The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

As the Pentagon moves to create novel ways of customizing acquisition to make the process faster and more agile, a new crop of acquisition professionals is learning their job and choosing what they learn based on specialization. At the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), aspiring contracting officers focus on the basics, and then they pick and choose based on what area of expertise they need.

Dr. Bill LaPlante, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, called the changes at DAU transformational.

“If you haven’t gone and seen online, all the courses and things that they put in, a new generation of training for the workforce, it’s very, very impressive,” LaPlante said at the Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Symposium Wednesday.

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It might just be an unfortunate fact: More government will lead to taxpayer dollars stolen through fraud. However, it also means more money is needed to combat that fraud. For example, the Health and Human Services Department has more programs than ever, resulting in the agency's Inspector General to ask for an increase in its 2024 Congressional Budget Justification. To learn more about some of the details, Federal Drive Executive Producer Eric White got the chance to speak with Julie Hodgkins, Principal Deputy Inspector General at HHS Office of Inspector General.

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Public employee unions are a fact of life at the federal and most state levels of government, and in many large cities. President John Kennedy famously authorized them at the federal level back in the early 1960s. Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with an author, who argues that public unions not only promote inefficiency, they're also unconstitutional. Philip Howard is an attorney and founder of Common Good.

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A bill from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) would make federal executive branch employees "at-will." You could be fired for any reason, short of a prohibited personnel practice. For one interpretation of what the bill could mean, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke to John Hatton of NARFE: the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association.

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

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A recent Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing raised questions of integrity and the so-called revolving door between industry and the Defense Department. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was among the witnesses, saying there's too much industrial influence on Pentagon decisions coming from former officers and high-level civilians. For a summary, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with POGO's Government Affairs Manager, Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette.

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The Tonopah Test Range is a classified spot in Nevada, operated by the Defense and Energy Departments. It was once the site for nuclear materials testing. Many veterans who worked at Tonopah in later years claim exposure to residual radiation has caused health problems. Now a bill from Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) would compensate these veterans. Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with the man who did much of the research and documentation of the radiation effects. The bill is name after him: Air Force Veteran Dave Crete.

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Supply-chain cybersecurity might seem like and abstraction, until you are, say, NASA, and building new ground stations to support the multi-billion-dollar Artemis-to-Mars program. All those antenna signals, data processing, communication links. At the recent ACTIAC conference on emerging technology, Federal Drive Executive Producer Eric White spoke with Jena Garrahy, Program Manager for Space Communications and Navigation.

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A bipartisan group of members of the Senate Intelligence Committee is pushing a significant overhaul of the government’s procedures for classifying information, seeking both to curtail what they say is a massive over-classification problem and to and make existing records simpler to declassify.

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The Office of Personnel Management, looking to fully close the gender pay gap in the federal workforce, is taking a new approach to try to level the playing field for new federal hires.

Proposed regulations OPM published Wednesday would bar agencies from using a federal job candidate’s previous salary history when setting pay as part of an employment offer.

OPM’s proposal aims to address the pay disparity between men, and women and racial minorities, in the federal workforce. In 2022, women federal employees’ pay trailed behind that of their male counterparts by an average of 5.6%. In other words, women made 94.4 cents for every dollar men made in the federal workforce.

“Relying on a candidate’s previous salary history can exacerbate preexisting inequality and disproportionately impact women and workers of color,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a press statement Wednesday.

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