Quick Hits

*** Sixty-four percent of the workforce at the Department of Homeland Security is vaccinated against COVID-19, said Chief Human Capital Officer Angela Bailey during a Thursday hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee. There's a Nov. 22 deadline for feds to get vaccinated. The agency's strategy to bring that number up is making vaccines available, educating the workforce and providing a reasonable accommodations process for anyone with exemptions. Agencies can discipline feds for noncompliance, but Bailey said "we're not in the business of removing our employees... It's a national security issue for us to make sure that we have every DHS employee that we can on board."

*** Rohit Chopra was confirmed on Thursday by the Senate on a vote of 50-48 to serve as director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Chopra previously served as a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

*** The Department of Labor has finalized its award of a block of five task orders to Verizon with a combined $887 million ceiling for modernization work on that agency's communications and IT environment. Washington Technology has more on this story.