Who Can be Fired at the VA for Cause? No One

Bipartisan Senate Group Unveils New Bill to Speed Up VA Firing, Bonus Recoupment

The new bill comes just days after a federal appeals court ruled Congress’ previous attempt at hastening VA’s disciplinary process — through the 2014 Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — was unconstitutional. The measure stripped Senior Executive Service employees of their right to a second-level appeal before the Merit Systems Protection Board’s presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed panel. VA had already stopped using the new authority after its constitutionality was questioned in court and the Obama administration declined to defend it.

The senators have been working on their new bill for weeks, but they said the court ruling reinforced the need for reform. “This legislation would improve on the law we enacted in 2014,” Rubio said.

The bill would allow the department’s secretary to fire, suspend or demote an employee with only 15 days notice. Affected workers would then have seven days to issue a response before a final decision is made. Any employee facing removal, suspension of at least 14 days or a demotion would have 10 days to appeal the action to the Merit Systems Protection Board. MSPB would then have 180 days to issue a decision, a much longer period than the 45-day timeline set up in the House bill. Employees would maintain the right to appeal an MSPB decision to federal court.

Employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement would also maintain the right to appeal a negative personnel action through the grievance process, though it would have to be resolved within 21 days. Read more here.

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Meanwhile, there is that blasted union problem at the VA:

An estimated 346 employees in the Department of Veterans Affairs do no actual work for taxpayers. Instead, they spend all of their time doing work on behalf of their union while drawing a federal salary, a practice known as “official time.”

That’s according to a report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. But exactly what those VA workers are doing and why so many are doing it is not clear. The VA doesn’t track that, and the GAO report offers no clue.

Rep. Jody Arrington, R-Texas, a member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, thinks the number on 100 percent official time may be much higher. He also notes that the 346 workers don’t include those who spend most, not all, of their time doing union work.

“The lack of accountability at the VA when it comes to monitoring official time suggests it might be worse,” said Arrington, who has introduced legislation that would require the department to track the use of official time, among other reforms.

Pointing to the waiting list scandals at the department, Arrington said the official time situation is reflective of the “broken culture at the heart of the VA” and adds, “I haven’t heard one good, acceptable reason why the practice has continued.”

The VA was not eager to discuss the matter with the Washington Examiner. After several days of inquiries, it responded with the following statement: “VA believes that the appropriate use of official time can be beneficial and in the public interest as stated in the Federal Service Labor-Relations Statute, which governs how executive branch agencies treat official time. VA takes the position that labor and management have a shared responsibility to ensure that official time is authorized and used appropriately. VA practices are in compliance with the Federal Service Labor-Relations Statute.”

Official time is allowed under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. The idea behind it is to ensure that a federal employee who is also a union official won’t be penalized for being away from work if he or she is negotiating a contract or addressing a worker grievance, for example. It is essentially a trade-off for the limitations put on federal unions, such as prohibitions on striking.

At least 700 federal workers do nothing but work on official time, according to the GAO and data obtained from various Freedom of Information Act requests. The VA uses official time far more than any other agency.

“Employees spent approximately 1,057,00 hours on official time for union representation activities … In addition, the data show that 346 employees spent 100 percent of their time on official time,” the GAO found in a January report.

It is possible that even those figures are conservative. The GAO said the said the VA’s poor monitoring meant the data was “inconsistent and not reliable.”

The GAO didn’t know what the employees are doing with all of that time. “We just didn’t get into that in that particular study,” said Cindy Barnes, the GAO’s director of education, workforce and income security issues and author of the report.

Part of the explanation is that the VA is one of the largest federal agencies with 373,000 workers, making it second only to the Pentagon in the sheer size of its workforce. About 250,000 VA workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, according to the GAO, citing 2012 data. Arrington puts the covered figure at 285,000.

By comparison, the Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 workers and the Department of Commerce has just under 44,000 workers. But those departments get by with proportionately far fewer people working exclusively on official time. DHS has 39, while Commerce has just four.

Another factor is that the VA’s workforce is represented by no less than five unions: The American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, National Nurses United, the National Federation of Federal Employees and the Service Employees International Union.

National Nurses United representative Irma Westmoreland was the only union official willing to talk about the practice with the Washington Examiner. She is one of five nurses union members who work exclusively on union time at the VA. The union has another nine who spent 80 percent of their time at the VA on official time, she said.

