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Nice Work If You Can Get It? What a New Report Reveals About Federal Employees
Kartina Trinko | The Daily Signal
Bring on the DOGE revolution.
An explosive new report from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who chairs the Senate DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) Caucus, notes that fewer than 1 of out every 10 federal employees (6%) work in an office full time, citing an April survey.
“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!” posted Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur leading DOGE with fellow billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, in response to the report. “Almost no one.”
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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, only 3% of federal government workers did remote work. Now, an astonishing 30% never come into the office, according to an April survey from Federal News Network.
Two-thirds of federal employees alternate between working at home and in the office—even as taxpayers remain on the hook for insanely expensive office building costs.
An August report from the Office of Management and Budget showed different numbers than the April survey, however. The OMB report found that 54% of civilian federal employees worked fully on-site, and that employees eligible for telework spent on average 61% of their work hours on site.
The “Out of Office” report details reasons for concern about the overall productivity of federal employees. Just consider these clear failures by various government agencies:
- 74% of calls to the Department of Education during the recent FAFSA debacle, with parents and students having questions about the new financial-aid application, were not answered, according to the Government Accountability Office.
- An Indiana man employed by the Social Security Administration was paid from 2019 to 2022 as a full-time teleworking employee “when in reality he was earning income working as a home inspector for his personal business.” (His mother and wife used his computer to send emails to make it look like he was working.)
- Don’t expect to get any customer service from the IRS. Only two of the 76 local IRS offices picked up their phones to answer questions, according to a July 2024 report.
Meanwhile, veterans in Atlanta faced significant hurdles to getting responses to their mental health calls. Out of the roughly 22,000 calls placed over 12 months in the 2022-2023 period, about 7,200 weren’t answered, according to a whistleblower cited in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
At about the same time, in March 2022, an employee at the Atlanta Veteran Affairs Medical Center’s community care office decided to post on social media about taking a bubble bath while “working.”
“The Instagram story shows him in a bathtub, legs kicked up with a federal government-issue laptop propped on the ledge. The computer is open to a March 17 staff meeting and the post’s caption reads, ‘My office for the next hour,’” reported WSB-TV, an Atlanta ABC affiliate.
What a workplace.
Sure, federal employees in many roles can be productive at home. But the report from Ernst, an Iowa Republican, raises serious questions about whether there is any real culture of accountability at federal agencies. Occasional work from home is a privilege—and federal agencies should be careful to limit it to good employees and regularly be tracking performance and productivity metrics.
Yet the IRS allowed 138 poor performers to work remotely, despite its own policy prohibiting that.
Ernst also recommends the commonsense policy of agencies avoiding blanket policies regarding telework, and allowing managers and supervisors to make those calls.
There’s also questions about just how occasional the work from home is. “[P]ublic reporting indicates telework-eligible managers and supervisors at the USDA’s D.C. headquarters have been required to be in the office five days per two-week pay period—which is less than three days a week—since September 10, 2023,” states the Ernst report. Coming in only half the time is wildly different from coming in, say, 70% to 80% of the time.
Meanwhile, over at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 90% of employees only have to show up one day a week to work.
At the same time that federal employees are getting able to dodge horrific D.C. traffic and work from their comfort of their homes, taxpayers continue to fund huge, underutilized offices.
“Not a single headquarters of a major government agency or department in the nation’s capital is even half full. Yet it’s costing $8 billion every year to maintain or lease government office buildings. Another $7.7 billion is being expended annually for the energy to keep them running. And billions more are being spent buying brand-new furnishings for the largely abandoned offices inside them,” states the report.
That’s insanity.
To realize just how ludicrous that is, consider that it costs “more than $182,000 per employee a year to cover operating and maintenance expenses at the Department of Labor headquarters,” according to the report.
“On an average day, fewer than 500 employees are reporting to work at the building, which costs nearly $60 million a year to rent, operate, and maintain.”
Say, maybe that money could be used to help the hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida? Or to repair crumbling roads? Or, well, a thousand other things?
Nor is that the only outrageous expense the report identified.
The federal government pays employees based on localities they work in. It’s a good-faith effort to recognize that different areas have different costs of living.
But there’s reason to believe a significant portion of government employees are getting paid the salaries for a different area than the one they actually live in. Ernst’s audits “are finding as many as [23% to 68%] of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay.”
Nice work if you can get it.
Clearly, there is room for reform here. Ernst’s report offers a slew of practical suggestions, from moving more federal work outside of the Washington, D.C., area to tracking, as some private employers do, workers’ time spent on their work laptops and in offices.
I’d also suggest that local D.C., Virginia, and Maryland governments should immediately invest in a dramatic expansion of the local highways. In-person work and collaboration is valuable, but spending time parked on a highway, as D.C. area drivers do during commute hours, is not. The region’s myopic focus on public transit and green fantasies has led to a situation where people regularly miss time with their families and friends just because local officials won’t build enough lanes and bridges to keep up with the demand.
Meanwhile, government agencies need to provide some accountability to taxpayers.
Right now, the average salary for government employees is $106,000, according to Zip Recruiter. (It’s even higher in Washington, D.C.: $120,000.) The average American salary is $59,000.
“One of the first things that I think you’ll see is a demand from the new administration, from all of us in Congress, [that] the federal workers, return to their desks,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday, according to the New York Post.
Musk and Ramaswamy signaled in a November column for The Wall Street Journal that they would oppose allowing federal employees to work remotely. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home,” the DOGE duo wrote.
When it comes to federal employees, the taxpayers are the bosses—and the taxpayers elected Donald Trump, whose allies are signaling it’s a new day in Washington for federal employees. It’s about time.
SOURCE: THE DAILY SIGNAL
