Combined Federal Campaign

I’ve recently been assigned to work on the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). The CFC is an annual charity campaign that allows organizations to raise funds from federal employees. The CFC has more than 4,000 charities that federal employees can donate to. According to the CFC website, these charities have all been vetted by the federal government and are recognized as legitimate organizations. I have been asked to run this campaign for our office under the guidance of another analyst who ran the campaign last year. My task is to give the information about CFC to the Office of Security employees and provide them the opportunity to give. The goal for our office is to raise a little over $11,000 from now until December 15, just a few days before my internship ends. I hope we can reach this goal by the time my internship is over. 

The CFC is praised as a very cost effective fundraising campaign, the average administrative cost for last year’s CFC was approximately 7 percent which means 93 percent goes directly to the charity. Overall, this is a low overhead, which I believe it is due to the fact that federal employees are the ones who run the campaign and do most of the work. It reminds me of the Army, where it’s not required to have landscapers, janitors, or security guards, because you have soldiers. Of course I am not saying helping in this is like cleaning, but the concept that keeps the cost low for the campaign is the same. In fact, the military is also involved and helps raise funds for the CFC. Below is Obama's message on the CFC. Obama - Combined Federal Campaign

Eventful First Tour

Of course the great part of being in Washington, D.C. is all the history and incredible things to see. Our second day here, the interns were invited to tour the U.S. Capitol. It was great for me because this was my first visit. I remember it being a perfect fall morning and I took some great pictures on our tour of the building. I actually still have the picture of the Capitol saved as my phone screen saver which is above.  I'm actually a little proud of this one for being a phone picture and my only regret is that I wasn't in front of it when I took it.

Interestingly, the day we had the tour was the same day they had the Glenn Beck rally at the National Mall. After the tour a few of the interns decided to check it out. We showed up at the tail end of it after Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin had spoken, but there were still a ton of people there. There were also a few billboards of Martin Luther King towards the back of the rally since it was the anniversary of his "I have a dream" speech.

The Beck crowd was peaceful and there were a few tents scattered around where people were shouting things about government spending. One tent had a guy singing about politics and in one line he sang "get your hand out of my pocket Uncle Sam". There were some people grouped up handing out flyers in different areas of the crowd, I was handed one about the dangers of socialism and another flyer about Christianity.

It was starting to get hot around 2:00pm when the rally ended and there were a lot of people just sitting under the shade of The Washington Monument. I was just taking it all in and people watching. I sat down and started to talk to one man who was sitting next to me. I asked him what happened at the rally and what was discussed. He said this rally was not about taxes but about brining God back into this country and that's all he really said to me.

Survey Assignment

One of my major assignments in this internship has been to analyze data from a survey that was distributed to about 20,000 Department of Commerce employees. Of the 20,000 distributed, a little over 4,000 responded, which is a good turnout. The survey attempts to measure the level of awareness people have of security issues ranging from how to respond to an emergency, how to respond to threats, and how to protect sensitive information. The survey also asked how satisfied employees were with the security measures provided. Once the survey was closed I had to download the data from a program called Inquisite (similar to surveymonkey).

From there, I created charts and tables showing the data and analyze the findings in the form of a report.  I created several reports broken down by bureau, then one report that summarized all the findings. Overall, people were satisfied with security measures and there seemed to be consistency with the highest and lowest rated aspects of security awareness. I then had to create a standard operating procedure to that will instruct future employees on how to create the report which will help with consistency for measuring progress for the following years. This project took a few weeks because the data was double checked by the Analyst and Assistant Director. They both had to read through the many comments as I did and highlight any important security issues that needed to be addressed. Currently the reports are being reviewed by the Director and Deputy Director before it goes out to all the bureaus. I hope to get some feedback soon on what they think of the report.  

Getting to know the metro

I had to learn the public transit system right away here because for obvious reasons I decided not to drive my car from Arizona. On my second day here I had to take the train for an orientation meeting with the rest of the interns in the program. However, a few days before I arrived back in August, I preplanned my trip on the D.C. transit website called the 

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. It seemed fairly straight forward and luckily I found out that I only had to take one train to and from work everyday. Everyone is encouraged to buy a metro card called SmartTrip which you add value to and you get you a small discount if you use it. 