Westmoreland said her work was necessary because nurses can’t simply stop taking care of a patient to do something like address a worker grievance. People such as her do the union work and make it possible for the other nurses to focus on providing care.

“I have to travel across the country working with 23 VA facilities in four time zones,” she said. “The management teams want somebody at 100 percent official time so they don’t have to pull somebody out of care.”

But not everyone at the VA is involved in care. So what are the other 341 exclusive official time workers doing? Westmoreland had no insight.

“I don’t know how the other people do it,” she said.

American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox told Arrington’s subcommittee in February that official time involved activities such as “designing and delivering joint training of employees on work-related subjects and introduction of new programs and work methods that are initiated by the agency or by the union.”

He added that “in no way did the [February GAO] report suggest that the use of official time presents problems for the department.” The report sought only to quantify the amount of time used.

Arrington argues that the practice has to change if the VA is ever to be truly reformed. He has sponsored the Veterans, Employees and Taxpayer Protection Act, which would require the VA to track the use of official time. It also would prohibit employees involved with direct patient care from spending more than a quarter of their work hours on union activities and bar any VA employee from spending more than half of their time on official time.

The legislation would effectively put VA employees under right-to-work protection. The VA would be prohibited from agreeing to union contracts that force workers to join or otherwise support a union as a condition of employment.

Westmoreland said she has no trouble with better tracking the use of official time but warns against putting any limitations on its use.

“It makes it very difficult if you cannot have set official time,” she said.

Trump’s EO on Voter Fraud Commission

Read the text here. The ‘voting rights’ division at the Justice Department may just have an issue with this, but the commission should happen along with a technology fix going into the future. We cannot forget that DHS contacted several states prior to the voting season last Fall concerning registration databases and voting machines. Some states cooperated while others frankly did not only not trust government intrusion but DHS.

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Trump signs executive order launching voter fraud commission

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to launch a commission to review alleged voter fraud, a White House official confirmed to Fox News, after months of claiming voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.

The order, titled “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity,” would establish a bipartisan commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, to review alleged voter fraud and suppression. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has investigated voter fraud in Kansas, will serve as vice chair.

“The commission will also include individuals with knowledge and experience in election management and voter integrity,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders said on Thursday at the White House daily press briefing. “The commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine confidence in elections and identify system vulnerabilities.”

Huckabee-Sanders announced five members to the commission on Thursday: Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson (R), New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner (D), Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D), Christie McCormick, commissioner of the election assistance commission, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell(R).

The White House said the commission will review practices that affect the integrity of federal elections–spanning improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting and voting suppression.

“We expect the report to be complete by 2018,” Huckabee-Sanders said. “The experts will follow the facts where they lead–we’ll share updates as we have them.”

Trump originally vowed to create such a commission in January. Days after his inauguration, Trump took to Twitter calling for a “major investigation into VOTER FRAUD,” saying that depending on the results of the investigation, “we will strengthen up voting procedures!” He cited “illegal” voters and “those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time)” which he claimed cost him the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won by 3 million votes.

But on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed the commission.

“Putting an extremist like Mr. Kobach at the helm of this commission is akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department,” Schumer said. “President Trump has decided to waste taxpayer dollars chasing a unicorn and perpetuating the dangerous myth that widespread voter fraud exists.”

Voting experts and many lawmakers have said they haven’t seen anything to suggest that millions of people voted illegally, including House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. The Utah Republican said his committee won’t be investigating voter fraud.

In a lunch meeting with senators in February, Trump said that he and former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte would have won in New Hampshire if not for voters bused in from out of state. New Hampshire officials have said there was no evidence of major voter fraud in the state.

In a February interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump said the main issue of voter fraud was registration, and vowed to look at the situation “very, very carefully.”

“When you look at the registration and you see dead people that have voted, when you see people that are registered in two states, that have voted in two states, when you see other things, when you see illegals, people that are not citizens and they are on registration roles,” Trump said. “We can be babies, but you take a look at registration, you have illegals, you have dead people, you have this, it’s a really bad situation, it’s really bad.”

The decision to revisit the voter fraud issue comes during a tumultuous week, after Trump on Tuesday fired FBI Director James Comey. The administration cited Comey’s handling of the Clinton email probe, but Democrats also question what role his bureau investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 race played.

