Quick Hits

*** Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced a review of the DHS workforce to identify violent extremism among agency employees. "Violent extremism has no place at DHS and we will work with urgency and focus to address it," Mayorkas said in an April 26 message to agency employees.

*** On Monday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order establishing a new Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, intended to boost union density and support collective bargaining. Vice President Kamala Harris will chair the group. Their assignment is to identify executive branch policies and tools that can bolster worker organizing. The text of the executive order explicitly includes feds, and it instructs the task force to consult with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the agency that governs labor-management relations in the federal government.

*** Under the pandemic, federal chief financial officers assumed a more influential and central role in agency operations, according to a new report from Accenture.