That strong encouragement should last through the end of January 2022 and includes a maximization of virtual meetings and a total ban on unofficial visitors to the worksite. The agency will also remove food court seating as of Jan. 3.

“We have seen an increase in coronavirus disease 2019 and positive test results in the National Capitol Region in recent weeks,” Donley wrote. “Additional mitigation measures will be implemented on the Pentagon Reservation to protect the workforce and our support to the no-fail mission of the Department of Defense. We will continually assess health protection measures and will update this guidance, as appropriate.”

The Pentagon did not change its health protection condition status, which currently sits at Bravo+. The agency’s most severe classification is HPCON D, while HPCON A represents limited spread of the virus.

The HPCON B+ designation represents a level of community spread that does not quite warrant moving up to the HPCON C level, but requires more stringent attention than a standard HPCON B status.

“While the Pentagon Reservation remains at HPCON Bravo+, organizations are expected to maintain occupancy rates at less than 40% of normal occupancy, subject to the exceptions approved by my office,” Donley wrote. “Effectively immediately, all previously approved exceptions for occupancy limits over 60% are now capped at 60%, through the end of January 2022, in order to protect the workforce and preserve mission effectiveness.”

Cases of COVID-19 in Washington have skyrocketed in recent weeks, with the city hitting a record daily case rate of 273.6 cases per every 100,000 members of the population as of Dec. 25. Substantial community spread in the city is classified at 16 cases per 100,000 members of the population.

The highly transmissible omicron variant of COVID-19 has driven a surge in cases across the U.S., with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that the variant made up approximately 58.6% of all new cases during the week leading up to Christmas.

Original language in the House version of the bill would have granted federal employees the opportunity to use the recently authorized paid parental leave — which covers 12 weeks of time away from work — to grieve the death of a child. But the conference between both chambers of Congress resulted in a separate bereavement entitlement that covers only two weeks.

The Office of Personnel Management will also be required to conduct a study of remote site pay allowances — which provide additional funds to feds assigned to work in places “so remote from the nearest established communities or suitable places of residence as to require an appreciable degree of expense, hardship and inconvenience,” according to U.S. Code. OPM will also have to make recommendations for any alterations to such allowances.

Beyond impacts to the overall federal workforce, the bill also contains provisions that will affect employees at the Defense Department. Beginning in 2023, new civilian employees at the DoD will receive a one-year probationary period, rather than a two-year time frame, putting them on par with the probationary standard for the rest of the federal government.

The legislation will also ensure defense civilian jobs remain government jobs by requiring senior officials to sign off on new contracts to certify that they comply with existing prohibitions against transitioning the work of federal employees onto government contractors.

Language in the bill will also place a stronger prohibition on arbitrary personnel caps, which can require certain DoD offices to fire hardworking and useful employees in order to bring on new, essential personnel.

The DoD will also be required to report any instances of borrowed military manpower — when service members are pulled from training or operational units to fill roles normally performed by civilian employees.

The DoD will also be tasked with creating a plan for addressing sexual harassment and assault among civilian employees as well as for tracking diversity, equity and inclusion.

“This bill contains many of our top legislative priorities, including restoring the one-year probationary period for new hires in the Department of Defense and preventing the arbitrary outsourcing of civilian jobs to private contractors,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. “These measures will directly improve workers’ pay and job security and signify the critical role of civilian employees in serving our troops and maintaining our national defense.”

Federal firefighters, who are predominantly employed by the military branches but also have positions in the departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, among others, will now be able to trade shifts under the NDAA without triggering overtime pay requirements or decreasing their regular pay.

D.C. National Guard members who work at the DoD and other federal agencies will also be provided leave without loss of pay or employment when called to mobilize, correcting a drafting error that previously left them out of such protections.

Federal employees who have not received a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and are not awaiting a decision on a requested exemption from the White House mandate will not face the loss of their jobs until after the holiday season, according to an email sent Monday to President’s Management Council members.

The email, written by the Office of Management and Budget’s deputy director for management, Jason Miller, and the Office of Personnel Management’s director, Kiran Ahuja, celebrated the fact that 92 percent of the federal workforce is vaccinated and more than 95 percent are compliant with the mandate. President Joe Biden originally signed an executive order in September requiring all feds and government contractors to be vaccinated, though the timeline and details have shifted on several occasions.