In a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election tampering in March, voter fraud became a topic of questioning — Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked Comey if the FBI had any evidence that votes were changed in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio, to which Comey answered “No.”

After winning the election, Trump singled out several states and claimed fraud in their voting system, but officials in those states insisted that his claims were unfounded.

No Cyber Policy, Doctrine, Protection, Result of Senate Hearing

President Trump signed another executive order today. This one is on cyber security and protecting infrastructure. Read it here.

Image result for trump signs executive order BusinessInsider

No one wants to participate in the hard debate regarding cyber, where it is noted to be the highest threat for the homeland. At least the Trump White House is taking note, yet this executive order may not be enough or engage the private sector. It is gratifying however that some inside and outside experts are in fact having talks on an international basis with cyber experts. That is always a good thing.

At issue on this topic is the path forward and the estimated costs. Cyber is a battlespace where it should be noted it could cost what conventional military operations costs against adversaries and could take as long if not forever. All government infrastructure is dated, unprotected and there are no measures to correct in a priority ranking.

The other item of note, there is no legal or case law condition where the cyber attackers are prosecuted. Exactly why did Sony not sue North Korea? If there is no consequence, even ceremoniously, then expect more hacks. Of note, to sue and or sanction North Korea, China would have to be included, as the internet connectivity to North Korea is provided by China and further, China trained the hackers in North Korea….sheesh right?

Politico reports: The directive is Trump’s first major action on cyber policy and sets the stage for the administration’s efforts to secure porous federal networks that have been repeatedly infiltrated by digital pranksters, cyber thieves and government-backed hackers from China and Russia.

“The trend is going in the wrong direction in cyberspace, and it’s time to stop that trend and reverse it on behalf of the American people,” White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert told reporters during a Thursday afternoon briefing.

Cyber specialists say the order breaks little new ground but is vastly improved over early drafts, which omitted input from key government policy specialists. The final version, cyber watchers say, essentially reaffirms the gradually emerging cyber policy path of the past two administrations.

As part of the executive order’s IT upgrade initiative, administration officials will study the feasibility of transitioning to shared IT services and networks across the government. An estimated 80 percent of the $80 billion federal IT budget goes toward taking care of aging systems.

Senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner’s Office of American Innovation will play a significant role in the federal IT modernization effort, multiple people tracking the efforts have told POLITICO. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order creating the American Technology Council, with Kushner as director, to help coordinate that effort. More here.

*** Personally, it must be mentioned there is a problem with this operating out of the White House and certainly out of Jared Kushner’s office, he is way too tasked to be effective. Other professionals in the cyber realm agree, the matter of a ‘net’ command and operations that collaborate with the private sector should be it’s own command and separated from NSA.

There was a significant hearing today on The Hill while the FBI hearing was going on. Those on the witness panel included James Clapper, Jim Stavridis and Michael Hayden. The Senate Armed Services Committee hosted this session and it included high rate discussions including why there is no cyber doctrine, why there are no offensive measures and what the highest cyber threats are for the homeland.

Proposed Legislation on Citizen Feedback on Govt Services

So, do you think your voice regarding the federal government goes unheard? Actually it is heard and it is scored. At issue is whether any substantial corrections are made. This proposed legislation may help and it is a step at least in the right direction.

Most of us don’t bother to even voice or register complaints. Perhaps we should rethink that. Who even knew in the first place there was a tally operation on public comments and it is referred to as ‘customer service’? Hah…

Problem is there is not an agency does not have issues….okay then, let the games begin…read on.

Primer: OMB belongs to the White House:

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) serves the President of the United States in overseeing the implementation of his vision across the Executive Branch. Specifically, OMB’s mission is to assist the President in meeting his policy, budget, management and regulatory objectives and to fulfill the agency’s statutory responsibilities.

OMB carries out its mission through five critical processes that are essential to the President’s ability to plan and implement his priorities across the Executive Branch:

  1. Budget development and execution.
  2. Management, including oversight of agency performance, human capital, Federal procurement, financial management, and information technology.
  3. Regulatory policy, including coordination and review of all significant Federal regulations by executive agencies.
  4. Legislative clearance and coordination.
  5. Executive Orders and Presidential Memoranda.

