GovernmentExecutive.com

Federal employees are rarely represented on prime-time TV, but Tina Fey’s sitcom 30 Rock, normally devoted to the backstage lives of the cast and crew of a sketch comedy show, ended its second season Thursday with two executives played by Matthew Broderick and series star Alec Baldwin desperately trying to find a way out of political appointments with the Bush administration.

Baldwin’s character, exiled GE Executive Jack Donaghy, the newly minted "Homeland Security Director of Crisis and Weather Management," brightens up Broderick’s drab existence when he convinces the House Appropriations Committee to provide the department pens with actual caps. "I haven't felt this energized at work since the two weeks when they tried to teach us Farsi," Broderick enthuses.

But their enthusiasm is short-lived. Broderick explains sadly to Baldwin -- who is desperate to flee back to New York -- that "my boss wouldn't let you resign. They don't want people leaving here any more." So the two concoct a scheme of Lurita Doan-esque proportions to get themselves fired. FedBlog doesn’t post spoilers, but needless to say, the end result is a doozy. Check out the full episode on Hulu or the show’s site on NBC.com.

By the way, if you think this is a farfteched plot, consider this: Yesterday President Bush announced he would nominate Thomas D. Cairns to be the new chief human capital officer at Homeland Security. Cairns' previous position? Senior vice president with NBC Universal, responsible for human resources and labor relations. --Alyssa Rosenberg

After years of calling for an alternative to the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, one may have been proposed -- or at least the start of one. As Nextgov reported today, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., introduced the 2008 Homeland Security Network Defense and Accountability Act. generally, the knock against FISMA is that it measures processes not results. For example, good FISMA compliance requires providing training for "employees with significant security responsibilities," but nowhere does it require the agency to test how much the employees learned or retained form the training. With FISMA, agencies aren't sure how good or bad their security vulnerabilities are because FISMA doesn't test for them.

Langevin's bill takes a stab at measuring actual security results, at least for the Homeland Security Department, and, for what some security experts hope, could be governmentwide. The key to the bill is requiring DHS to test if it can successfully defend its networks against known cyberattacks and to conduct vulnerability testing. The bill would have DHS measure what is actually happening on the ground and defending itself against what are real threats.