Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) officials on Dec. 10 to stop negotiations with federal employee unions on new agreements that would extend costly teleworking rules for five years.
“It has come to my attention that you and Chief Human Capital Officer [Lori] Michalski are allegedly today engaging in discussions with federal employee unions representing HUD to extend the current labor agreement concerning teleworking [to 2029],” Ernst told Acting Deputy HUD Secretary Elizabeth de León Bhargava.
A spokesman for Bhargava did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
“Unsurprisingly, individuals with direct knowledge of the negotiations tell me telework and remote work privileges are the top priority for the union,” Ernst told Bhargava.
“If true, these allegations are damning and call into question your commitment to an orderly transfer of power from the Biden administration to the Trump administration.
“Therefore, I call on you to cease any negotiations, bargaining, or discussions with any federal employee union representing HUD employees until the Trump administration takes office.”
Separately, Ernst told The Epoch Times that she thinks Biden officials are trying “at the eleventh hour” to put in place “another cushy telework agreement with federal employees” that protects them for the entirety of the second Trump term in the Oval Office.
“Spending its final days fighting for bureaucrats not to do their job is wrong on every level but a fitting end for this administration,” Ernst said. “As chair of the Senate DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] Caucus, I will be working to stop this lunacy and get Washington back to work.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the main union representing HUD workers. The HUD AFGE chapter president, Holly Salamido, did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Reducing or eliminating teleworking—conducting official business from a location other than a federal worker’s assigned duty station—is a priority of President-elect Donald Trump, who asked entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to organize DOGE to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
Teleworking was a prominent part of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
Departments and agencies, however, have continued to allow employees to telework virtually without supervision or processes to confirm that work that taxpayers pay for is actually being performed.
She released a report last week pointing to investigations by 14 federal inspectors-general who found widespread teleworking abuses.
“Just 3 percent of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the pandemic. Today, 6 percent of workers report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are entirely remote.
“Most federal employees are eligible to telework and 90 percent of those are. Some come to the office as infrequently as once a week.”
Ernst said Biden administration officials’ redacting of the locations of more than 281,000 rank-and-file federal employees has made it difficult to determine the exact extent of teleworking abuse.
There are 2.2 million career federal employees, most of whom are covered by labor agreements negotiated with AFGE and other federal unions.
Ernst said many problems have intensified because of teleworking abuses, including failure to respond to taxpayer calls and emails, delays in processing tax returns and other forms, and service backlogs that hurt businesses, especially small ones that generate most new jobs in the country.
The Senate DOGE Caucus report also said there is substantial evidence that many teleworking feds are also receiving higher salaries than they would otherwise receive by claiming to be working in regions with “locality pay” rates that are more generous.
“My audits are finding as many as 23 to 68 percent of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay,” Ernst said in the report.
“Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office and one ’temporary' teleworker collected higher locality pay for nearly a decade.”
The Senate DOGE Caucus includes Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), and James Lankford (R-Okla.).
On the House side, Reps. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) are co-chairmen of the House DOGE Caucus, which also includes 36 other GOP representatives.
The first House Democrat to join the DOGE caucus was Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who said “streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue.”