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Congress could be poised to take on the federal government’s customer service problems.

Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Wednesday introduced the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act, bipartisan legislation that would simplify the process agencies go through to gather public feedback about their customer service.

The bill would roll back requirements that force agencies to go through lengthy approval processes to gather voluntary feedback from citizens and customers, and further creates both legislative and executive oversight mechanisms to oversee how agencies deliver services.

“The bill also directs agencies to post the results to their websites and requires them to use the feedback they receive to improve government services,” Lankford said in a statement. “We must do more to increase federal customer service and remove unnecessary requirements that make basic services tedious and overly bureaucratic.”

The legislation mandates agency heads—or designated officials—collect voluntary feedback from customers “with respect to services of or transactions” made by the agency.

Feedback would be gathered across all channels based on both standardized questions created in tandem by the leaders of the Office of Management and Budget director and the General Services Administration, and agency-specific questions developed by senior officials. Those questions would revolve around customer satisfaction, such as the professionalism and timeliness of federal action and potentially other metrics.

Agencies would be required to submit customer service reports based on the feedback they collect to OMB and to post it on their websites. In addition, the legislation would create a centralized website that links to all agencies’ customer service reports.

“Most people think interacting with the federal government is unpleasant—but at the same time we’re making it difficult for agencies to ask the public how they can improve—it makes no sense,” McCaskill said. “This law will allow the federal government to better identify specific customer service issues and start to implement changes to make the government work better for the American people.”

Congress, too, would get regular updates on how agencies perform with regards to customer service.

The bill would require the U.S. comptroller general to deliver scorecard reports “assessing the quality of services provided to the public” of agencies to the Senate.

Fixing the government’s customer services woes—the government routinely ranks below industry—could unite Republicans and Democrats in much the same way the government’s IT issues have. The Obama administration elevated customer service as a major issue, yet agency progress was minimal.

Max Stier, CEO of the government-focused nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, said the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act will help agencies improve their service delivery.

“The important legislation introduced today by Sens. Lankford and McCaskill will allow agencies to continue to improve by helping them better understand the concerns of the public, continue to improve in the delivery of services and increase citizen satisfaction,” he said in a statement.

Mexico’s Cartel Kids and a Deadly State

Reuters: The Mexican army says its fight against surging opium production that feeds U.S demand is increasingly complicated by the rise of smaller gangs disputing wild, ungoverned lands planted with ever-stronger poppy strains.

The gangs have engulfed the state of Guerrero in a war to control poppy fields, turning inaccessible mountain valleys of endemic poverty and famous beach resorts into Mexico’s bloodiest spots.

Colonel Isaac Aaron Jesus Garcia, who runs a base in one of the state’s most unruly cities, Ciudad Altamirano, told Reuters on an operation to chop down poppies high in the Guerrero mountains that violence increased two years ago when a third gang, Los Viagra, began a grab for territory.

Bodies are discovered almost daily across the state, tossed by roads, some buried in mass graves. In Ciudad Altamirano, the mayor was killed last year and a journalist gunned down in March at a car wash.

“These fractures (in the gangs) started two years ago, and that caused this violence that is all about monopolizing the production of the drug,” Jesus Garcia said.

From this frontline of the fight against heroin, Jesus Garcia sees a direct link between a record U.S. heroin epidemic that killed nearly 13,000 people in 2015 and violence on his patch.

“The increase of consumers for this type of drug in the United States has been exponential and the collateral effect is seen here,” Jesus Garcia said.

REUTERS/Henry Romero

Heroin use in the United States has risen five-fold in the past decade and addiction has more than tripled, with the biggest jumps among whites and men with low incomes.

Jesus Garcia said the task of seeking out poppy fields in one of Mexico’s poorest and least accessible regions, rising above the beach resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa, was practically endless.

His 34th Battalion and others send platoons of troops on foot for month-long expeditions every season. They set up camps and fan through treacherous terrain, part of a campaign that destroys tens of thousands of fields a year.

One such field visited by Reuters was deep in a lawless region six hours from Ciudad Altamirano through winding dirt roads thick with dust that rose into the mountains.

It was irrigated by a lawn sprinkler mounted on a pole that spritzed water over less than a hectare of poppies and fertilizer bags were piled nearby, basic farming techniques the soldiers nevertheless said were a sign of growers’ new sophistication.

