#2: DOT- FAA: Share and share alike
It sometimes seems as though the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t part of the Transportation Department. But last week, the DOT chief information officer announced that the two organizations are in talks to work together on server virtualization. DOT hopes to forge a formal agreement by the end of the Bush administration, said DOT CIO Dan Mintz. It is part of efforts to establish an enterprise view in a department whose IT authority is decentralized across its component agencies. The move also should reduce costs. For example, DOT and FAA possibly could use each other as backups for continuity of operations instead of having individual COOP sites.
#3: Justice: Don’t BYO
For Justice Department employees, it’s government-issued PCs and nothing else. Security concerns have forced Justice officials to adopt a new policy that forbids any department employee from using a personally owned computer for government business. That blanket restriction covers e-mail messages sent from personally owned personal digital assistants, which had been allowed. Government-issued devices are fully encrypted and monitored.
#4: What did Clinton do?
Lawmakers want to go back to the Clinton years to get an historical perspective on a current controversy: the practice of White House aides delivering political briefings to federal employees. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, requested documents from the National Archives and Records Administration that might show whether President Clinton’s political aides conducted political briefings in federal office buildings. Controversy over that practice landed Lurita Doan, administrator of the General Services Administration, in trouble earlier this year. The Office of Special Counsel recommended that President Bush remove Doan from office because of a political briefing held at GSA’s headquarters in January.
#5: NSPS: A partial no-go
The Defense Department is proceeding to implement only the pay provisions of its new pay-for-performance and labor relations rules. DOD will move an additional 90,000 nonbargaining unit employees into the new system — the National Security Personnel System — in fiscal 2008. That would bring the total number of employees in NSPS to about 200,000. The department updated its NSPS Web site Sept. 11 to state that DOD has no plans at this time to implement the adverse actions, appeals and labor relations portions of NSPS.
