“Although the restrictions are no longer in place, in keeping with the strategic direction established by Executive Order 13871, the OMB memorandum and ongoing Departmental organizational reviews mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2017, I expect components to scrutinize carefully all recruitment and hiring actions and undertake to recruit or hire only when such are wholly consistent with the principles, requirements and actions set forth in the OMB memorandum,” the memo said.

The memo outlined that future recruitment actions had to take into account:

• Whether the duties of the position, qualifications and skills or the organizational placement reflect mission needs

• Whether the duties can be assigned to lower organizational levels

• Whether appropriate changes to the position can be accomplished in a timely and efficient manner

Agency components are instructed to review the 2017 NDAA for direction on resources for recruitment, but also operate within the funding limits and full-time equivalent authorization set up by the president’s fiscal 2017 budget.

The Trump administration began the governmentwide hiring freeze on Jan. 23, shortly after taking office. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said that agencies would have to submit their draft agency reform plans by June 30, with plans to implement them in September.

“This would be the first time the government has executed cuts of this magnitude — and all at once — since the drawdown following World War II,” the story said.

Economic analysts told the Post that the projected agency layoffs would reduce employment in the Washington metro area by 1.8 percent.

Speculation over the projected cuts’ impact on the workforce has abounded since the Office of Management and Budget released topline numbers on Feb. 27, calling for a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which would be offset by $462 billion in domestic spending.

The numbers portend double-digit cuts at numerous agencies — with EPA’s budget projected to be slashed as much as 25 percent — but agencies won’t get a sense of the exact figures until the Trump administration releases its spending budget this week.

Federal employee unions have railed against the proposed cuts ever since the Feb. 27 budget disclosure and have sought to mobilize a massive grassroots effort to sway Congress to kill the spending plan.

“Cutting the size of the federal government’s civilian workforce won’t make federal programs run better, erase our national debt or save taxpayers any money,” American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox said in a statement.

“All it will do is increase our dependence on more expensive and less regulated private-sector contractors, and push more of the burden onto state and local governments that are struggling under the weight of unfunded mandates.”

The National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon said in a statement that the cuts will drastically impact the government’s ability to provide essential services.

“Reports that the new administration will propose deep and indiscriminate budget cuts across multiple federal agencies should be alarming not just to those in the civil service but to taxpayers everywhere,” he said.

“Federal workers we represent are worried about their jobs and about the ability of their agencies to carry out their missions under such austere conditions: making sure our air and water are clean; inspecting new foods and medicines; shutting down financial scams that prey on consumers; maintaining our national parks; and safeguarding nuclear materials, just to name a few.”

Reardon reiterated NTEU’s earlier call for its membership to rally Congress to reject the White House’s spending plan.

Despite VA specialists not being able to identify the medical diagnosis of his blindness, Almbaugh was witnessed leaving a VA appointment in October 2016 with his ex-wife, Debra K. Alumbaugh, driving.

A few blocks from the Witchita VA facility, witnesses saw the couple stop, swap seats and Billy Almbaugh drive off.

The March 2 indictment said that Almbaugh received $63,000 in supplemental pension benefits for his blindness. The couple is charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the government and one count of theft of government funds.

If convicted, they face five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine for the conspiracy charge in addition to a possible 10-year sentence and a $250,000 fine on the theft charge.

House Republicans had held a closed-door vote on Jan. 2 where members voted 119-74 to move the OCE under the House Ethics Committee in an amendment to a new House rules package.

It was expected that the move would formally be adopted on Jan. 3, rebranding the body as the Office of Congressional Complaint Review, but House Republicans dropped the measure after facing critique for the amendment.

But that doesn’t mean the OCE will remain unchanged. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., told Bloomberg that House leadership promiseda bipartisan reform package by August.

“I think people just did not want this story on opening day,” he said.

The OCE was established in March 2008 in response to the Jack Abramoff scandal and reviewed allegations of misconduct by House members and their staff.

The nonpartisan, seven-member board reviewed misconduct allegations in a number of investigations before referring them to the House Committee on Ethics.

The OCE played prominent roles in the ethics investigations of Reps. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y.; Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and former Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga.

Trump’s criticism follows that of House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., whom The Washington Post reported spoke out against the amendment.

In addition to its board — which is composed of non-federal employee, bipartisan members — the OCE employees a staff of eight investigators and counsel.

For his part, President-elect Donald Trump was unambiguous about his stance on cybersecurity.

“As a deterrent against attacks on our critical resources, the United States must possess — and has to — the unquestioned capacity to launch crippling cyber counterattacks. And I mean crippling,” Trump told a veterans group on Oct. 3. “America’s dominance in the arena must be unquestioned. Today, it’s totally questioned. People don’t even know if we have the capability that we are supposed to have.”

Along with a more aggressive offensive stance in cyberspace, Trump also called for a cyber review team — made up of military and civilian government experts, as well as from the private sector — to conduct a holistic assessment of the federal government’s cybersecurity posture, presumably with an eye toward bolstering that posture.

Trump “is specifically committed to fixing our cyber capabilities or improving them,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., a leading candidate for secretary of defense, said in an interview with Defense News, a sister publication of Federal Times. “We have got to both have a defensive plan and an offensive plan. You simply can’t allow yourself to be vulnerable all of the time to cyberattacks and not have a response.”

While Trump has pledged to be more aggressive in cyberspace, the realities of building strong defensive and offensive capabilities will be a long haul, according to Greg Garcia, executive vice president at Signal Group and the first Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for cybersecurity. Moreover, a more aggressive America will lead to more aggressive adversaries, he said.

“The Donald talks tough … but the reality is that cybersecurity policy movement is by its nature incremental,” Garcia said. “Its technological complexity coupled with a wide and disparate network of users, vendors and service providers means that the law of unintended consequences is guaranteed to come into play against any combination of those players with promulgation of aggressive policy or regulatory initiatives.”

“Reacting and calling for security best practices are easy to do,” former National Security Agency computer scientist Ben Johnson, now chief security strategist at Carbon Black, said. “It gets to be a lot harder when we’re talking about doing these things in practice, though.”

The specifics will be the hardest to pin down, according to Johnson.

“[Is] Donald suggesting that we, as a country, make it a policy to hack back? Should individual businesses have the right to retaliate? Who should be conducting attribution? Should we even focus on attribution?” he wondered. “Attribution and retaliation seem to be on everyone’s minds in Washington right now — from policymakers to military leadership to the media to private experts involved in discussions with the former. These are necessary topics, but let’s not forget how poorly our private companies and our government agencies are doing at defense — we need to improve our capabilities in defending our sensitive data, our infrastructure and our digital credentials.”

Outgoing Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., a potential candidate for secretary of the Navy, said cyber-watchers could expect to see important changes immediately after Trump is sworn in in January, including de-politicization of the nation’s cybersecurity policy.

“I think that with a President Trump, you’ll see him coming out literally within the first few days saying that we are going to have an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council,” he said. “That’s a clear game-changer. Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”