Personnel Director John Berry said Wednesday that his staff is working “around the clock” to fix bugs in the government’s revamped Web site for job seekers, who will get a three-week reprieve on application deadlines for most positions.

“We’re not going to rest until we work through these problems,” the director of the Office of Personnel Management pledged.

In this photo illustration U.S. Treasury checks are piled at the U.S. Treasury printing facility July 18, 2011 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo Illustration by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images) (William Thomas Cain - GETTY IMAGES)

Federal retirees will receive in January the first inflation adjustment to their annuity benefits since 2009, an increase of 3.6 percent for most, following the announcement Wednesday of Consumer Price Index figures through September.

The COLA also will be paid in Social Security and military retirement benefits, which like civil service annuities have been frozen for two years due to a period of deflation that followed the calculation of the January 2009 payout.

Campaign signs litter a Northern Virginia road. By law, they’re prohibited in the federal workplace. (Shamus Ian Fatzinger - Fairfax County Times) With campaign season in full swing, federal employees already know they can’t display or distribute campaign literature and pictures at the office. The Hatch Act, which bars feds from engaging in most political activities, places strict limitations on what they can do or say when it comes to partisan politics.

But how does the 72-year-old Hatch Act address the use of e-mail, BlackBerries, social media and the growing trend of federal employees working from home?

So far, it doesn’t say anything at all about those trends, and the office enforcing the law is desperately seeking some updates.

Note: earlier versions of this blog post incorrectly identified the publication that first reported problems with the USAJobs Web site. The error has been corrected.

Eight days after launching what it described as a new and improved Web site for federal job seekers, the Office of Personnel Management is still working to clear up major glitches that are blocking access for many users.

Among the bugs in the new version of USAJobs.gov cited by users: Search results that don’t get displayed, pages that are slow to load or don’t load at all, a “so sorry--come back later page,” a mediocre search engine and job postings that disappear before the deadline.

U.S. Army troops pack up to walk down to meet their helicopter following a mission along Pakistan-Afghanistan border in June 2009. (Nikki Kahn - The Washington Post) Buoyed by a new law requiring states to make absentee ballots more accessible to military troops serving overseas, troops voted at a higher rate than the general population in last year’s midterm elections, according to a new report.

Overall, 46 percent of the military voted in the 2010 midterm elections, a 21 percent jump from the 2006 midterms and slightly higher than the 45.5 percent of the general population that cast ballots last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Federal Voting Assistance Program.

FVAP is a Pentagon office responsible for overseeing the distribution of absentee ballots to troops and their spouses.

(Courtesy of U.S. Postal Service (USPS)) Stamp prices are going up by 1 cent starting in January, the U.S. Postal Service said Tuesday.

The cost of a first-class stamp — also known as a Forever Stamp — will climb to 45 cents on Jan. 22, the first price increase in more than 2 ¹ / ₂ years, USPS said. The cost of sending magazines, standard mail and some package services will also rise, but prices for Express Mail and Priority Mail will stay the same.

The price increase is expected to generate an additional $888 million in revenue, postal officials said Tuesday.

The price jump “is small and is needed to help address our current financial crisis,” Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe said in a statement, adding that while USPS continues to “aggressively cut costs” it needs Congress to pass postal reform legislation that he said would make it easier to save money.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. (upper right), consulting with an Apple Store employee while hunched over a store counter Monday. (Photo by Ed O’Keefe - The Washington Post) Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — a big fan of Apple’s iPad and iPhone — rushed into the Apple Store in Bethesda Monday night in a fast and furious fashion (pardon the pun) for an appointment with Genius Bar employees.

The Federal Eye spotted the attorney general rushing in with his security detail in tow around 7:15 p.m. Very few of the dozens of customers and store employees seemed to notice or care that the nation’s top lawyer was consulting with an employee, first about his iPhone and then his iPad. (See the photo above.)

Holder’s latest visit to the store was much less awkward than a trip he made in June, where he was confronted by store employee Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official who at the time faced charges of unauthorized possession of classified documents.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is proposing $130 million in budget cuts that include closing regional offices of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. (Win McNamee - GETTY IMAGES) Dozens of career antitrust lawyers at the Justice Department are likely to quit if the department goes through with plans to close four regional offices, according to several of the attorneys.

Officials this month announced plans to close four regional offices of the department’s antitrust division, in Atlanta, Cleveland, Dallas and Philadelphia, and to move 94 attorneys and support staff members to offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and division headquarters in Washington. The plans would allow the department to consolidate operations and focus on larger criminal investigations, and department officials said they would pay to relocate the attorneys and support staffers willing to move.

(Andrew Harrer - BLOOMBERG)

The IRS commissioner has warned Congress that plans to cut the tax collector’s budget would add to the nation’s budget deficit and seriously hurt customer service.

Legislation proposed by Senate appropriations that would slice $525 million from the Internal Revenue Service, and a House bill that would reduce agency spending by $650 million “would lead to noticeable degradation of both service and enforcement and would have a serious detrimental impact on voluntary compliance for years to come,” Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman said in the letter. The IRS budget is about $12.5 billion.

The budget cuts also would force long waits for customer service, he said.

(Jonathan Alcorn - BLOOMBERG) A proxy battle between Google and Microsoft in their ongoing war to provide lucrative cloud computing services to the federal government appears to have resulted in a decision favoring Microsoft.

The General Services Administration, which is spearheading a contract program to help federal agencies use Web-based e-mail services, must rework the deal to better address terms that would have allowed technology firms to base computing centers in countries including Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, but not in more tech-friendly countries like Brazil, India and South Africa, according to a decision published Monday by the Government Accountability Office.

Two small contracting firms, Annapolis-based Technosource Information Systems and Reston-based TrueTandem, filed bid protests with GAO, arguing that GSA’s deal would have allowed winning contractors to base their computing centers in the war-torn countries that GSA considers Trade Agreements Act-designated countries, but not in countries with developing tech sectors, like Brazil, India and South Africa, which are not considered TAA compliant.