“Given that tremendous progress, we encourage your agencies to continue with robust education and counseling efforts through this holiday season as the first step in an enforcement process, with no subsequent enforcement actions, beyond that education and counseling and, if warranted, a letter of reprimand, for most employees who have not yet complied with the vaccination requirement until the new calendar year begins in January,” Ahuja and Miller wrote.

“We understand that your agencies may need to act on enforcement sooner for a limited number of employees, such as where there are additional or compounding performance or workplace safety issues under consideration, but in general, consistency across government in further enforcement of the vaccine requirement after the start of the new calendar year is desired,” they added.

Agencies were previously instructed to pursue a progressive discipline approach to employees that refused to comply with the mandate, which included five days of counseling, a 14-day suspension and then removing that employee from federal service.

That procedure would have resulted in many noncompliant feds facing termination procedures in the midst of the holiday season.

An OMB official clarified to Federal Times that the policy does not change the vaccination deadline for federal employees, which was Nov. 22, but that “we’re seeing strong increase in compliance and believe this is the best approach to vaccinate more employees.”

“The administration has done the right thing by listening to federal workers, taking their concerns seriously, and modifying the vaccine mandate policy to give those who haven’t yet gotten vaccinated some peace of mind this holiday season,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. “Once again, President Biden has demonstrated his commitment to hearing from rank-and-file federal employees through their unions and responding to workers’ concerns.”

Despite consistently high compliance rates, the total 3.5 million employees covered by the federal mandate means more than 100,000 federal employees are currently out of compliance, and their removal could have significant operational impacts on certain agencies.

The White House continued to stress that agencies should work to educate workers, rather than punish them, and the extended enforcement timeline gives agencies a few extra weeks to convince noncompliant employees before more punitive actions are taken.

Federal employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development were the most proactive of any large agency in complying with President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to numbers released Nov. 24 by the Office of Management and Budget.

A total of 97.8% of the agency’s more than 4,000-person workforce received at least one vaccine dose by Nov. 23, meaning that only around 90 employees were unvaccinated. Compliance through either vaccination or the filing of an exception was at 99.1%, leaving only about 35 USAID employees noncompliant.

Vaccination rates were the lowest at the Social Security Administration, with 87.7% of employees receiving a vaccine dose and 95% of the agency compliant overall.

The Department of Transportation had the highest compliance rate at 99.6%.

No major agency fell below 95% compliance, showing that the vast majority of federal employees will continue to work uninterrupted.

“The federal COVID-19 vaccination data released by OMB today prove that federal vaccine requirements work. Tens of thousands of HHS employees followed the science, which means they are safer today and so are their families, workplaces, and communities,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement on his agency’s numbers, which revealed the second-most vaccinated workforce among Cabinet-level agencies.

“As we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, we have many things to be thankful for — a safer federal workforce is one of them,” he added.

Though high across the board, agency compliance rates do not entirely assuage fears that employees who refuse to get vaccinated or do not qualify for an exemption could leave government and disrupt critical operations.

Two agencies central to national security — the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security — reported noncompliance percentages at around 3% and 4% respectively, which translate into thousands of employees, considering these agencies have such large workforces.

But employee departures and firings aren’t immediately in the works, as agencies have been instructed to place noncompliant employees in counseling programs before pursuing more stringent responses.

“This chart provides a snapshot in time. In the days and weeks ahead, employees will continue to provide vaccination information and documentation, as well as request exceptions, and agencies will continue to process and review that information and documentation, and those requests,” according to an OMB blog outlining the data.

“At any point, if an employee gets their first shot or submits an exception request, agencies will pause further enforcement to give the employee a reasonable amount of time to become fully vaccinated or to process the exception request. This next stage of the process will not result in disruptions to government services and operations and will result in more employees becoming vaccinated.”

The announcement comes alongside new rules from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on vaccination for employers of 100 people or more and for healthcare workers participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

“And third, to make it easy for businesses and workers to comply, we will be aligning the deadline for the previously announced requirement for employees of federal contractors to be fully vaccinated with these new OSHA and CMS rules. This single, consistent deadline across all three requirements is Jan. 4, 2022,” a senior administration official told reporters on a late Nov. 3 call.

