They are conducting their professional activities remotely.
While only 6% of the federal workforce “reports in person full-time,” approximately one-third of federal employees work remotely full-time. A report from the office of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) found that only 3% of people work from home every day.
Ernst, who has long opposed increased remote federal work, will reveal the results of a year-and-a-half investigation by his office to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-heads of the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), during the visit. It’s a plan. Thursday at the Capitol.
“The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with an average occupancy rate of 12(%) for government buildings,” Ernst wrote in a scathing report. “If you can’t find a federal employee at their desk, where exactly are they?”
Iowa Republicans in particular have criticized President Biden’s tendency to leave the White House for vacations at home in Delaware or with wealthy donors.
“President Biden is setting an example. “He has been away for 532 days over the past three and a half years, which is about 40 percent of the time he is expected to be in the Oval Office,” she scolded.
Her office worked with Open the Books, a nonprofit group that advocates government transparency for taxpayers and argues that the Biden administration has fixed “the workplace of more than 281,000 regular federal employees.”
According to her report, the cost of renting and maintaining federal office buildings and maintaining them amounts to about $15.7 billion annually.
Meanwhile, according to her report, the government owns about 7,697 vacant buildings and 2,265 partially vacant buildings, with rental and maintenance costs for underutilized space amounting to about $15 million.
hit to government services
State Senator Hawkeye concluded that “taxpayers are being scammed” and claimed his constituents are suffering due to a lack of response from various government agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration.
The report is peppered with several anecdotes illustrating the federal government’s lack of capacity.
She cited the example of a whistleblower report at the FDA that went unread for months. The report warns of bacteria spreading in infant formula, ultimately leading to a nationwide shortage in 2022.
Another case cited in the report was when an Atlanta Department of Veterans Affairs administrator took a photo of himself “at work” while taking a bubble bath, sparking outrage at the time.
“If you think this is no big deal, what’s the big deal? “Is it a big deal if a veteran dies?” One of his colleagues later became angry, according to the report.
“He is one of the few people who reports to the Washington, D.C. office, and contractors have mentioned the whereabouts of agency employees to him,” one federal employee lamented, according to the report.
inadequate salary increase
To further emphasize that taxpayers are “being ripped off,” Ernst cited research showing that some federal employees are receiving higher salaries in locations where they do not actually work.
“My audit found that as many as 23(%) to 68(%) of remote employees at some agencies were receiving incorrect local pay and receiving pay raises,” her report said. “Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from the office, and one ‘temporary’ remote worker has been earning higher local salaries for almost a decade.”
According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, more than 25% of federal remote workers live more than 50 miles from their workplace each day.
“Government salaries are determined in part by the location of an employee’s official workplace. “There are 58 local pay regions where base pay for federal employees is adjusted to take into account the cost of living in each region,” the report noted.
Labor union resistance
Ernst criticized federal workers’ unions for hindering efforts to force workers to report to work in the field.
Last year, the Biden administration called on agencies to “significantly increase meaningful face-to-face work.”
at a federal office,” but some union officials ignored this, the report said.
“The administration’s new guidance on agency work environments does not override the collective bargaining agreements in effect at agencies where we represent frontline employees,” said Tony Reardon, national president of the Treasury Employees Union, at the time.
“This means that for the majority of our members, access to working from home (depending on institution and job type) will remain the same.”
solution
To rectify the situation, Ernst decentralized the federal workforce across the country, enacted a “use it or lose it” approach to federal assets, tied permissions for remote work to performance, and built a virtual private network (VPN)-based It was suggested to monitor the location. Among other steps.
Last month, Ernst was announced as chairman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which will work with non-governmental organizations led by Musk and Ramaswamy to tackle government bloat and inefficiencies.
On Thursday, the Senate Governors’ Caucus is scheduled to hold its first meeting to coincide with Musk and Ramaswami’s visit to the Capitol.