Government Executive's Editor-in-Chief Tom Shoop helped bring some facts to the debate over the generosity and funding of government employee pension plans when he appeared on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio on Thursday.

One of Shoop's main points, as he wrote in Government Executive's FedBlog:

My job was to explain why the federal system is at considerably less risk than state and local plans. (The main reason of course, being that the Federal Employees Retirement System has shifted more of the burden to the individual to be responsible for retirement savings via the Thrift Savings Plan, while plans at lower levels of government still tend to rely heavily on a pension component.)

Listen to the show here.

A follow up to Nextgov's Tuesday article on the Supreme Court hearing arguments from NASA employees that background checks for new ID cards violated their privacy, the Denver Post reported early on Wednesday that it looked like almost all the justices weren't buying the workers' argument.

[Justice Elena] Kagan did not participate in Tuesday's argument, but all of her new colleagues -- with the exception of Justice Sonia Sotomayor -- sounded as though they would take her advice and uphold the use of background checks.

The Post pointed out that when Kagan was solicitor general in 2009 she urged the high court to reverse the ruling of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the open-ended questions in the background check violated their right to privacy, stressing the employees, who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, held "low-risk" jobs.

The background checks are part of the federal government's billion-dollar-plus program to issue new high-tech standard ID cards to all government employees. The program was launched under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. The case has implications for all government workers and their claims to privacy.

John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote a blog post for The Huffington Post on Tuesday musing about this weekend's gathering in Washington of "tens of thousands of people . . . to push the government on the jobs issue."

Feffer made the point that progressives were making an issue between spending on war versus spending on jobs. But, he wrote, there's a problem with this stance.

Many unions, although perhaps willing to oppose the war in Afghanistan, are hesitant to advocate cutting Pentagon spending. With a base that continues to shrink, they fear losing dues-paying members who manufacture weapons. Politicians, too, don't want to appear anti-job by voting for anything that would close down production lines in their district.

We may not like it, but war is good for jobs, something that economists on the left and right agree on.

For years, government officials have predicted a wave of federal retirements, but it has yet to materialize. New Jersey may have found a way to make it a reality.

Gov. Chris Christie has proposed reforming the public pension system, and state workers believe he is serious, so much so that an increased number are planning to retire.

From WHHY in Delaware:

So far this year more than 19,000 state employees and teachers have filed applications for retirement. That's a 55 percent increase from last year.

Rutgers University public policy professor Carl Van Horn says Gov. Christie's call to change pension and health care benefits is one reason why workers who want to preserve their current benefits are leaving. But, he says there are other factors.

"With budgets being reduced and personnel being reduced the pressures on the remaining workers increase and so the environment for working in government in general has declined. The satisfaction that people get from the job and the pressures they feel have increased."

Considering the current unemployment rate, Van Horn says the government should not have trouble attracting new workers in the short term. But he says it could be more difficult once the economy improves.

This item was updated at 11:45 a.m. on Sept. 24 to provide another example of how Congress affects IT.

When Congress passes legislation, it rarely thinks about how much work is involved in putting a new policy into place. And that includes information technology labor.

One example I wrote about was the requirement in the 2001 USA Patriot Act that mandated the creation of an entry-exit system that would keep track of when a foreign visitor entered the country and when he or she left. The deadline to build the network was unrealistic, to say the least. But then again, the country was pretty shaken and wasn't thinking through its policy decisions.

Then there was the cost to rework computers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to process Medicare Part D, which ocngress passes to alleviate the high cost of prescription drugs for elderly and disabled Americans. "The legislation required upgrades to the IT systems of pharmacists, insurance companies, state governments and CMS alike," Robert Charette wrote in Government Executive in December 2006. Computer problems "became so bad that more than 20 state governors had to step in and order temporary payment of drug benefit claims for their senior citizens."

Another, earlier, example occurred when some members in Congress wanted to privatize part of Social Security in the late 1990s (and the proposal has come up periodically since then). SSA officials told me then that to retrofit computer systems at the agency to track what was private and what wasn't would cost upwards of $1 billion. (Some congressional members were dubious.)

Which brings us to this week, when a Republican introduced a bill calling for two weeks of unpaid leave for federal employees. How does that affect payroll systems? What's involved in reprogramming payroll and human resource systems to track that accurately? Maybe it's merely just a box you check in the systems. Or maybe a lot more is involved. Not sure. How many extra work hours would it take to make the change, and was that taken into account when Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., figured out it would save the government more than $5.5 billion?

It would be helpful for federal IT managers and programmers out there who may know how much work is involved to comment on this. Is it significant or is it real easy?