The international stock index I fund was the big winner among Thrift Savings Plan funds in April. Its monthly return was 4.16%. That also leaves it as the highest year-to-date, at an even 9%. The government securities G fund and fixed income investment F fund both also showed positive returns last month, at 0.35% and 0.39 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the common stock index C fund and small cap stock index S fund - both tied to major stock indexes - stayed in the red in April, and have negative year-to-date returns. All lifecycle fund returns were positive.

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Federal firefighters within the Defense Department continue to struggle with significant workforce shortages. The DoD has been operating below the minimum required staffing level for firefighters since 2019. That’s according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO says the staffing gaps partially stem from worse pay and work schedules than those offered by local fire departments. To address the issue, GAO says DoD should analyze the factors affecting staffing challenges, and make a department-wide workforce plan.

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Agencies received a record 1.5 million Freedom of Information Act requests in fiscal 2024. That’s according to the Justice Department Office of Information Policy’s latest summary of federal FOIA data. Agencies nearly kept pace by processing one-point-four-nine million FOIA requests last year. Still, the governmentwide FOIA backlog increased to 267,000 cases by the end of fiscal 2024.

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President Donald Trump has appointed new members to a group that will recommend reforms to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump on Monday formally appointed 20 members to the FEMA Advisory Council. They include Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Robert Fenton, Junior, the regional administrator for FEMA Region 9. The council is co-led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It has yet to meet more than three months after Trump set it up.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed all members of the Defense Department’s advisory boards. Joe Kasper, Hegseth's former chief of staff, launched a review of all advisory committees in March, required them to justify their existence. Kasper instructed the committees to explain how their advice “benefited the DoD, the Federal Government, and the United States,” and how it aligns with President Donald Trump’s goals and Hegseth’s priority of “restoring the warrior ethos.” This is not the first purge of advisory boards at the Pentagon in February 2021, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin fired all members of the advisory boards as part of a “zero-based review” of their operations.

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The Coast Guard has digitized 40% of its paper health records as of February. In a new update on the initiative, the Coast Guard said the goal is to completely digitize all paper health records by the third quarter of fiscal 2027. The service began the effort to digitize 45,000 paper health records in November 2022. Digitized records can be viewed on the MHS Genesis portal and are also accessible to the Department of Veterans Affairs for benefits delivery.

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The Postal Service strikes a labor deal with another one of its unions. USPS reached a tentative agreement with the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, which represents more than 130,000 rural letter carriers. NRLCA members must vote to ratify the contract before it’s approved. Letter carriers represented by the National Association of Letter Carriers voted against a tentative contract earlier this year. It took a third-party arbitrator to reach a final labor agreement between USPS and NALC.

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