So, does this help or hurt the bureaucrats from enacting burdensome regulations on Americans?
They’re being remote-ly professional.
A paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily, a report from Sen. Joni Ernst’s office found.
Ernst (R-Iowa), who has long crusaded against the rise in remote federal work, is planning to reveal the fruits of her office’s year and a half inquiry to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy during their visit to the Capitol Thursday.
“The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12[%],” Ernst wrote in the blistering report. “If federal employees can’t be found at their desks, exactly where are they?”
How many can we promote to customer? If they do not want to do their jobs, well, it’s time to terminate. And this goes with supervisors all the way up the food chain who fail to make the employees come in. You can’t seriously hold them accountable if you rarely see the employees and cannot watch them work.
The Hawkeye State senator concluded that “taxpayers are getting ripped off” and claimed that her constituents were troubled by the lack of responsiveness from various government entities such as the Social Security Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, and more
The report rattled through a handful of anecdotes to describe the lack of competence from the federal government.
She cited an example of a whistleblower report at the FDA that was unread for months warning about bacteria spreading in baby formula, which ultimately culminated in a national shortage back in 2022.
We’re forcibly having money taken from our paychecks to cover the operations of the federal government and the employees aren’t providing the service we’re forcibly paying for.
To further her point about taxpayers “getting ripped off,” Ernst cited findings that some federal workers are cashing in on higher pay rates from localities where they are not actually working.
“My audits are finding as many as 23[%] to 68[%] of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay,” her report found. “Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office and one ‘temporary’ teleworker collected higher locality pay for nearly a decade.”
That seems like a little charge called “defrauding the federal government.” Perhaps it’s time to start prosecuting. After terminating.
If employees are as productive working from home as they are in the office, then it’s actually beneficial to have them work from home: less office space is needed, smaller parking lots, less fossil fuel burned, less consumption of all of the consumables of offices, such as coffee and cleaning supplies.
But the obvious question becomes: are they as productive? Major employers like Comcast have determined that they are not, and that’s why they’ve demanded workers to be in the office full-time. Unlike the government, which seems to care less about productivity, private corporations do, and that’s why we’re seeing demands for workers to return to the office.
“it’s actually beneficial to have them work from home: less office space is needed, smaller parking lots, less fossil fuel burned, less consumption of all of the consumables of offices, such as coffee and cleaning supplies.”
Except we, the taxpayers already own or have leases on the office properties and are on the hook for all those expenses whether or not they work from home or the office. Everybody knows (or should know) that people working from home with few exceptions are less motivated, less disciplined and much less inclined toward peak performance without distractions and interruptions than in the office. When every day is “casual Friday” the work all becomes sloppy.
Again, you are talking about the federal workforce where Performance was never going to happen no matter where they worked. Most of the jobs that have measurable objectives are already farmed out to contractors. For people who work answering the phone at the VA or IRS, it doesn’t matter to the customer if the call center is in Washington DC or someone’s kitchen.
I’m not arguing against your main point, only pointing out that the federal workforce was never all that productive even before COVID. The flip side of that is, “do you really want a more productive federal government”? Workers who stay home and watch porn all day are spending less of your money than the same employee going into the office pretending to “work” there.
The right solution is massive blanket cuts to the workforce, including whole agencies and to the power those agencies have. Don’t hold your breath.
Jared Kushners father was indicted for not knowing the rules. He had to be pardoned.
In the case of these federal workers breaking the law, what needs to happen is that the supervisors need to be prosecuted for allowing their underlings to defraud the government by working 2000 miles away and collecting huge paychecks while living in an area that would require them to be paid less.
This is a reality for Corporations. I know for a fact that Target pays its grunts in large cities much more than they pay the grunts in small, flyover country. This is what the feds are doing.
Arrest, try and convict these managers (WHO ARE IGNORANT OF THE LAW) for the same things that the DOJ is going after FLYNN, KUSHNER and others.
Flynn was crushed for meeting with a Russian ambassador before taking office. It is the same with Kushner meeting with people before having the official capacity to do so. They broke the law…technically…and were POUNDED for it by the lawfare left. So, pound these supervisors for NOT KNOWING THE LAW and breaking it by allowing their workers to embezzle funds from the government.
Simple really. Start pounding these supervisors, and stuff will get cleaned up fast.
My friends wife worked for nearly 20 years for Target. She was employee of the year for her store several times. A stellar worker, who was fired for shop lifting. What she did was take broken stuff, package it up and put it on sale on an end cap at a 60 percent discounted price. SHE was doing this at the behest of the store manager. The store was given credit for this stuff and told not to ship it back. The store manager broke the rules by then selling it to make even more money and my friends wife was told to do this. She took the fall. Not the store manager who broke the rules by telling her to do this.
The store manager simply said…I had no idea she was doing this…..She was fired on the spot and escorted out of the store in handcuffs by the police. Seriously. I have lost every ounce of respect for Target because of this bullshit.
that is why I say…go after the stupidvisors and bosses and not the workers….get at the root of the problem by addressing 1000 workers instead of a 100k or 1 million.
