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Kudos to Sen. Joni Ernst for digging deep enough to get the real facts: Years after the pandemic’s end, only 6% of federal employees are reporting in-person to the office, while nearly a third are remote full-time.
Talk about privilege.
“The nation’s capital is a ghost town,” Ernst (R-Iowa) railed, citing an abysmal 12% occupancy rate at DC’s federal office buildings.
No wonder nobody at the Pentagon noticed when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wasn’t around during his secret hospitalization at Walter Reed last December.
“If federal employees can’t be found at their desks, exactly where are they?” the senator asked.
More important: How hard are they working?
How many does the nation actually need?
Cue DOGE, the government efficiency panel co-chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
It’s no surprise the Biden administration never bothered fighting the federal unions to get workers back to work; now the Trump folks will have to push — while also using this info as a guide to trimming bloat.
Last year, Team Biden demanded agencies “substantially increase meaningful in-person work,” but union leaders rebelled, with one insisting that new guidance “does not override collective-bargaining agreements.”
Sorry: Whatever workplace-safety provisions are in those labor deals, they can’t possibly allow this lunacy.
President Franklin Roosevelt — a liberal Democrat — clearly had it right about the danger of collective bargaining power for unions in the federal government: Public-sector unions have proved a bane for federal, state and local governments.
Ernst’s work also makes a strong case for moving entire agencies out of DC: Leasing, operating and maintenance costs for federal office buildings run about $15.7 billion a year, her report notes.
Slimming down the sclerotic and inefficient federal workforce may not come close to closing the federal deficit, but it’ll clearly be a blow for justice that can’t come soon enough.