Federal Manager's Daily Report
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
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In Today's Issue:
1. Revised Circular A-76 Overturned in Senate
2. Legislation Would Reform Intelligence Community
3. Premium Pay Rules Finalized
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1. Revised Circular A-76 Overturned in Senate
A Senate subcommittee has passed an amendment to the fiscal
2004 Treasury-Transportation Appropriations bill overturning
the Office of Management and Budget's revision of Circular
A-76, effectively reinstating the earlier version.
The bipartisan amendment, sponsored by Senator Barbara
Milkulski, D-Md., prohibits appropriated funds from being
used to implement the revised A-76 guidelines.
Also, the Senate followed the House in voting to eliminate
a privatization review of some Department of Homeland
Security employees involved in immigration processing.
"This amendment would protect our civil service from
cronyism and political patronage," said Mikulski. "I am
not against privatization when it's based on thoughtful
consideration. I am against arbitrary quotas, bounty
hunters and stacking the deck against dedicated federal
employees."
She said the amendment "sends the administration back to
the drawing board to come up with new guidelines for
competitions that are truly fair," that under the
revisions federal workers could lose "jobs to contractor
bids that don't even save the government enough money to
cover the cost of the competition."
2. Legislation Would Reform Intelligence Community
Governmental Affairs Committee chairman Susan Collins,
R-Maine, and ranking member Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.,
have introduced legislation reforming the intelligence
community of the executive branch, establishing a
national intelligence director with strong budget and
personnel authorities that would act as the President�s
chief intelligence advisor.
The legislation also creates a National Counter-Terrorism
Center, "integrating intelligence capabilities and
facilitating joint operational planning among intelligence
agencies." It said the NCTC would not have authority to
direct operations and would remain outside military command.
A National Intelligence Program would include "at least"
the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security
Administration, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,
National Reconnaissance Office, and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation�s Office of Intelligence, and the Department
of Homeland Security�s Information Analysis and
Infrastructure Protection Directorate, plus other elements
of the intelligence community that serve multiple federal
intelligence consumers, under the bill. However, it would
not include tactical military intelligence assets, which
would remain under the Department of Defense.
The legislation also creates a civil liberties board, "to
ensure privacy and civil liberties concerns are being
adequately respected and protected as the president and
executive agencies propose and implement policies," by
conducting investigations and oversight of policy
implementation.
3. Premium Pay Rules Finalized
The Office of Personnel Management has finalized, in a
September 17 Federal Register notice, rules carrying out
a 2001 statute (PL 107-107) that raised the premium pay
caps for most employees, and permitted the use of an annual
cap instead of a biweekly cap in circumstances including
the performance of emergency and "mission-critical" work.
Under the rules, the head of an agency or designee is
authorized to make determinations concerning mission-critical
work in order to apply the annual cap provisions of instead
of the standard biweekly cap provisions. The regulations do
not require that separate emergency and mission-critical
determinations be made for each pay period.
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