Federal Drive with Tom Temin

Defense contracting is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar activity. It can also be highly technical and demanding. Now the University of Oklahoma's Graduate School of Business has launched an online graduate degree program for aerospace and defense. Joining the Federal Drive with the details, the program director Shad Satterthwaite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The financial and economic effects of the pandemic and government-ordered shutdowns has hit career military families no less than anyone else. A big reason is job losses among military spouses. That's according to a survey by the financial services firm First Command. Joining the Federal Drive with details of the survey, First Command CEO Mark Steffe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The National Defense Strategy stresses the possibility of what planned call high intensity warfare with peer nations, presumably China or Russia. Do the Defense Department's spending priorities reflect the need to modernize its forces such that it could defeat these nations? That's what data analysts at Govini sought to find out. Joining the Federal Drive with what they discovered, Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The military commander the White House tapped to lead the government’s Operation Warp Speed says he started out thinking, getting a coronavirus vaccine into distribution by the end of the year was, a stretch goal. But Army General Gus Perna now says the more he’s learned, the more he’s become convinced that DoD and Health and Human Services can pull it off. Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu has details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Agencies are slowly reopening their doors to small groups of employees after three months of telework. The majority of you are still working from home. And 85 percent of say you're uncomfortable about the prospects of returning to the office during a pandemic. Employees who recently returned to the office or have been on site the whole time also have some discomfort with reopening. Just some of the findings from our latest survey. For more, Federal News Network's Nicole Ogrysko. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The CIO Council made 10 recommendations for how to improve the federal IT workforce ranging from a new pay system to training to nationwide recruiting. This latest report is one in a series of data-driven reviews the council’s workforce committee is leading. Suzette Kent is the federal chief information officer. She tells executive editor Jason Miller about how the administration will put those recommendations into practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How much time does your company spend editing its federal contracts for the myriad of regulations that might apply. This vendor claims you can cut that by 90%. For more about the whole topic of contract editing, Dan Broderick is co-founder and CEO of BlackBoiler, and he joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My next guest spent 24 years in the Army, including seven years in special operations and tours to both Iraq and Afghanistan. She was the first woman in the Defense Department to complete the Military Free-Fall Jumpster Course. But wait, there's more. But I'll let her tell the story. She's now the deputy director of the Government Publishing Office, and Patricia Collins joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Protests over racial issues remain active across the nation. And now some of the attention has turned to the armed services. The Pentagon is aware of racial disparities in its ranks, but what’s it actually doing? Congress tried to find that out earlier this week. Federal News Network’s Scott Maucione has more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What a year to be director of the Congressional Budget Office. No one imagined what would soon strike the country. The pandemic caused Congress to think big and that resulted in an extraordinary workload for the teleworking CBO. With more from the inside, we spoke with CBO director Phill Swagel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this year Congress passed and the president signed a trillion-dollar new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. You might ask how'd they do that? It wasn't the politicians that figured out the thousands of details. That took a dedicated team of career feds. In this case, John Melle and Maria Pagan of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Both are finalists in this year's Service to America Medals program. John Melle is the assistant U.S. trade representative for the western hemisphere, and he joined us to talk about their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Government Accountability Office has completed a detailed study of three private citizens and what influence they might have had on decisions made by Veterans Affairs. The people involved were members of President Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. With highlights of the interactions of Bruce Moskowitz, Isaac Perlmutter and Marc Sherman the GAO's managing director for health care issues, Nicole Clowers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The State Department has reopened more than a dozen passport service offices across the country as part of its Phase One reopening plan. Those reopenings brought back nearly half the passport services workforce to confront a backlog of nearly two million passport applications that have accumulated since March. But the State Department has also sent in employees from other parts of the agency to help address the backlog. Federal News Network's Jory Heckman has the details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Agencies are taking a wide variety of approaches to reopening their offices and facilities to employees and to the public. They're all on their own timelines with offices in one part of the country reopening earlier than others. The Environmental Protection Agency launched a facility status dashboard to help its leadership making reopening decisions. But even the reopening policies themselves vary at each agency. Federal News Network's Nicole Ogrysko gave us the breakdown on who's doing what. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Army has decided to totally reorganize the way it manages and governs its information technology. In fact, the Army's final serving CIO/G-6 is about to retire. That's just one developments in the Defense Department you'll find in this week's DoD Reporters Notebook. Federal News Network DoD Reporter Jared Serbu joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to share more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices