The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

The Veterans Affairs Department's big medical campuses are full of physical security gaps, the VA's office of Inspector General has found. Unlocked exterior doors, broken surveillance cameras and a shortage of VA police officers top the list. For details, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Deputy Assistant Inspector General Leigh Ann Searight.

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At least one program of the EPA has had consistent support regardless of the administration or the makeup of Congress. It's called WaterSense and it's aimed at plugging household leaks thought to result in billions and billions of wasted gallons. For more, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Beth Livingston, WaterSense Lead Environmental Specialist.

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The Office of Personnel Management still has a lot of rebuilding to do. Federal Drive host Tom Temin's guest in this interview, points out that OPM went eight years without a confirmed director. The Trump administration tried to roll its functions into the White House and GSA. American University professor Bob Tobias puts the recent OPM testimony into context.

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Since January, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has been running a highly classified version of a very popular consumer platform. DISA completed functional testing of what it calls DOD-365-Sec, a secure version of Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-hosted suite of common products. With a progress report on user testing, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with the program manager for DISA's Defense Enterprise Office Solution, Carissa Landymore.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is asking Congress for a significant boost in funding for next year, in part to try to rectify the challenge of a shrinking workforce paired with a rapidly growing workload.

The White House proposed a $12 billion budget for EPA for fiscal 2024. If enacted, the funding would be a 19% increase over the agency’s budget for fiscal 2023, and the largest budget ever for the agency.

Among efforts to tackle climate change, protect public health and improve infrastructure, a top priority of the EPA budget request is rebuilding its workforce.

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As the Space Force continues to build its capabilities, it has to figure out how to train the growing number of guardians coming into its ranks. For now the solution remains a cobbled-together system of using its own training command and supplementing that with resources from the Air Force and the private sector.

The technology-heavy new service relies on skilled operators to run and maintain its arsenal of satellites and sensors that make up U.S. presence in space. While the Space Force maintains Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM) as its central training command for guardians, it must farm out a variety of skills training to other sources in order to quickly train its recruits.

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The future look and feel of your office space isn’t just going to be filled with movable furniture or whiz-bang technology. It likely will include federal employees from other agencies. The latest trend the General Services Administration is hearing from agencies is the desire to share buildings, conference space and training rooms as a part of reducing costs and improving the employee experience.

Nina Albert, the commissioner of the Public Building Service at GSA, said federal office space will continue to evolve over the next few years, as more agencies get a better handle on their short- and long-term needs.

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In today's episode of The Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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The Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act -- the Pact Act -- became law a few months ago. It brought an expansion of services available to veterans and drew more veterans into eligibility. For a review, Federal Drive host Tom Temin talked to a director at the National Veterans Legal Services Program, Richard Spataro.

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The omnibus appropriations bill enacted last year, contains something called the Anti-Money Laundering Whistleblower Improvement Act. Federal Drive host Tom Temin's guest on this podcast, calls it the most important transnational anti-corruption whistleblower law since the Dodd-Frank law in 2010. In fact, Stephen Kohn, a partner at the law firm Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto, helped get it passed.

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