A dozen troops fanned out, chopping down the flowers with machetes.

HIGHER YIELDS

Army officials said gangs use poppy varieties that produce higher yields and more potent opium from smaller plots, and that its higher value is driving violent competition between gangs.

“Now we see more production of poppy in less terrain, and it has to do with the quantity of bulbs each plant has,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jose Urzua as he showed bulbs oozing valuable gum from slits. He explained opium is often harvested by families.

In these tiny mountain hamlets opium has grown for decades, officials said, but a coffee plague and the U.S. opiate epidemic has led farmers to plant much more.

The harvest has become central to Guerrero’s economy, also dependent on cash sent home by immigrants.

One army official said the field seen by Reuters could produce around 3 kilos (6.6 lb) of opium, fetching up to $950 per kilo from traffickers who sell it for up to $8,000.

“There aren’t many alternatives here,” said a woman selling soft drinks and snacks from a pine shack by a dirt road. Her husband grows poppies, and she said anyone who runs a business faces extortion by gangs.

***   Image result for cnn no way out cartel kids CNN

(CNN)It was the second deadliest conflict in the world last year, but it hardly registered in the international headlines.

As Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan dominated the news agenda, Mexico’s drug wars claimed 23,000 lives during 2016 — second only to Syria, where 50,000 people died as a result of the civil war.
“This is all the more surprising, considering that the conflict deaths [in Mexico] are nearly all attributable to small arms,” said John Chipman, chief executive and director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which issued its annual survey of armed conflict on Tuesday.
“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed 17,000 and 16,000 lives respectively in 2016, although in lethality they were surpassed by conflicts in Mexico and Central America, which have received much less attention from the media and the international community,” said Anastasia Voronkova, the editor of the survey.   
In comparison, there were 17,000 conflict deaths in Mexico in 2015 and 15,000 in 2014 according to the IISS.

Rising death toll

Voronkova said the number of homicides rose in 22 of Mexico’s 32 states during 2016 and the rivalries between cartels increased in violence.
“It is noteworthy that the largest rises in fatalities were registered in states that were key battlegrounds for control between competing, increasingly fragmented cartels,” she said.
“The violence grew worse as the cartels expanded the territorial reach of their campaigns, seeking to ‘cleanse’ areas of rivals in their efforts to secure a monopoly on drug-trafficking routes and other criminal assets.”
Mexican drug cartels take in between $19 billion and $29 billion annually from US drug sales, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Rivalries between the cartels wreak havoc on the lives of civilians who have nothing to do with narcotics. Bystanders, people who refused to join cartels, migrants, journalists and government officials have all been killed.

Not on news agenda

Jacob Parakilas, assistant head of the US and the Americas Programme at London-based think tank Chatham House, said part of the reason for the relative lack of attention paid to Mexico in the international media is “it’s not a war in the political sense of the word. The participants largely don’t have a political objective. They’re not trying to create a breakaway state. It doesn’t come with the same visuals. There are no air strikes.
“Also this has been going on since the beginning of the modern drug trade in the Americas. It’s not news in that sense. And Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. They are intentionally targeted in Mexico, which puts a dampener on the ability to report on this.”
Drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is facing trial in New York.

There have, however, been significant arrests in relation to the Mexican drug trade in recent times.
Damaso Lopez Nunez, a high-ranking leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested on May 2 in Mexico City and could face charges in the US, authorities said.
His arrest follows January’s extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is accused of running the Sinaloa cartel — one of the world’s largest drug-trafficking organizations.
He awaits trial in New York on 17 counts accusing him of running a criminal enterprise responsible for importing and distributing massive amounts of narcotics and conspiring to murder rivals.

World conflict deaths fall

The number of conflict fatalities globally edged down last year, from 167,000 to 157,000, according to the IISS.
This was the second successive annual drop — 180,000 people were killed in 2014.
The number of deaths in Syria fell from 55,000 in 2015. But there were 1,000 more deaths in Afghanistan last year than 2015 and 4,000 more in Iraq.
Voronkova from the IISS said: “Civilians caught amid conflict arguably suffered more than in the preceding years. Between January and August, 900,000 people were internally displaced in Syria alone.”
The internal displacement figures were 234,000 for Iraq and 260,000 for Afghanistan.