*** The Office of Personnel Management clarified on Friday that it's waiving the usual Title V biweekly premium pay cap for feds doing details at the border to help with surges in unaccompanied minors.
Last month, OPM announced a partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services allowing feds to volunteer for 120-day deployments at facilities in the Southwest. Usually, there's a biweekly cap on premium pay, but feds can be covered by an annual cap if they're working on "an emergency that involves a direct threat to life or property" wrote Kathleen McGettigan, acting OPM director, in a memo sent to agency heads.
"The presence of unaccompanied children at the southern border has given rise to an unusual set of circumstances that requires use of volunteers from other agencies," McGettingan wrote. "The unaccompanied children who are being assisted by HHS following entry are subject to conditions posing a direct threat to their lives, as they are need of food, shelter, supervision, and protection, and unable to provide such resources for themselves."
*** IBM won a five-year, $850 million task order on the Navy's Enterprise Resource Planning Technical Support Services (NETSS) contract to upgrade the service's financial management systems.