According to that official, contractor employees will need to receive their final vaccine dose by that date or risk penalties.

Contractors initially had until Dec. 8 to get their employees vaccinated per Biden’s executive order.

“We wanted to do this because we’re really aligning it to make it easier — to make it as easy as possible for businesses to implement these requirements and for workers to comply,” the official said.

“That said, there’s no reason to wait, and … we know that many employers are not waiting. And we hope that employers and workers will get vaccinated as quickly as possible, because that’s obviously our path out of this pandemic.”

According to guidance issued by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, contractors should determine the best enforcement strategy for employees that refuse to get vaccinated by the deadline, though it recommends modeling enforcement after the planned penalties for federal employees.

Agencies also have the right to deny a non-vaccinated contract employee entry to a federal workplace.

Contractors that willfully refuse to comply with the requirement could face “significant actions” by the contracting agency, such as termination of that contract, but a contractor working in good faith and honestly struggling to comply can receive collaboration assistance from the agency contracting officer.

Guertin is a senior software systems engineer at Carnegie Mellon University with both military and civilian experience in areas like submarine operations weapons testing, combat management and cyber-physical systems.

The White House also said Biden will nominate current acting DoD chief information officer, John Sherman, to take up the permanent post.

The largest portion of that increase will go to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is anticipated to see a 19,100 employee increase over the number of employees on the books for 2021.

The Department of Labor is also expected to see a 13.5 percent increase in its workforce, with 2,100 more employees added under the new budget, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development is expected to see a 9.6 percent increase with 800 new employees.

The IRS is also slated to receive $13.5 billion under the proposed budget, which, according to the National Treasury Employees Union, would help pay for an additional 8,493 full-time employees, including a $417 million adjustment to improve tax enforcement programs.

“Rebuilding the IRS workforce after a decade of cuts is essential to making sure our tax code is enforced fully and fairly, and we will urge Congress to follow through on this proposal and help improve enforcement and customer service at the IRS,” NTEU National President Tony Reardon said in a statement.

The 2022 budget also reflects a ramping up of civilian personnel for the Space Force, with a planned nearly 1,000 full-time-equivalent employee increase across the operations and maintenance and the research and development portions of the agency.

The employment increases also reflect the Biden administration’s commitment to improved equality and labor management across the U.S., with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board each seeing a more than 13 percent increase in employees next year.

“Workers have cried out for more staffing so that agencies can fulfill their mission without resorting to enormous amounts of mandatory overtime, and President Biden has heard them,” American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

“AFGE is thankful that substantial staffing increases to multiple agencies were included in the president’s first budget. For far too long, our members have spoken out about the dangers of understaffing agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bureau of Prisons and Transportation Security Administration.”

Much of the push for increasing the labor force across the government is likely to come from programs that target recent-graduates and highly-skilled workers in areas like IT and cybersecurity.

“The Federal workforce continues to become older on average. Almost 30 percent (635,397) of employees are older than 55, while 8.1 percent (176,805) of employees are younger than 30. By comparison, in the private sector, 23 percent of the workforce is younger than 30. Every single agency has fewer employees younger than 30 today than they had in 2010,” the budget proposal’s analytical perspectives state.

“The number of paid internships dropped from more than 60,000 in 2010 to about 4,000 in 2020, reducing the opportunity for many to serve.”

The Biden administration also points to restrictions placed on internship and hiring programs for recent graduates as one of the reasons why the percentage of workers under 30 in the federal government dropped significantly after 2010. That disparity between older and younger employees is especially pronounced in the IT workforce.

The Office of Personnel Management will be expected to release updates to the Pathways internship program, and federal agency leaders have been instructed to examine an expand internship opportunities at their agencies. Such improvements to the internship process were a key component of a recent National Commission on Military, National and Public Service report on how to better incentivize employees to choose public service.

Another element of that report, making it easier for feds who left public service to return at a higher grade based on new experience, will also be a part of upcoming OPM guidance.

