Government Executive

TSP funds returned to growth in April

The common stocks of the Thrift Savings Plan’s C Fund led the way, gaining 10.49% in April. Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images After a lackluster March, every offering in the federal government’s 401(k)-style retirement savings program gained value last month.The common stocks of the Thrift Savings Plan’s C Fund led the way, gaining 10.49% in April. So far this year, the C Fund is up 5.70%.The small- and mid-size businesses of the S fund improved 9.96% last month, bringing its 2026 growth up to 8.61%. And the international (I) fund grew 9.11% in April, taking its performance since January to 11.12%.The fixed income (F) fund ticked up 0.12%, good for a 0.16% increase since January. And the G Fund, which is made up of government securities, increased by its statutorily mandated rate of 0.36%. So far this year, the G Fund has grown 1.41%.Each of the TSP’s lifecycle (L) funds, which shift toward more conservative investments as participants near retirement, likewise posted gains. The L Income Fund, for those already making withdrawals, grew 2.95%; L 2030, 5.59%; L 2035, 6.60%; L 2040, 7.16%; L 2045, 7.64%; L 2050, 8.13%; L 2055, 9.84%; L 2060, 9.84%; L 2065, 9.84%; L 2070, 9.84%; and

Contracting association warns it could take DHS until the end of the year to ‘get back on track’ following record-breaking shutdown

The Homeland Security Department was in a funding lapse from Feb. 14 until Thursday. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images While the funding lapse for most Homeland Security Department agencies ended on Thursday, a trade association for government contractors warned that it will take time for federal operations to return to normal and for some contracting companies to experience financial relief from missed reimbursements due to the shutdown. “We're very thankful that the shutdown is now over, but there's still a lot of work to be done to get the government back on track,” said Jim Carroll, the CEO of the Professional Services Council. The association reported on Tuesday that as a result of the DHS shutdown, which began in mid-February, contracts that support government cybersecurity operations as well as disaster response and preparedness were forced to operate at a reduced capacity. Even though DHS appropriations have now resumed, Carroll cautioned that it may take until the end of the year for agencies and contractors to return to normal capabilities. “For every day of a government shutdown, it takes three to five business days for the federal government to get back on track,” the PSC CEO said. “So with this extraordinary shutdown, the

Workers predict significant disruptions to food assistance programs as USDA announces more relocations

The Food and Nutrition Service oversees 16 nutrition programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images The Agriculture Department is relocating hundreds of additional employees away from its Washington-area and regional offices, this time focusing on food assistance program employees. The Food and Nutrition Service will relocate most of its staff to new hubs USDA has established around the country, including to Indiana, Texas, Missouri and North Carolina. The relocations are part of a larger reorganization of FNS, which will now go by the Food and Nutrition Administration, that a union representing the agency’s workforce said would lead to closures of regional offices in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco. The changes are part of USDA's reorganization that will see 2,600 employees shifted from the capital region into the new regional hubs.FNS oversees 16 nutrition programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Women, Infants and Children, that collectively serve one-in-four Americans annually. The reorganization and relocations will improve customer service and not result in any disruption to program execution, USDA said. “As part of this reorganization, we are changing our structure from regional offices to Hubs that will offer improved program support across the nation,” said USDA

One CEO’s push to speed up how the Pentagon adopts technology

Meagan Metzger founded Dcode, a tech accelerator, in 2015. Courtesy: Dcode Early in her career, Meagan Metzger walked into a program office with a simple question: Why was the government building software it could just buy?Again and again, she saw the same pattern: the government spending time and money building technology that already existed in the commercial market — often ending up with something slower, more expensive and less effective.She saw it as a systems integrator building software for the Army, scaling a company and working with commercial tech firms that wouldn’t touch the federal market. And she saw it inside government, where the challenge wasn’t the technology.“The tech’s easy,” she said. “It’s all the unsexy stuff that gets in the way.”So she started figuring out how to work around it. Where others saw barriers — requirements, contracting, incentives — Metzger saw problems to solve. If there was a path forward, she was going to find it.In 2015, she founded Dcode, a tech accelerator, to help startups break into the federal market. But over time, she realized the bigger problem wasn’t companies, it was the system. Today, Dcode works with government leaders to help them become better customers of technology.A

