Federal Employees

Caren Cordell For all of the bipartisan goodwill that modernizing the government’s information technology has beget, there’s one thing that Gerry Connolly thinks can bring it to a halt: the executive branch. Speaking at the MeriTalk’s Cloud for Next-Gen Government conference on June 7, Rep. Connolly, D-Va., said that despite the legislative momentum behind the Modernizing Government Technology Act and White House support through recent executive orders, the movement to upgrade federal IT could s... Read more

Jessie Bur Congress will be busy with future tech initiatives and members have high hopes for the potential of current programs, according to two congressmen who spoke June 7 at MeriTalk’s Cloud Computing Brainstorm. Congressional IT leaders Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Gerry Connolly, D-Va., talked about the future of major IT initiatives such as FedRAMP, the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, FITARA, and executive leadership, offering insight into the shape of IT developments in the... Read more

Eliza Collins Republicans are about to give one of the top committee posts in the House to a guy who has never said he wants the job: South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy. Gowdy is expected to be chosen this week to take over the chairmanship of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, despite the fact he has not said he is running for the position. The Republican Steering Committee — which is made up of Republican leadership and other representatives — will meet this week to choo... Read more

Bill McAllister Forty-eight years after President Richard M. Nixon pleaded with postal unions to support his plan for an independent postal service, another Republican president appears to be saying those unions might have achieved too many benefits with their collective-bargaining rights. That seems to be what Donald Trump’s proposed federal budget for fiscal 2018 is saying. The president wants to roll back some of the gains the postal unions have made in the almost five decades since Nixon gav... Read more

Damian Paletta and Mike DeBonis President Trump faces an increasingly narrow path to win major legislative victories before the looming August recess, with only two months left to revive his health-care or tax initiatives before Congress departs for a long break. White House officials said Tuesday that Trump has become increasingly incensed that legislation is bogging down in the Senate, something they blame on Democrats. Trump wrote on Twitter that the Senate should change its long-standing rul... Read more

Joe Davidson President Trump, with his well-crafted disrupter reputation, potentially could disrupt one self-funding service Americans directly use almost every day — mail delivery. In the fiscal 2018 budget plan the Trump administration released this week, he reopened the divisive issue of cutting Saturday mail service. After a long and contentious effort, Republicans and Democrats, postal officials, postal unions and mass mailers managed to reach a compromise on postal reform with Saturday ser... Read more

Robert McCartney President Trump’s full budget plan, issued Tuesday, is even worse for the Washington region than the initial “skinny” version released in March, local government officials and analysts say. The new one includes all the same ominous proposals that prompted warnings that the spending plan would worsen economic inequality and possibly tip the area into recession. The White House still wants to shrink the local federal workforce by thousands of jobs and slash spending for affordable... Read more

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA) released the following statement on the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the Republican health care bill: “The CBO confirms what we already knew: the GOP health care bill is still a bad bill. It kicks 23 million people off health care by 2026 and leaves consumers at the mercy of insurance companies when it comes to pre-existing conditions. CBO even confirms that essential services covered under Obamacare including maternity care, mental health and substanc... Read more

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA) released the following statement on President Trump's FY2018 Budget proposal: “The President's FY2018 budget proposal is the most radical policy document to come out of Washington since the failed Ryan Budget. It is a blueprint for social Darwinism and a unilateral retreat from our commitments at home and abroad. How does slashing Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Social Security, disability insurance, NIH funding, SNAP, community deve... Read more

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA) released the following on President Trump's proposed cuts to federal employee retirement programs: "The biggest losers from President Trump's draconian cuts to federal employee pay and benefits will be the American people who count on dedicated federal employees to care for our veterans, maintain our national parks, and process Social Security checks each and every day. Cuts of this magnitude will make it impossible to recruit and retain the qualified workforce ... Read more