At least 75 percent of the available office space for most federal department and agency headquarters in and near the nation’s capital is sitting empty and unused—while still costing taxpayer money for maintenance, cleaning, and climate control—because so many government employees work from home.
In response, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is calling on 24 inspectors general (IG) to figure out how much the vacant space costs their agencies and how much of it should be sold off or have leases canceled. The Iowa Republican also wants the IGs to determine how much slower government response times have become as a result of mass teleworking.
The IGs were created by Congress in 1978 and are dedicated to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. They are appointed by the president, with Senate confirmation, and report to Congress.
“Americans are being put on hold while too many federal employees are phoning it in,” Ms. Ernst stated, expressing frustration in a statement made available to The Epoch Times. She says it’s time for the federal government to be held accountable for the rising costs of teleworking by its workforce.
Teleworking was used by a small slice of the 2.1 million career civil service employees working for the federal government prior to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans since January 2020. But the vast majority of federal workers began teleworking during the pandemic, and most of them in the Washington area are still doing so.
The Iowa Republican points to the costs of unused office space and to the growing reports of federal workers being paid while not performing their duties at home or in their offices as evidence of tax dollars going to waste as a result.
But teleworking is far from an unmixed blessing, according to Ms. Ernst.
“Remote work provides federal agencies with an opportunity to reduce costs for taxpayers and increase the ability to recruit and retain talent for public service. However, such arrangements only work for taxpayers when telework does not (1) harm the agencies’ ability to achieve their mission, (2) adversely impact the timely delivery of quality services, or (3) impede or impair the management of the federal workforce and taxpayer money,” she said in the statement.
A Commerce Department IG analysis, Ms. Ernst said in the letter, found that “lax oversight and inadequate internal controls of telework has cost millions of dollars for unpaid work and contributed to a patent application backlog. After a tipster called out a patent examiner who ‘never shows up to work’ and whose work is ‘garbage,’ it was determined the employee was paid $25,000 for 730 hours not worked. He was instead playing golf, shooting pool, and going to happy hour.”
A subsequent review of USPTO teleworking reported that the agency failed to receive millions of dollars in work product that would contribute significantly to reducing the current patent application backlog by 7,530 cases, she pointed out.
Getting to all of the facts about the benefits and costs of federal teleworking won’t be easy for the 24 IGs. That’s partly because the Biden administration is refusing to make public the work locations of 281,656 government employees in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watchdog that documents spending at all levels of government across America.
The FOIA was submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages the federal workforce at the direction of the president. A White House spokesman didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for an explanation of why the information is being withheld.
“If government services and response times seem to be slow or failing, you’re not imagining it. Workers are literally phoning it in, and too often, we don’t know from where or why. We have previously reported on the Office of Personnel Management’s refusal to reveal the work locations of over a quarter million federal employees,” OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski told The Epoch Times.
“These are not folks in the intelligence apparatus, they come from the myriad alphabet-soup agencies like Health and Human Services, the IRS, the Small Business Administration, and many more. Our auditors estimate it’s $36 billion worth of salary and bonus compensation to employees we cannot meaningfully hold accountable,” he said.
“We don’t know who they are, what they do, whether they are, in fact, working 40 hours, or from where they’re phoning it in.”
The average salary paid to employees of 109 federal departments and agencies was more than $100,000 annually. In addition to the high salaries, federal workers also get 44 days of paid time off annually after working three years for the federal government, according to OpenTheBooks.com.
