Baby blog: Happy Mother’s Day

It was 11 years ago when I was interning for my hometown newspaper when I opened the editing program to take a final read of the article I was writing that night when I got an error message – the file was blocked because someone else was reading my story.

I yelled out into the newsroom, asking not so nicely for whoever was in my copy to get out as soon as possible. Of course, I had no idea that person was the new copy editor on her first night on the job who opened the story purely by accident.

Correct that: I had no idea that person was the new, blonde-haired, blue-eyed copy editor on her first night on the job.

When you talk about the night you met your loved one, you’d hope it would be some magical story: Your eyes caught across a smoky room, some cosmic force magically pulled you together, and you instantly fell in love, never to be separated for more than a second.

Sadly, that’s not my story.

For us, it was a dingy newsroom of a paper that recently went out of business. The building we met in is now a gastroenterologist’s office. Harp music, it was not.

But not because our road to love and marriage was not out of a movie – we were friends for six years before dating and eventually getting married.

Now, with a new baby in our house – Samantha Jean Stegon was born Friday, May 3, 2013 at Mary Washington Hospital – it’s easy to say I love my wife more than ever.

I joked during delivery I wanted to spend labor in the waiting room, Don Draper-style with a cigar in my hand accepting congratulations while my wife did the work in another room.

Instead, I spent all of the nearly 15 hours of labor at her side, my role being somewhere between errand boy and motivational speaker to help her through the best I could.

In the end, though, it all came down to her, pushing through the pain to give me a beautiful baby girl.

As my mom later pointed out, the work though was not all in the labor – my wife was a model for pregnant women. She ate healthy (her main cravings were for grapefruit and popsicles – OK, she threw in the occasional Double Stuf Oreo, but still) and avoided anything and everything that could be even potentially harmful, including caffeine. She took her vitamins religiously, and never missed an appointment — a grueling schedule, considering we were seeing both her regular doctor and a pregnancy specialist for some extraneous medical reasons.

Thanks to all that, my daughter is a joy to behold. She has 10 fingers and 10 toes, blonde hair and blue eyes, and a set of lungs that would make an opera singer proud.

I’d like to take some credit for that, but honestly, it was all my wife.

So, I’m excited to spend Mother’s Day with her this weekend. It’s always been a hard day for her after the passing of her own mother more than a decade ago, but hopefully Sunday will be better for her with her own daughter in tow.

My hope is she has a wonderful day and takes pride in the human life she created. Both my daughter and she are beautiful, and I’m so thankful for both. I want Sunday to be wonderful for her – she’s deserved it, and something tells me just getting her a card signed by the cat ain’t going to cut it.

Veterans Affairs awards contract for new HR system

The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded IBM a 10-year, $123 million contract to replace the agency’s 50-year-old human resources application with a new software-as-a-service model.

Under the contract, IBM will build, operate and maintain the new system that will be deployed across the enterprise and allow VA to better manage its workforce.

The system will provide enhancements such as new self-service options for VA managers and employees, IBM said.

“IBM is proud to partner with the Department of Veterans Affairs to support its critical mission of helping veterans,” said Anne Altman, general manager of U.S. Federal for IBM. “The VA’s human resources system will provide a more flexible, stable and capable system to meet the evolving needs of the agency and its thousands of employees. The VA’s greatest asset is its people, and this new HR system will bolster the agency’s mission to provide care and benefits for our nation’s veterans and their families. ”

IBM will provide implementation services, as well as management and maintenance services for the new system over the course of the contract.

The new HR system, which will serve more than 300,000 department employees, is expected to be implemented by the end of 2015.

IBM said a phased deployment strategy will be initiated in January 2014 following design, development and testing of the new HR application.

IBM’s HR solution is built using Oracle PeopleSoft, Monster Government Solutions and IBM Software products including IBM Rational, IBM InfoSphere and IBM Tivoli.

5 civic projects powered by ‘We the People’ data

The White House officially released Wednesday its application programming interface for the “We the People” petition site on Wednesday, something that was developed earlier this year during the first official White House Hackathon.

