Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Furlough and the Job Fair

A number of you have been speculating about what would happen if Congress and the President cannot work out an agreeable budget for the rest of the fiscal year and annual appropriations lapse. Specifically, you have been wondering about the status of this year's PMF job fair. Today, OPM has released some information that you may find interesting, although it doubtless will not set your mind at ease.

Most of OPM operates on funds that are not annually appropriated by Congress, so in the event of a funding lapse, a good deal of OPM will still operate, at least for a while. In the event of a prolonged lapse, a number of these operations may cease if they ran out of money. The Presidential Management Fellows Program Office operates from non-appropriated funds and would be able to continue operations. However, if no budget is in place prior to the PMF job fair, the job fair will have to be postponed, since many of the agencies who would have attended would themselves be furloughed. So this is the answer to how the looming government shutdown will affect you: it depends, but only on the duration of the shutdown.

I wanted to provide this information as soon as I came across it just to make you all aware. For more information about what I just discussed, visit OPM's special page at http://www.opm.gov/furlough/opm/

20 comments:

  1. Sooo... my take is this (feel free to disagree or bat this around):

    1. If the government shuts down tomorrow (please no, please no), the fair still won't be cancelled unless the government continues to be shut down for the next two weeks --which is unlikely. So it could shut down for a few days and then jump back up and we are a go.
    2. If Obama signs another week extension (which has been offered but says he doesn't want to do), but the budget still isn't figured out, and then is shut down next week, we are screwed.

    So I'm hoping it gets shut down tomorrow or never.

    Thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No agreement reached. According to the Senate Majority Leader (Harry Reid) $$$ is no longer the issue, "the major obstacle was Republican insistence on including provisions that would strip Planned Parenthood funding and prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions".
    The real question is if a deal isnt reached, will OPM leave all finalist in limbo through next week or wait till next friday to tell us the job fair is re-scheduled??

    ReplyDelete
  3. They can't reschedule the Job Fair. There are at least a few hundred of us whom have already made and paid for arrangements and are bound by our schedules. If this thing goes down, I think mist agencies will just hire via phone interviews after the dust settles.

    Watching the whole thing from abroad makes me even more embarrassed about American politics...

    ReplyDelete
  4. @1:42AM. Agreed. Watching this from Europe makes it all the more ridiculous...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Won't agencies still need to figure out their own budgets once Congress passes their budget? (especially if there's a shut down or major cuts). Couldn't that delay their decisions on PMF hiring?

    I also hate to say this, but I'm pretty sure they CAN reschedule the job fair, or whatever else they want to do. That's why it was optional to begin with.

    ReplyDelete
  6. WHY WON"T OPM TELL US ANYTHING???

    ReplyDelete
  7. General question: Does anyone know who actually pays a PMF's salary? Is it OPM or the agency? What is the $7,000 fee that agencies pay to OPM? Is that ALL they have to pay out of pocket for a worker for two years?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Probably because OPM doesn't know either. Do you know whether the government will be shut down during the job fair? I think they've pretty much given us all the information they have that isn't pure speculation. Just be glad they called the PMF job fair by name in the official release.

    ReplyDelete
  9. @8:14 AM - The appointing agency pays the PMF's salary for the duration of the fellowship. The $7000 fee is what the PMF Program collects from agencies for each appointed PMF to help pay for things like the job fair, the assessments, the orientation, the training, and probably even the staff salary (though I don't know that for sure, OPM's suggestion that the PMF program continues to work through a shutdown may be indicative).

    ReplyDelete
  10. Congress looks to be passing a compromise to avoid a shutdown and fund the government for 5 months. Is this enough time for agencies to come out of the woodwork?

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/reid-says-impasse-based-on-abortion-funding-boehner-denies-it/2011/04/08/AFO40U1C_story.html

    ReplyDelete
  11. @ 8:03 I sure hope so. Lets hope for 200+ new jerbs on PPS on Monday!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Disaster averted, unless something happens next week, which would surely put a wrench in the job fair. Dang, this is a rough year for PMFs! New assessment process and horrible political and budgetary climate.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Wait, so the budget will only get us through next Thursday, and there could be another shutdown then?

    ReplyDelete
  14. There will be no shutdown. The house and senate have agreed to a budget deal that will get us through the remainder of the fiscal year.

    ReplyDelete
  15. @ 8:19 -- I think you mean 600+ new jobs lol

    ReplyDelete
  16. Can anyone really explain what is appealing about hiring a PMF? Why are agencies willing to pay $7,000 EXTRA to hire us just because we took a silly online test and had an in-person interview? Is it because the hiring involves fewer bureaucratic hoops? If it's that we do rotations and get formal training, why don't the agencies already pay thousands for their normal employees to do the same?
    It's telling that the PMF program has been around since the 70s and only a handful of agencies are actively using it to recruit employees. Either the PMF office has failed at promoting the program, or there really just isn't much value added for the agencies.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Be quiet! We don't want the feds to wise up and not hire us.

    ReplyDelete
  18. @10:29 AM - Yes.

    Oh, you want more? The point of all the assessments and interviews was supposed to be to establish credentials and determine suitability for federal employment. Agencies usually do these things for other people they hire, so in a sense this does save them some money and effort. Where it pays off is the fact that they can hire from the PMF list on an expedited basis, without having to go through the full competitive hiring process, which despite having been reduced in the past couple of years still averages around 100 days. The trade-off for this is $7000 per appointee, plus 4-6 months out of office and some training.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Oh, also, prior to the 2003 updated executive order changing the name of the program from PMI to PMF, I believe I remember reading that the program was limited to 500 fellows per year (that's probably the number of finalists, not all of whom got hired) and was limited to very specific degree fields. Given 8 years, we've seen a pretty good increase in the number of positions available for a variety of PMFs.

    ReplyDelete
  20. The funny thing about the PMF program is that at certain agencies (prime example: state) you'll probably make less as a PMF than if you were hired in the normal fashion for a similar position. I don't think there's a great deal of "prestige" to the PMF, rather the advantage for the agency is the expedited hiring, while the advantage for us is the ability to rotate within and across agencies.

    ReplyDelete