Quick Hits

*** The Office of Personnel Management will publish its final rule on the 12-weeks of paid parental leave extended to federal employees with Title 5 status who have been on the job for at least a year. The rule takes effect Oct. 1, 2020, as per the authorizing statute. That means parents who birth, adopt or foster a child on Oct. 1 or after are eligible for the benefit, however the leave does not apply to parents of children born, adopted or fostered before that date. Additionally, the regulation provides that federal employees who use the benefit must promise to return to work for at least 12 weeks following the end of the leave, unless prevented from doing so for some medical reason. The government may recover insurance contributions made on that employee's behalf for the term of the 12 weeks of leave if the employee does not return to work.

*** The State Department released a plan designed to expunge "malign actors" from U.S. networks, telecommunications and applications ecosystems. Dubbed the Clean Network program, the effort is designed to put new restrictions on Chinese manufactured devices available to U.S. consumers, to limit access by Chinese state-owned firms to cloud computing services as a means to protecting U.S. corporate and research data and to safeguard undersea cables connecting U.S. networks to the global internet.