Here are five civic hacking projects developers worked on at the hackathon:

• Widget the People: A tool that allows users to search for a petition by headline and then create an embeddable widget that shows how many signatures the petition needs to get an official response.
• R We the People: A package for the R statistics environment that allows users to load petition data and run ad-hoc analysis and create visualizations.
• The We the People Petitions app: An iPhone app that lets users monitor the status of petitions and receive updates once a petition they’ve signed receives a response.
• We the Politics: Visualizes the distribution and potential partisan affiliation of petition signatures by mapping signature zip code data.
• Pulse: A dashboard that predicts when petitions may cross the 100,000 signature threshold.

 

FedWire: Petraeus, Apple and DARPA

FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus is going back to school. The retired general is joining the faculty of the University of Southern California, where he will teach classes and mentor ROTC member. Petraeus, who has a doctorate from Princeton, is also a visiting professor at New York University.

The Navy Intelligence Command is looking for a CTO.

WSJ: Pentagon to use Apple, Samsung devices.

Discovering DARPA.

Did you check out the first episode of the Cyber Show?

President Obama makes a personnel announcement:

 

Cyber Show: NIST’s Ron Ross discusses SP 800-53

NIST Senior Fellow Ron Ross joins FedScoop Radio’s Cyber Show to discuss the release of the latest version of Special Publication 800-53 as well as how his organization is able to keep pace with the emerging cyber threat landscape.

Army recognized for innovation

The U.S. Army has been named one of the world’s most innovative research organizations by Thomson Reuters, joining companies such as Apple, DuPont and General Electric on the 2012 Top100 Global Innovators list.

The recognition comes after the Army earned more than 300 patents for new technologies in a three-year period.

“This recognition is shared with the members of our Army science and technology community who perform research relevant for the Army and our important mission, and provide the innovation that contributes to a strong national security posture,” Heidi Shyu, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said in a released statement.

According to the Army, the award focuses on all organizations with 100 or more innovative patents from 2009 to 2011. Reuters used its proprietary methodology to measure success on a variety of metrics, including how often an organization’s research was cited by other innovators in subsequent inventions.

More than 900 individuals contributed to the Army’s patents, including personnel from RDECOM, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

OMB: agencies to cut 10 percent off FY15 discretionary budgets

The Office of Management and Budget is calling for federal agencies to cut 10 percent off their discretionary spending for the fiscal year 2015 budget.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, OMB’s new administrator, sent a memo Wednesday that told all agencies to look for ways to reduce fragmentation, overlap and duplication, and increase effectiveness in finding those reductions from the FY14 budget.

“We recognize that agencies will identify the most effective way to implement this request,” Burwell said. “Your budget submission will provide the president with the options needed to make the hard choices necessary to adhere to the [Budget Control Act’s] discretionary funding levels, invest in priority areas, and focus on programs that work.”

The list of recommendations should include proposals that address the Government Accountability Office’s recommendations in this area as well.

The guidance also instructs agencies to not include budget cuts based on sequestration or other mandatory spending reductions.

“Agencies should review their mandatory spending with the same rigor as their discretionary spending,” Burwell said.

She added agencies should use the next several months to work with OMB to review the mandatory proposals included in the 2014 budget, identify areas for special scrutiny, and develop any new proposals prior to including them with the 2015 submission.

Along with making budget cuts, OMB is asking federal agencies to update their strategic plans and revise their performance plan with specific strategies and performance goals.

Burwell wrote these plans should align with the 2015 budget, and provide Congress and the public with an ambitious, yet realistic, expectation of the impact achievable as part of proposed budget policy. These plans should also identify new agency priority goals for the FY 2014 to FY 2015 time period.

The priority goals should represent the administration’s top implementation-focused priorities and ambitious, measurable, near-term results, which will be delivered for the American people, Burwell said.

FedWire: Buy a computer, GSA and a robotic hand

FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.

