Several New Provisions Added

The House Treasury-Postal appropriations measure also includes: a new provision requiring agencies to report annually with the White House’s budget submission on use by their employees of “official time” for union duties (the Office of Personnel Management recently instructed agencies to compile those figures); a new training program to encourage managers to support telecommuting by their employees (the measure says that only 4.2 percent of employees telecommute even part of their time and that “manager reluctance is the most frequently cited barrier to telecommuting’); language requiring OPM to report on efforts to expand flexible spending accounts for federal employees; and a provision aimed eliminating what the measure calls unfair in-house advantages in contracting-out cost competitions through use of public resources.