The House passed two bills that would affect the Transportation Security Administration’s hiring of military personnel, and child custody rights for servicemembers during deployment.

The House approved by voice vote a bill that would have the TSA comply with the the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, a 1994 law that requires employers to hold jobs for employees, such as reservists, called to active duty.

“We have USERRA protections in place for a reason and this bill simply ensures that the thousands of veterans, reservists, and members of the National Guard working for TSA are protected as they would be in any other position,” said Rep. Timothy Walz (D-Minn.), the author of the bill.

Must be nice to be a federal worker — at least according to the stereotype of a “lazy bureaucrat.”

It sort of goes against another common Washington stereotype, the BlackBerry-leashed, type-A worker bees who stay late and then take work with them.

So which is it, federal workers? Do you step away from your work outside the 9-5, or do you find yourself staying as long as it takes to get the job done? Are budget cuts and staff reductions increasing your workload or affecting your work day? Tell us how much work you do outside regular business hours for this week’s Federal Buzz Question of the Week.

You can weigh in on our Federal Buzz partner site, GovLoop, in the form below, or on Twitter using the hashtag #FedBuzz.

A key senator asked the Thrift Savings Plan for more details Tuesday on the data security breach that resulted in the disclosure of the Social Security numbers and other information of more than 123,000 federal employees and other TSP account holders.

The request from Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee which oversees the TSP, comes as affected account holders are receiving notification letters that the 401(k)-style retirement savings program began mailing last Friday.

The TSP disclosed that day that the Social Security numbers of 123,201 participants had been stolen, out of the 4.5 million federal employees and uniformed services personnel and retirees who have accounts. About a third of those affected also had names and addresses stolen in the cyberattack, and in some of those cases, additional information, including financial account numbers and routing numbers, was taken. The other two-thirds lost some TSP-related information in addition to their Social Security numbers.

This is an excerpt from a post by The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama, who reports that the Veterans Talent Index, a report based on surveys of veterans looking for work and of the employers who are seeking to hire them:

Military veterans face a major communications gap when looking for jobs in the civilian world. That’s what a survey from Monster.com, one of the world’s leading job sites, found when it took a deeper look at how veterans fare in the job market once they leave military service.

On Wednesday, Monster released the Veterans Talent Index, a report based on surveys of veterans looking for work and of the employers who are seeking to hire them. This is the second index the company has done; Monster plans to revisit the project every six months or so.

“We created the VTI to shine a light on the problems that vets are having in finding jobs,” said Steve Cooker, Monster’s Executive Vice President and Head of Global Government Solutions.

Veterans’ confidence in being able to find a job is dropping, the study found, as they face a tough job market. The unemployment rate is particularly high for 18- to 24-year-old veterans, said Jeff Quinn, Monster Worldwide’s Vice President of Global Insights. They are finding it tough to compete for scarce jobs against peers who have not served in the military but instead have a few years of additional education or work experience under their belts. Cooker said the problem will only get larger as the government budget cuts prompt more people look for jobs outside of the military.

But those moving into civilian life also find it difficult to talk convincingly about how their military skills can translate to other fields of work.

For the full report, check out the original post here.

The secretaries of the departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development will argue the case for more funding to meet the Obama administration’s goal of ending veterans’ homelessness by 2015 at a conference Wednesday morning in Washington.

Secretary Eric K. Shinseki and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan are scheduled to give keynote address during the opening session of the 2012 Annual Conference of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans (NCHV) in downtown Washington.

The results in reducing the number of homeless veterans “allow us to make the case for more investments in a tough budget environment,” Donovan said in remarks prepared for the conference.

The number of homeless veterans found in point-in-time counts dropped 12 percent from 2010 to 2011, a decline Donovan attributed to the government’s embrace of the “housing first” strategy to combat homelessness.

“For decades, the federal government used to say to somebody living in the streets with substance abuse, for example, ‘Get sober — and then we’ll help you find a place to live,” Donovan said in his prepared remarks. “... That approach had it absolutely backwards.”

More than 30,000 veterans have been housed thus far through the HUD-VASH program, which combines housing vouchers issued by HUD with VA case management and clinical services.

HUD’s 2013 budget includes an additional $75 million for HUD-VASH, an increase of about 15 percent.

“That’s funding we need to fight for,” Donovan said, according to the prepared remarks.

A new, comprehensive Homeless Veterans Registry several years in the making will be rolled out this summer that will help researchers study the causes of homelessness and the forces that keep homeless on the streets, according to Shinseki.

“With this registry, we’ll be able to clearly validate our needs, see where to apply our resources, and then measure whether we did any good,” Shinseki said in remarks prepared for the conference.