The budget proposal also includes $6.5 billion to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which will place additional federal focus on cancer and diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

Oshkosh Defense, a contractor largely known for producing the kind of rugged, tactical vehicles normally found in warzones, was selected in February 2021 to receive the U.S. Postal Service’s multi-billion dollar contract for crafting the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle fleet over the next 10 years.

According to Oshkosh Defense President John Bryant, the needs of mail carriers for those new vehicles are centered on a truck that can keep going no matter what.

“Fairly early on in the competition, I was talking with one of our USPS customers, and he said something that stuck with me. He said, ‘we really need a purpose-built vehicle for our unique requirements, so we need it to last almost forever.’ And I thought, that is exactly what happens with our military customers,” Bryant told Federal Times.

“We have military vehicles that we delivered in the early 1980s. We have to support them over these very long lifecycles.”

The average USPS vehicle is 25 years old, with some vehicles purchased as long ago as 1987, meaning that the agency relies on a lifecycle far longer than most commercial drivers expect.

“The NGDV program, when you think about it, is the first major vehicle program in over three decades,” said Bryant.

“They lack the modern safety systems that you would see and that you would expect in a modern vehicle that you would use to commute to work, and they definitely lack some of the higher-end safety systems that are available.”

For both USPS and the military, that need translates to something that is rugged, reliable and adaptable.

“With out military customer, it’s all about delivering vehicles from the ground up to meet specific, stringent requirements. Our experience building and designing the world’s toughest military vehicles has actually applied directly to the NGDV program,” said Bryant. “The NGDV is designed to take a beating for a very long time.”

U.S. mail carriers have, of course, been promised several features that most drivers have long taken for granted: air-conditioned vehicles, collision detection, automatic breaking, 360 degree cameras and more.

The vehicles will also have more USPS-specific needs, like larger cargo areas for package delivery, much greater bumper visibility and better ergonomics for right-side driving and delivery.

USPS will also have the option to include all-wheel drive in some of its new vehicles for those mail carriers who have to deliver in rural areas in the midst of hazardous weather conditions or both at once.

That adaptability is also designed to address concerns that the USPS fleet is not moving to a more sustainable model quickly enough.

And though Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., worried at a May 13 hearing that Oshkosh “doesn’t know how to make electric vehicles,” Bryant told Federal Times that their plan for building the NGDV is designed specifically to adapt to electric vehicle or internal combustion needs.

“We’ll be ready to deliver them in any combination that USPS desires, so up to 100 percent of either one of them,” said Bryant.

“They’re actually designed on a common, unibody chassis, so we’re able to produce any combination of vehicles that USPS desires. We were thinking that over time the mission profiles, the business models, technology, costs may evolve and so we intentionally designed the Oshkosh NGDV so that you could take an internal combustion vehicle and convert it — during a mid-lifecycle refresh or rebuild — to a battery-electric vehicle.”

That adaptability may prove critical if a House bill mandating that at least 75 percent of the new fleet be electric or zero-emission becomes law.

According to Bryant, USPS was very specific about what kids of features and flexibilities mail carriers would need during the contract competition process.

The new NGDVs will have to go through a period of extensive operations and safety testing prior to arriving at U.S. mail facilities, but the first members of the new fleet are expected to hit the roads in 2023.

“The carriers will have the configurations to meet their needs,” said Bryant.

“They’ve been waiting a long time.”

But according to the union that represents approximately 300,000 employees at the agency, it is those very hiring authorities that have caused the DoD to struggle in finding and keeping enough talent in key areas like STEM, acquisition, financial management, cyber, artificial intelligence and foreign language skills.

“The Department of Defense has sought these authorities purportedly in the quest for greater management flexibility, often to the detriment of the long-term job security of employees being hired into the department,” American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said in a letter to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks dated May 5.

“In fact, the misuse of these authorities arguably has been one of the primary factors leading to these persistent skills gaps in the workforce. There has not been a recognition of the inherent contradiction between unfettered management ‘flexibility’ to set the terms and conditions of employment to deviate from standard Title 5 civil service procedures to preserve an apolitical workforce and the very idea of human capital planning that views employees as possessing both existing skills and potential talent that can be developed only through a long term commitment to those employees as a valuable part of a team.”