GSA procurement chief leads FAR overhaul

Jeffrey Koses is the senior procurement executive at the General Services Administration. Courtesy: GSA Jeffrey Koses paced the floor of his home in the middle of the night in 1995, trying to get his newborn son back to sleep by talking him through potential responses to a stack of procurement protests waiting on his desk.Somewhere in those 2 a.m. conversations, three ideas took hold. The government needed to communicate better with industry to avoid protests. The workforce shouldn’t be stuck working 16-hour days just to keep up. And technology should make the job easier, not harder.Today, as the senior procurement executive at the General Services Administration, Koses applies those same principles to one of the government’s most ambitious acquisition reforms: the Revolutionary Federal Acquisition Regulation Overhaul.Koses’ path into federal acquisition wasn’t planned. With a degree in history and political science and “no clue” what to do next, he landed in a GSA management development program buying furniture for the federal government.“I found the mission was just fascinating, because GSA is the behind-the-scenes engine that keeps the rest of government working,” he said. “Any initiative that I saw going on in the country, any story in the paper, I would find

Coast Guard officer promotion advanced by Senate Republicans despite IG finding of whistleblower retaliation

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., speaks at a press conference on Oct. 28, 2025. She said that senators "cannot allow the promotion of officers into the Coast Guard's senior ranks who have substantiated claims of retaliation in their records.” Anadolu / Getty Images A group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday requested that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin urge the White House to withdraw the pending promotion of a Coast Guard officer who they say has been found to have retaliated against a whistleblower. In their letter, the lawmakers wrote that the inspector general for the Homeland Security Department in 2018 determined that Commander Jesse Millard retaliated against a subordinate after she filed a complaint against him and other Coast Guard leaders. Names were redacted in the IG report that the senators cited, but the document states that investigators found the “totality of evidence” showed that a lieutenant commander stationed at the Coast Guard Academy would have received higher evaluation marks if she hadn't submitted discrimination and harassment complaints against her superiors. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., one of the letter’s signers, said during a Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee meeting in March that advancing Millard’s promotion would contravene progress that lawmakers and

DHS funding bill heads to Trump, ending shutdown for department employees

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks to reporters after passage of a Homeland Security Department funding bill, on April 30, 2026 at the U.S. Capitol. DHS has been shutdown for weeks as a funding patch is worked out between House and Senate Republicans. Graeme Sloan/Getty Images The House approved a bill Thursday that will fund almost every agency in the Department of Homeland Security for the next five months, sending the measure to President Donald Trump weeks after the Senate unanimously approved it.Once the bill becomes law, it will end the shutdown that began in mid-February and has at times stalled paychecks for federal employees throughout much of the department, including those at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration.The voice vote to pass the DHS appropriations bill finally marks an end to the annual government funding process that was supposed to be wrapped up before the end of September. There were three shutdowns in all through the fall and early spring.Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, said during brief floor debate it was “about damn time” Republican leaders brought the bill to the floor.DeLauro said that “from the outset” Democrats wanted

After reductions, VA chief says facilities can 'hire where they need and what they need'

VA Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers on Thursday that the department has eight pilot programs underway to get new hires onboarded more quickly. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images The Veterans Affairs Department can hire any employee it wants at any time, the head of the agency told lawmakers on Thursday as he sought to address concerns about staffing declines and new restrictions that have set ceilings on workforce levels. No VA facility is facing constraints on bringing in new personnel, Secretary Doug Collins said, who once again stressed that previous hiring efforts outpaced demand for health care through the department. He made the comments despite VA placing staffing caps on each facility that led to the elimination of tens of thousands of vacant positions and were designed to add layers of review to be surpassed. “We will hire every need that we have in the department,” Collins said before a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Our hospitals have the complete autonomy to hire where they need and what they need going forward.”Collins’ comments came following his push to reduce VA’s workforce by 30,000 employees last year and the subsequent vacancy eliminations. The reductions have raised some bipartisan

How an obscure federal agency threatens to upend union disputes

A small agency designed to resolve labor-management disputes is taking an unusual approach as agencies enforce Trump's executive orders Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images This story has been updated at 4 p.m. ET to include comments from FMCS.A small federal agency has taken unusual steps to interfere in federal employee unions’ ability to secure independent adjudicators to hash out disputes with agency management, though on Friday it clarified that its new approach won’t apply to pre-existing cases, following pressure from advocates and arbitrators alike. As the Trump administration has defended in court the legality of two 2025 executive orders that strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of its collective bargaining rights on national security grounds, its attorneys have frequently relied on the idea that unions could challenge the edicts’ validity as part of preexisting administrative disputes to support the idea that federal judges lack jurisdiction to hear the labor groups’ lawsuits.“The government identified numerous avenues for unions to challenge the executive order’s validity before the [Federal Labor Relations Authority] and then on direct review in a court of appeals, and plaintiff fails to explain why those avenues are unavailable,” the government wrote in a legal brief last October.