The metro system works unlike the bus system or other train systems I've been on before. When you use  the metro rail system here you are charged by how far you travel. Rates vary depending certain hours of the day but they charge the highest during peak hours from 6-9am and 4-7pm. The average cost to get from my house to work costs me about $6.50 each way. That includes the $1.50 bus fee to get to the train since I don't live waking distance to the station. I calculated that I was paying around $80+ a week for transportation to include my weekend travels!

I knew there had to be another way, so I discovered an option called a short trip pass. The way the short trip works is you have a weekly pass that only allows you to travel distances that cost less than $3.05. So what I've begun to do is get off the train at distances that only cost less than $3.00 and get back on the next train. This has worked fine because during peak hours the trains come within minutes of each other so as soon as I pass the turnstile and back to the dock, another train is already arriving. I only have to do this twice on my way to work but it's been worth the hassle. The short trip pass costs $32.50 a week and it's unlimited travel on the weekends. The only downside is that you have to pay attention to how far you are traveling. I've already gone too far with my short trip pass once, but the transit worker was nice and let me though anyway.  

Getting to work

The first few days at the Department of Commerce were not too hectic. The first thing I did was to begin the process of getting a badge so I could enter into the building without an escort. All entrances are guarded and every visitor must pass through a metal detector and every bag is checked through an x-ray scanner. If you are a commerce employee, you are allowed to pass through freely. The process to get my badge took about two weeks, so everyday I had to sign in with the guards and one of the analysts had to escort me to the office. The building itself is huge, at the time of it's construction, it was the largest administrative building ever built. If you google "Herbert C. Hoover building" you'll see what I mean.

Soon after we had most of the paperwork completed for the badge, I was taken around the offices and introduced to some of the people in other departments. Most of the people who work in the office seem to be in a mid-to late career folks. During the first week my task was to help out the finance / administrative department for the Office of Security. When I walked in to their office they had pretty much a room full of brand new computer equipment. The reason for it was because it was the end of the fiscal year so OSY ordered a large order of brand new equipment to spend all the money in their budget. So my task was to help the purchaser in the finance office sort all that out while more equipment was coming in every day. I just made a spreadsheet and we sent them to the appropriate offices. It was fairly simple but time consuming. For a moment, I felt like I was at FexEx.

I guess the more important story behind this was all the equipment and money spent necessary? Apparently, a partial reason was because OSY has just created a new security department and they are just about to hire about 5 new personnel/agents for that office, so they need this equipment when they arrive. Most of the desktops and laptops had dual monitors and all the security specs. Obviously the total of all this equipment was quite pricey. Since the new department is getting the equipment isn't really staffed yet, I still haven't had a chance to find out what it's all about and understand what their mission is. I hope to find out and I'll post in another blog entry. The rest of the equipment may have been used to upgrade some of the other departments technology needs.

Orientation of the Office

Since I've been slacking a little on my blog entries, I will tell you all more about the Office of Security. The first day one of the people in the office gave me a mini orientation and told me about how the office works. The person giving me the orientation was a Management Analyst. What a Management Analyst does is support the duties and responsibilities of the office and the directors.  The office  has three analysts and the director, deputy director, and assistant director. There are also two secretaries in the office. 

The office itself is called the Strategic and Administrative Division. Again, this is basically the headquarters that handles all aspects of policy and management of security within the Department of Commerce (DOC). All other offices fall under this department which includes the counter-espionage division, anti-terrorism division, project management division, emergency preparedness division, and the physical security division that I don't remember the exact title to. All these divisions have a specific job in the security for DOC and together it's all the Office of Security. 

Going back to the my office, I report to the assistant director who handles the budget for the Office of Security, everything from approving salaries, purchasing, contracts, awards, etc. He obviously reports to the two directors who give final approval on the budget. The three other analysts support the office with required training, policy briefs, evaluations, and general human resources type of work that is required for OSY. This work is necessary since the several departments  each have assistant directors that must report up the chain to the directors. 

This is truly bureaucracy at it's finest, not to mention that many of the employees at OSY are either prior military or police officers so you get that mentality. And if this is confusing to anyone, don't worry about it. It took me a while to get this all figured out, and I'm still learning.