The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

The IRS has taken several big steps recently on the personnel front. It has brought in people to help improve taxpayer service. And just the other day commissioner, Danny Werfel said he would reorganize management to emphasize service, compliance, technology and operations. But to discuss one missing element, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talked with long-time leadership professor Bob Tobias.

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Like every agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) relies on its acquisition workforce to keep it supplied. In the ongoing crisis at the U.S. southern border, CBP appears to have a secret weapon in the person of its assistant commissioner for the office of acquisition. This long-serving official has received a Presidential Rank Award. Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talked with Diane Sahakian.

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For the federal workforce, 2023 was yet another pivotal year — defined by changes not only to the federal workplace, but also to the government’s recruitment and retention strategies.

What this year perhaps most notably marked was a pivot in agencies’ telework policies and return-to-office plans. After the Office of Management and Budget’s call to ramp up “meaningful” in-office work, agencies led a slow, one-by-one release of their individual plans to heed the White House memo.

Depending on their agency, many federal employees’ partial return to the office began in the late summer of 2023 and lasted through the fall — some changes will take place even further ahead, beginning in early 2024.

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Federal agencies coalesced around a new national vision for cybersecurity over the past year, but continued to grapple with emerging cyber threats.

I asked experts in the cyber field, many of them former feds, the following question: What was the biggest development for federal cybersecurity in 2023?

The most popular answer far and away was the Biden administration’s release of a new national cyber strategy. But regulatory activities, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and some game-changing cyber attacks were also among the most significant developments of the past year.

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Special victims units are now solely responsible for investigating sexual assault and some other serious crimes, marking a turning point for the military justice system and the way sexual misconduct is handled in the military.

Within each military service, Offices of Special Trial Counsel will allow trained lawyers to evaluate and prosecute allegations of sexual assault and other “covered” offenses independently, taking those cases out of the hands of victims’ commanders.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced today that the Offices of Special Trial Counsel are now fully operational, officially shifting away prosecutorial discretion for serious offenses from unit commanders to specially trained military attorneys.

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Adopting a zero trust approach to cybersecurity inside a single federal agency is hard enough. For U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, it’s many times more complex. That’s because INDOPACOM needs to adopt zero trust in a way that works not just for the U-S military, but for numerous other allies and partner nations – some of which are further behind the curve than others.

Long before it started the work of bringing “mission partners” into a zero trust environment, INDOPACOM’s first task was to figure out how to apply the principles to the U.S. military’s own requirements for IT networks.

Paul Nicholson, the command’s deputy CIO, said the previous approach to network defense wasn’t working well.

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Defense contractors are parsing out a nearly 250-page proposed rule. It landed sort like a lump of coal on Christmas Eve. It is all about a program known as Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). At the very least, if you are even tangentially involved in the topic, you should read the proposal and prepare comments. For more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talked with procurement attorney Eric Crusius, a partner at Holland and Knight.

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The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey scores came out just before Christmas. And the results, in general, seem to be pointed in the right direction. For early analysis, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with a partner and the Director of Government and Public Affairs at Shaw, Bransford and Roth, Jason Briefel.

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A special retention pay authority the Justice department used to retain certain Bureau of Prisons employees expires in a few days. This affects employees of the Federal Correctional Institution Thomson in Illinois. The result: A Christmastime pay cut of 25% for correctional officers and other employees. For more of what is going on, we turn to the president of the American Federation of Government Employees local 4070, Jon Zumkehr.

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

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