Infrastructure permitting agencies have 45 days to develop modernization plans
Infrastructure permitting agencies have 45 days to develop modernization plans
The action plan also will provide a roadmap for creating a unified interagency permitting and environmental review data system.
Michele Sandiford
- Agencies who handle the federal permitting process for roads, bridges and other infrastructure programs are on the hook to modernize the technology that runs these systems and share data more easily. President Donald Trump’s latest executive order says the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) has 45 days to develop a Permitting Technology Action Plan that will include initial technology and data standards. The action plan will also provide a roadmap for creating a unified interagency permitting and environmental review data system. Agencies will then have 90 days to implement the data and technology standards and minimum functional requirements for the new interagency system. CEQ also will lead an interagency Permitting Innovation Center that will design and test prototype tools that could be implemented as part of the Permitting Technology Action Plan.
- A new Democratic bill in the House is attempting to secure job protections for some recently fired federal employees. The Protect Promoted Workers Act seeks to support feds who are in their probationary periods due to a recent promotion. If enacted, agencies would have to reinstate all terminated probationary employees who only had that status because they were recently promoted. Most agencies stated that the governmentwide terminations in February were due to performance issues. But some workers who were fired were only in a probationary period because they had just been promoted. If the House bill is enacted, agencies would have to reinstate all terminated employees who were in that specific situation. The bill would also prevent any future employees who receive promotions from being fired.
- The Trump administration is setting a higher occupancy baseline for federal buildings. The General Services Administration is setting an 80% utilization goal for federal buildings and deploying new tools to measure occupancy. GSA is looking to use laptop data to track how many employees are in a building. Public Buildings Service Commissioner Michael Peters said this will help agencies identify underutilized office space. “We literally don’t know how many people are in our buildings. We kind of have an idea of how many people are in this building, which is good. But we should know it for every one of the facilities that we own or lease, because that’s a fundamental metric,” Peters said.
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is sharing more information about a recent cyber breach. In a Monday letter to bank CEOs, the OCC said it’s reviewing whether any of the hacked information has been found on the dark web. The agency first uncovered the hack in February. OCC disabled the compromised account, but not before hackers were able to access sensitive financial supervision information. Earlier this month, the OCC told Congress that the breach met the threshold for a major cyber incident.
(OCC letter – Office of the Comptroller of the Currency )
- Federal employees who were recently fired from their jobs have a new place to turn for legal help. A coalition of federal unions and good government organizations has launched an initiative called “Rise Up.” It’s a network of lawyers offering free legal support to employees impacted by the recent actions of the Trump administration. Federal unions and other organizations have taken a number of broader legal actions against the Trump administration in the last few months. But the new coalition said there’s still a need for legal support in many individual employees’ situations. Through the new network, terminated federal employees can sign up online to request assistance at no cost. The group is also offering training sessions to lawyers to prepare them to take federal employees’ cases pro bono.
- A free, online tax filing platform run by the IRS may soon come to an end. The Associated Press reports the Trump administration is looking to eliminate Direct File and has told IRS employees to stop work on getting it ready for next year’s filing season. The agency launched Direct File as a pilot in a dozen states last year. More than 140,000 individuals used it last year. The IRS expanded to 25 states for this year’s filing season.
- A new executive order kicks off the rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulations. Over the next six months, a team led by the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the General Services Administration will remove hundreds of pages of acquisition regulations that aren’t required by law or necessary to ensure successful procurements. Dr. Kevin Rhodes, a senior advisor at the Office of Management and Budget, said the goal is to get back to the core of FAR for why it really exists: “We want a system that provides the guardrails for success but does not remove the requirement for people to think.” Rhodes said the FAR overhaul will be an iterative process that will depend on industry and agency experts alike.
- The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency extended a key cyber contract at the last minute. It’s called the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, and its funding was set to expire on Wednesday. But late Tuesday night, CISA issued an 11-month contract extension for MITRE to continue managing the program. The CVE database is used by security researchers across the globe to manage and prioritize vulnerabilities in software and hardware. CISA also relies on the CVE program to feed its list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, which agencies are required to patch within set time frames.
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