Charles Kushner (Ivanka’s daddy-in-law) hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, had the encounter videotaped which was sent to his sister to dissuade the brother-in-law from testifying against Charles.
Overall, Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. He was sentenced to two years. He was prosecuted by Chris Christie (R-NJ) and George W Bush’s DOJ. Kushner, then a Democrat, had illegally donated to Democratic campaigns, according to George W Bush’s FEC and DOJ.
In 2017 Michael Flynn (yay! Flynn) resigned from the Trump (R-FL/NY) Administration after it was revealed he had lied to VP Mike Pence (R-IN) booo! Pence) about Flynn’s interactions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Former Lt General Flynn was forced out of the military in 2014.
Another Rimjob scoop of yesterday’s news.
Like people were unaware of all of this.
Kushner served his time.
Flynn served his time.
Hunter never served a day.
Fuck off, fatso. You’re irrelevant.
Bwaha! Lolgfy Loser!
MAGA47 Comin’ to getcha!
MethMouth,
I was correcting the previous commenter’s disinformation. Get used to it, Pissant.
Fuck off, mama’s boy. You’re less than irrelevant.
Sure, sure blame others.
If it upset you, Rimjob, my job here is done.
Bwaha! Lolgfy Loser!
MAGA47 CominTaGitCha!
There is a lot to unpack here. First, the 6% figure is extremely misleading. For one thing, 2/3rds of the federal workforce are uniformed military people and 85% of them show up in person every day. The story is true in many regards, just not accurate.
There is no doubt that the federal workforce is a boated, inefficient bureaucracy that could accept massive cuts to operating costs with little impact on actual services performed. All those inefficiencies were deliberate choices by Congress and Congress has always had the power to change it. That change needs to come in the form of not just severely reducing the budgets of those many offices, but to erase whole departments. The Dep of Education has been a favorite pinata for conservatives since the Reagan administration, but it is still there despite making zero measurable benefit to education in America in all its life. The Voice of America (VOA) is still operating and churning out stories for international radio offices despite the cold war having ended over 30 years ago and all those targeted countries have radio stations of their own providing nearly the same content.
Most of the federal workforce are required to have telework agreements in place, even if they cannot use them. This is done as part of the continuity of government program so that if a place like the Pentagon ever gets hit by a commercial passenger jet (not like that would ever happen), the employees could get a phone call or Text announcement and work from home while things get sorted out.
Sadly, the DOGE group will itself prove to be ineffective at performing its intended purpose. Its primary virtue is that their employees are expected to work for free (violation of federal labor laws, but if they aren’t federal employees in the first place, those laws don’t apply to them), and they will eventually go away (as if anything ever goes away in DC).
Republican administrations typically grant blanket immunity to the Defense Department, even though they are every bit as much of a bloated swampy bureaucracy as the rest of the government. They have the only virtue of being so massively overstaffed that they can be called on in a moment’s notice to scrape together a fairly competent task force to accomplish almost anything from running operation Warp Speed, to invading small countries, to providing disaster relief on the other side of the planet. The establishment is fighting so hard against the Hegseth nomination because the Pentagon has about a trillion dollar a year budget and control over all that money is too important to the establishment to place into the hands of a “reformer”.
From my own desk, I have long been an advocate that the US military could afford to be half the size it is now and suffer no loss of readiness or ability to perform its primary missions. I have also mentioned more than once that since the US military has no interest in defending the USA, there is no need to have them at all.
As it is, democratic party administrations use the defense budget as a slush fund to pay off connected friends with no-bid contracts, high payed executive jobs at the Pentagon, and to funnel a host of payoffs to foreign nations.
It is worth noting, that as the Biden/Harris/God-knows-who lame duck administration draws to an end, they are putting in place long term labor agreements with unions to tie the hands of the Trump administration when it comes to reducing the federal labor pool, requiring them to work at the office, or to actually live in the places where they draw locality pay.
Another painful reality about the work from home federal workforce is that they were never all that productive when they were in their offices full time either. Most of the federal workforce does not have any rational metrics to measure employee productivity.
The discussion in the article misses the point that telework is just a more efficient way to be inefficient. As long as Congress is pleased to continue to grow the size and authority of government, this will get worse, not better.
Commenter: democratic party administrations use the defense budget as a slush fund to pay off connected friends with no-bid contracts, high paid executive jobs at the Pentagon, and to funnel a host of payoffs to foreign nations
That NEVER happens during Republicun reigns! That’s why the Pentagon budget drops drastically under Republicun administrations!!
GOPers have long bitched and whined that Democrats don’t support the military. Now, MAGAnazis are the new pacifists! Will they cut the defense budget in half as suggested?
Commenter typed: I have also mentioned more than once that since the US military has no interest in defending the USA, there is no need to have them at all.
That would save at least a trillion dollars a year!!! The DOGE-boyz (Ramiswami and Musk) have already proposed discontinuing Veterans healthcare and other benefits.
BTW, 70% of our national debt is owed to…. Americans!! Only 30% is owed to other nations.