Thinking of buying a computer? Now is a good time, according to analyst Jon Peddie. Because of Moore’s Law, he says, people buying computers today get more computing power for their dollar than ever before. Peddie also says computers use less power than before, negating rising energy costs, so it’s more cost efficient to use a new computer than one that’s even a few years old. Read his compelling argument.

GSA buildings save taxpayer dollars.

An IT security job out of FDIC.

DON CIO: Take precaution before using cell phone boosters.

FDSys reaches 500 million retrievals.

A robotic hand from DARPA:

Dempsey: ‘Literally impossible’ to incorporate sequestration for 2014

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday it was “literally impossible” to incorporate sequestration cuts into the 2014 budget proposal.

Speaking at a luncheon hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, Dempsey deflected criticism that the Pentagon should have included the $52 billion in sequestration cuts the Defense Department could face in the coming year if a debt agreement is not reached again.

“We would have to have done two budgets,” Dempsey said. “And that’s not possible, particularly when you’ve got furloughs. There wasn’t a neglect — it was a practical matter of literally what was possible for us to ask the services to do.”

Dempsey added as sequestration will not take effect until March 1, DOD would not have had the time to prepare a separate budget for that situation.

The Pentagon’s 2014 budget request came in at $526 billion, approximately $52 billion above the budget caps enforced by sequestration.

Throughout the previous sequestration battle, defense leaders argued the sequestration cuts would cause major problems for force readiness and could leave the nation in danger from outside attack.

Going forward, Dempsey said the department, which could make the $52 billion in cuts before sequestration takes effect or wait for the blunt cuts to come, said DOD officials have not yet decided how to address another round of sequestration.

White House to propose legislation limiting contractor reimbursement

The Obama administration will outline new legislation next week that will put a tighter cap on the amount of money some government contractors can receive to cover executive salaries and bonuses.

Joseph Jordan, administrator for the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said under current law, contractors who are paid based on incurred costs – about a third of all government contracts – can demand reimbursement for executive salaries, bonuses and other compensation up to the level of the country’s top private sector CEOs and other senior executives.

As private sector salaries have grown, this number has risen more than 300 percent since the law was enacted in the mid-1990s, Jordan said.

“Taxpayers have been required, by law, to foot this unaffordable expense, despite the fact that this rapidly increasing cost has had little bearing on the value agencies receive under their government contracts,” Jordan said.

Instead of tying that number to the salaries of the private sector, the Obama administration wants to connect it to the president’s salary and apply it to across-the-board to all defense and civilian cost-reimbursement contracts.

That effort would help keep in check the rising costs of these reimbursements.

The current cap is expected to be more than $950,000, Jordan said, for fiscal year 2012, a number that has grown from $693,000 since fiscal year 2010 alone.

“Tying the cap to the president’s salary provides a reasonable level of compensation for high value federal contractors while ensuring taxpayers are not saddled with paying excessive compensation costs,” Jordan said.

Jordan said the last Congress attempted to change the ruling, but ultimately could only agree on a modest change that expanded application of the statutory cap for defense contractors from the contractor’s senior executives to all of its employees.

The White House’s proposal does provide an exemption to the cap if a federal agency determines such additional payment is necessary to ensure it has access to the specialized skills required to support mission requirements, such as for certain key scientists or engineers.

Jordan reiterated the cap does not limit what contractors can pay their executives, but just what the government will reimburse under that type of contract.

“This proposal is part of the president’s broader Campaign to Cut Waste and the administration’s ongoing effort to eliminate inefficient spending in contracting – an effort that has resulted in a noteworthy decline in annual contract spending since the president took office in 2009,” Jordan said. “We hope that this Congress, unlike the last one, will heed the urgent call to restore fiscal responsibility before additional taxpayer dollars that could be used to fund critical agency mission work are wasted unnecessarily to pay for costly overhead in the form of excessive contractor compensation.”

He continued, “Taking these steps has the potential to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars over what they would have to pay if the cap remains unchanged.”