In the video, an employee at Bushways Packing Inc. in Grand Isle tries to skin alive a days-old calf in front of an alleged USDA inspector, among other abuses. A Humane Society investigator took the video while employed undercover at the slaughterhouse.

“This government official tells the worker, on hidden camera, that if another USDA inspector saw this, the plant would be shut down, but he allows the abuse to continue,” the Humane Society said in a news release.

Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack called the abuse “deplorable” and “callous.” He said employees are obligated to report noncompliant behavior.
Both USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and inspector general are investigating.

In a Nov. 4 letter to SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue, AFGE Council 220 President Witold Skwierczynski said an SSA negotiator told Council 220 members in October that swine flu “is not a serious communicable disease.”

Skwierczynski also said the negotiator and other SSA managers have threatened employees with disciplinary action should they decline to do face-to-face interviews with people who appear to be ill.

The negotiator said anyone who appears to be sick could be taken to to a private room and an SSA employee could telephone the room to interview the client regarding benefits, Skwierczynski said. The union leader called on SSA to change its policies to meet Health and Human Services Department guidelines for swine flu prevention.

“We regret that Mr. Skwierczynski continues to fabricate reports for media attention on this important public health issue,” said SSA spokesman Mark Hinkle. “Our policies meet or exceed everything Health and Human Services is recommending.”

• Angry residents of Lantana, Fla. sent a not so subtle message to Post Master General John Potter about his plans to close their local post office: 1,000 coconuts. Potter, in turn, donated the produce to the D.C. food bank Bread for the City.  [h/t: DCist]
• The Smithsonian uses the photo sharing Web site Flickr to remind us of an era in photography where you couldn’t instantly share an image with thousands of your closest friends around the world without ever making a print.  [h/t: NPR]
• The TSA now allows you to bring ice through security checkpoints, provided it is not partially melted. [The TSA Blog]
• Sesame Street marks its 40th anniversary on Tuesday. The stars of the PBS show are frequently federal spokesmuppets, as seen most recently in these ads raising awareness about flu prevention.

Here is how government performed, according to the INPUT report card:

Speed of Spending: B+ (Previous Grade: B+)
Reviewer’s Comments: “The federal government has continued to show unusual adeptness in dispensing a tremendous amount of money very quickly…At its current spending pace, the federal government will achieve 87 percent of the goal set by the president of having $350 billion spent by Sept. 30, 2010”

Contracting Effectiveness: B (Previous Grade: C-)
Reviewer’s Comments: “Federal agencies significantly improved in the use of fixed-price contracts and the percentage of contract awards made to small businesses…The federal government has awarded 48 percent of reported contract obligations using fixed-price contracts, a 30 percent increase over INPUT’s initial report card.”

Transparency and Reporting: C- (Previous Grade: D)
Reviewer’s Comments: “Each new report has been late…and the data quality of each new report has been poor upon release. However, overtime the quality and completeness of reports have improved. INPUT expects this will continue to be the case with the new recipient reports…A major area of disappointment continues to be the lack of transparency surrounding grant applications for many of the grant programs funded by the Recovery Act.”

Jobs Created: Incomplete (Previous Grade: Incomplete)
Reviewer’s Comments: “While the efforts to count jobs created or saved is a laudable goal, INPUT believes that accurate reporting of job creation is ultimately unknowable because of the number of recipients reporting, the complexity of the reports and the vagueness in the definition of a saved job.”

During the meeting, members of the Steering Committee on Federal Sustainability will be presented with some of the top suggestions from employees who participated in the White House’s GreenGov Challenge last month. More than 5,300 ideas were submitted during the two-week challenge.

The meeting will be streamed live online. Check back with www.federaltimes.com for a full report on the effort to go green.

The commission took the last year to quiz election officials, academics, community groups and voters from the 50 states, four territories and the District of Columbia. It found:

• More than 190 million Americans were registered to vote, a 14 million voter increase since 2004.
• Nearly 700,000 Americans used an online form to register to vote.
• More than 878,000 poll workers staffed approximately 132,000 polling places nationwide.
• Approximately 61 percent of voters cast their ballots in person at the polling station on Election Day; 17 percent used domestic absentee ballots; 13 percent voted early; 1.3 percent cast provisional ballots; and 0.7 percent sent in absentee ballots from overseas. (The balance falls into the very informative “other” and “not categorized”  categories)
• Approximately 1 million ballots were sent to military personnel and citizens overseas. Of those, 69 percent were returned and 93.6 percent of those returned were counted.
• At home, 26 million absentee ballots were distributed and 91 percent were returned and counted.
• Electronic touch-screen machines were the most common type of voting equipment used in 2008, with 23 states reporting 218,370 touch-screen machines in use. However, the optical scan voting systems are more widespread, with 43 states using them. However, there were only 107,519 optical scanners in use.

Sixteen committee Republicans sent a letter to Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., on Nov. 4, calling on him to schedule immediate hearings to analyze the impact H.R. 3692 may have on the FEHBP. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Nov. 5 she has the votes to pass the health care bill on Nov. 7.

In the letter, Republicans said they need clarification on what the bill could do to participants in the FEHBP.

We believe the legislation in its current form may have a significant impact on FEHBP, including the possibility that FEHBP may not be deemed a ‘qualified health benefits plan’ for purposes of the bill, which will have the effect of either forcing federal employees out of their current coverage and into the ‘public option,’ or subjecting them to a tax for failure to obtain ‘acceptable health coverage.”

The Republicans are just trying to stall the health care bill with “baseless concerns,” Towns replied in a Nov. 4 news release.

Any suggestion that federal employees may be forced out of insurance coverage and subjected to an additional tax is false and has no basis in the text of the bill.  Under H.R. 3962, federal employees will remain in their current system, and will also benefit from the same improvements to health insurance plans that all other Americans will enjoy, such as ending copayments for preventative medicine and automatic enrollment.  Insurance providers participating in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) will be subject to the same rules and regulations covering all other health insurance plans.”

The report will look at whether GSA’s reorganization improved management of the Multiple Award Schedules program and the effectiveness of the management tools GSA has in place, he said. Mismanagement of the schedules program led to a series of contracting scandals five years ago. The scandals prompted GAO to add interagency contracts to its High Risk List.

In addition, the report will address concerns raised by the congressionally charted Acquisition Advisory Panel in a 2007 report, Needham said. The panel found that agencies weren’t competing orders placed through established interagency, multiple awards contracts. In addition, the panel raised concerns that there were too many interagency contracts competing with each other and hampering the government’s abilities to get a good price.

Needham spoke at the Coalition for Government Procurement’s fall conference today.

In the video game world, your Web site is ‘Pong.’”

– Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told Greg Long, executive director of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, at a Nov. 3 hearing in reference to the state of the TSP’s Web site, comparing it to one of the first arcade games.

The board is working to make its Web site more user friendly and improve the information available, Long told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommitee on the federal workforce, postal service and the District of Columbia.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will quiz Gordon on his vision for the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at 10 a.m. on Nov. 10.  Gordon is slated to have his confirmation quiz alongside the president’s choice to lead the Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers.

Check in with FedLine and FederalTimes.com that day for complete coverage.