencies are currently facing.

Limited resources are the greatest impediment to agencies’ ability to bring human resources innovations to scale, OPM said in a recent report summarizing findings from human capital reviews during fiscal 2023.

Last year, OPM spent several months interviewing agency chief human capital officers (CHCOs) and other workforce leaders about their challenges in everything from recruitment and retention to long-term workforce planning.

Many CHCOs, as summarized by OPM, said during the 2023 human capital reviews that without the right staffing, skills and structure in federal HR shops, advancements in workforce planning will likely fall short. Limitations in both budget and HR restrict agencies’ capacity to explore opportunities and take innovations to scale, OPM said.

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A contractor got into a pricing squeeze when the customer, in this case the Marine Corps, way underestimated the quantities for the services under the contract. It learned what can happen when the legal proceedings get complicated. For details on the lessons learned, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with Haynes Boone procurement attorney Zach Prince.

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Federal improper payments roll on and on, year after year. Among the most frustrating are fraudulent unemployment benefits, federal dollars that get spent by the states. Last fall, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that as much as 15% of pandemic-era unemployment spending went to fraudsters, or as much as $135 billion. For a review of GAO recommendations, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with Seto Bagdoyan, GAO's Director of Forensic Audits.

GAO Report

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A new initiative from Health and Human Services seeks to prevent preventable health problems in under-served communities. The HEROES Program will run through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). HEROES stands for Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes. To see how it works, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with program manager Dr. Darshak Sanghavi.

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On this episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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A new memo from the Defense Department clarifies who is accountable for ensuring the security of cloud services at the FedRAMP moderate level.

The latest document provides guidance on a clause within the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement regarding the application of FedRAMP moderate to cloud services being used by contractors for storing and processing covered defense information.

“One of the things that we learned in the early days of cloud was there was a lot of finger-pointing going on when something bad would happen. Let’s say a vulnerability would be found, or a zero-day event happened, there was this confusion around, ‘Is that the cloud service provider’s responsibility? Is that a contractor’s responsibility? Is that the government’s responsibility or somebody else? Who really is responsible?’” Raj Iyer, ServiceNow’s global head of public sector and a former chief information officer of the Army, told Federal News Network.

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The Veterans Health Administration is looking to raise workforce productivity, after a record year of hiring, and increase the number of health care appointments available to patients.

“We now have the end-strength to be able to increase productivity across the system, and provide more care out of the direct care system,” VA Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal told reporters in a briefing on Monday.

VHA hired more than 61,000 employees last year, far exceeding some of its workforce goals for fiscal 2023.

“Because of that, the goal this year is not going to be to increase total employees on board except for very critical staffing areas like mental health,” Elnahal said. “But pretty much for every other category of staff that we have, we think we have what we need to meet that demand. It’s on us to increase productivity commensurate with our staffing level, to make sure that we are able to provide accessible care.”

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