Bills extends insurance to older dependents

Bills pending before Congress would allow the Office of Personnel Management to extend health care to more adult dependent children of federal employees this year.

The health care reform law passed in March extends dependents' coverage until they turn 26. Federal employees' children now lose their parents' coverage when they turn 22.

But because of the way the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program law is written, OPM cannot extend that coverage earlier than Jan. 1. Some insurers are extending coverage for private-sector employees' children earlier than the law requires.

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and 11 other senators on May 11 introduced a bill that would allow OPM to grant coverage earlier.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and other lawmakers introduced similar legislation in the House May 4.

USPS cut facility, fleet energy consumption 9%

The U.S. Postal Service cut its energy consumption from buildings and vehicles by 9 percent last year, furthering the agency's goal to cut overall consumption 30 percent by 2015, the agency said last week.

The Postal Service also increased its use of alternative fuels by 26 percent in 2009, which is a key strategy to meeting the agency's overall goal to cut petroleum fuel use 20 percent by 2015.

Cutting energy and fuel consumption also are at the heart of a Postal Service initiative to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. Other efforts detailed in the Postal Service's 2009 sustainability report, issued May 11, include cutting landfill waste by 7 percent between 2008 and 2009 and increasing the amount of electronics that were recycled or reused electronics by 73 percent during the same timeframe.

"The Postal Service is making good progress in achieving its sustainability goals and continues to lay a solid foundation for a sustainable future for our organization, our employees and our customers," said Sam Pulcrano, vice president of sustainability

Recovery.gov moves to a cloud

The White House said May 13 that it will save $750,000 by the end of 2011 by moving its stimulus projects website, Recovery.gov, to a cloud computing system.

White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said Recovery.gov is the first governmentwide system to move to cloud computing. Under cloud computing, agencies rent access to other vendors' or agencies' servers, storage and applications and access them via the Internet. This saves them the expense of owning and maintaining the systems themselves.

Kundra said more government systems will move to cloud computing to save money and improve efficiency.

"It's not going to happen overnight, but this represents one of the first bricks we're laying," Kundra said in a conference call with reporters.

Nine contractor employees indicted

Nine people were indicted May 12 for sneaking a peek at President Obama's student loan records while working for an Education Department contractor, The Associated Press reported.

A grand jury returned the indictments in U.S. District Court in Davenport, Iowa, the U.S. attorney's office told AP. The nine workers were assigned to an office in Coralville when they allegedly "intentionally exceeded authorized access to a computer and thereby obtained information from a department and agency of the United States," the indictments say.

The alleged crimes occurred between July 2007 and March 2009, AP reported. Eight of those indicted are Iowa residents; no hometown was listed for the ninth.