The union cites, for example, the fact that personnel caps for foreign language instructors mean that any time the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center needs more teachers in a particular language, they have to sacrifice instructors in another, leading to a year-to-year workforce that does not have the necessary people on hand to pivot to emerging linguistic needs.

And DoD has increasingly made use of temporary personnel, as the Government Accountability Office found in August 2020 that the agency increased term personnel by 40 percent from 2016 to 2019.

“Another contributing factor to these management problems in the department has been lax oversight by the Office of Personnel Management of the delegated examining authority provided to the department, a delegation that has persisted over a couple of decades. As a result of this lax oversight, there has been a proliferation of separate career programs within each military department for the same kinds of skills,” wrote Kelley.

“Sometimes this results in each military department creating separate developmental paths and certification requirements for similar sets of skills, a practice that creates significant barriers for promotion for internal candidates or lateral entry for external candidates. Moreover, management practices and culture more often than not erect barriers to hiring more than the lack of authorities. A prime example is the department’s reported failure by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence to recognize experience as a substitute for educational credentials when determining appropriate compensation for persons with cyber skills.”

This isn’t the first time that “flexibility” has been labeled the enemy of improved hiring, with HR professionals from several agencies testifying in a 2019 hearing that the myriad special authorities with different titles for certain job types have made the job of hiring managers that much more cumbersome. And that burden gets translated into longer hiring times.

AFGE called on the DoD to cut back on hiring caps, siloing of positions, extended probationary periods and unnecessary degree requirements, while expanding on existing incentive programs like the three-year Cyber Scholarship program to attract and keep talent.

“These workers are critical to the functioning of the federal government: from cleaning professionals and maintenance workers who ensure federal employees have safe and clean places to work, to nursing assistants who care for the nation’s veterans, to cafeteria and other food service workers who ensure military members have healthy and nutritious food to eat, to laborers who build and repair federal infrastructure,” the fact sheet on the order states.

Currently, federal contractors must make at least $10.95 an hour, under an executive order signed during the Obama administration that raised the contractor minimum wage and mandated that the minimum be indexed based on inflation.

Biden’s order will include that same provision, meaning that every year after 2022, the minimum for contract workers will increase based on the changes to cost of living.

Wages will not change the moment the order is signed, but rather will be brought up to the $15 minimum over the next year.

All federal contract solicitations will have to include a $15 minimum wage clause by Jan. 30, 2022, and all contracts awarded on or by March 30, 2022 will have to include such a provision.

For federal contractors that are already working under an existing contract, wages must be increased to a $15 minimum the next time their employer exercises its option to extend the contract, which usually occurs on an annual basis.

The order also eliminates the ability for contractors to pay their employees below the minimum wage on the expectation that they will receive tips to compensate for the lower base pay, a practice most commonly used in restaurant service.

Contract workers with disabilities, who are sometimes exempt from minimum wage requirements under law, would also be required to receive at minimum $15 an hour.

Outfitters and guides working on federal lands, who were previously exempt from minimum wage provisions under the Trump administration, would also be subject to Biden’s mandated $15 minimum.

“This executive order will promote economy and efficiency in federal contracting, providing value for taxpayers by enhancing worker productivity and generating higher-quality work by boosting workers’ health, morale and effort,” the fact sheet states.

“At the same time, the executive order ensures that hundreds of thousands of workers no longer have to work full time and still live in poverty. It will improve the economic security of families and make progress toward reversing decades of income inequality. Extensive, high-quality research shows that higher minimum wages have the intended effect of raising wages without significantly reducing employment outcomes. Higher minimum wages increase earnings growth for workers at the bottom of the income distribution, and those gains persist for years. A higher minimum wage, and an elimination of the tipped minimum wage, will benefit many women and people of color who likely have children and are the breadwinners in their households.”

Biden telegraphed his intention to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors alongside government employees just two days after his inauguration, promising a 100-day deadline for developing a plan to mandate higher contractor pay. This order comes just inside that promise at 95 days.

The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and the Federal Acquisition and Regulatory Council will be responsible for creating and issuing a rule to enforce the provisions of this order.