The Office of Personnel Management maintains USAJOBS—a website for posting federal job opportunities from across the government. USAJOBS connects federal agencies with job seekers and facilitates the transfer and merit-based promotions of current federal employees. Since the redesign of USAJOBS in 2016, OPM has assessed and enhanced the user experience with the website. For example, OPM added in...

Each year, we make more than 1,000 recommendations to help improve the federal government. We alert department heads to the recommendations where they can save the most money, address issues on our High Risk List, or significantly improve government operations. This report outlines our 7 priority open recommendations for the Department of Labor as of April 2020. For example, we recommended that L...

The federal government’s Black Lung Disability Trust Fund faces financial challenges and has borrowed billions to cover costs. The Trust pays benefits to certain coal miners when no coal mine operator can be held responsible, or when the liable operator does not pay. Three coal mine operator bankruptcies have further strained Trust finances by transferring $865 million in estimated benefit resp...

The National Mediation Board (NMB) helps airlines and railways and their related unions resolve labor disputes that could disrupt commerce in those industries. We are required by law to review NMB’s programs and activities every 2 years. NMB implemented our prior recommendation to improve ethical standards for employees seeking outside employment; 6 others remain open. Also, NMB doesn’t have...

The National Mediation Board (NMB), which facilitates labor relations for railroads and airlines, has implemented five of the eight recommendations GAO made in its December 2013 and February 2016 reports (see table). The three remaining recommendations—on information security, information privacy, and rail grievance arbitration—are not yet fully implemented.Regarding information security, GAO...

The National Mediation Board (NMB) has made some progress in addressing the seven recommendations GAO made in December 2013; however, additional actions are needed to fully implement those recommendations and strengthen operations (see table). Without full implementation, NMB lacks reasonable assurance that its limited resources are effectively targeted and may be missing opportunities to improve...

The four departments—Agriculture (USDA), Education (Education), Health and Human Services (HHS), and Labor (DOL)—and their selected components used guidance for multiple purposes, such as clarifying or interpreting regulations and providing grant administration information. The terminology used for agency guidance varied and agency components issued varying amounts of guidance, ranging from ab...

Limitations in the intelligence community's (IC) inventory of contract personnel hinder the ability to determine the extent to which the eight civilian IC elements—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and six components within the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, State, and the Treasury—use these personnel. The IC Chie...

From 2004 to 2012, the federal non-postal civilian workforce grew by 258,882 employees, from 1.88 million to 2.13 million (14 percent). Permanent career employees accounted for most of the growth, increasing by 256,718 employees, from 1.7 million in 2004 to 1.96 million in 2012 (15 percent). Three agencies--the Departments of Defense (DOD), Homeland Security (DHS), and Veterans Affairs (VA)--accou...

The National Mediation Board (NMB) recently updated its strategic plan but is not meeting some federal strategic planning and performance measurement requirements. NMB missed deadlines for updating its strategic plan and lacks performance measures to assess its progress in meeting its goals, even though an agency's strategic plan should form the basis for everything an agency does.NMB also lacks s...