New leave policy could slow D.C. government

District officials are scrambling to delay a little-noticed administrative change made this year that has the potential to bring government operations to a crawl.

Thanks to a reduction in the number of vacation hours the city’s more than 30,000 employees can carry over into the next year, some longtime workers who have racked up several weeks of unused vacation in their tenure are looking to burn many of those days before they lose them in 2013, according to city staffers. Meanwhile, their supervisors are crunching the numbers and shuffling schedules to figure out how much overtime they’ll need pay others to cover those hours.