Ernst Unveils Plan to Slash Federal Bureaucracy and End Telework Abuse
WASHINGTON – Today, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Chair and Founder of the Senate DOGE Caucus, unveiled a detailed report showing how federal bureaucrats have abused telework and locality pay to fleece taxpayers out of billions of dollars.
Based off her investigations, Ernst’s report lays out a roadmap for fixing the broken federal workforce that she will work to implement with the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“For years, I have been tracking down bureaucrats relaxing in bubble baths, playing golf, getting arrested, and doing just about everything besides their job,”said Ernst. “It would almost be funny if it wasn’t happening on the taxpayers’ dime and at the expense of veterans, seniors, small business owners, and Americans in need of competent service from government agencies. Federal employees need to return to work, but if they don’t want to, I will make their wish come true.”
Senator Ernst exposed a chronically absent federal workforce where:
- Ninety percent of federal employees telework;
- Pre-COVID this number was 3%;
- Just 6% of workers report in-person on a full-time basis;
- Nearly 33% of federal employees are entirely remote;
- Depending on the agency, 23-68% of surveyed teleworking bureaucrats are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay;
- Some employees lived more than 2,000 miles from their office;
- Not a single headquarters of a major agency in Washington is even half-full;
- Average occupancy is just 12%;
- Maintaining and leasing government office buildings costs more than $8 billion every year; and
- Another $7.7 billion is spent on the energy to keep the buildings running.
The report details how to make telework work for taxpayers by:
- Draining the swamp and relocating the federal workforce;
- Downsizing the federal government by implementing a “use it or lose it” approach to government real estate; and
- Tracking individual employee productivity and tying it to their privilege to telework.
Click here to view the full report and here to view a summary.
Background:
Iowans elected Senator Ernst with a mandate to cut Washington’s pork and make ‘em squeal. Her ten years of “Squeal Awards” exposing waste, fraud, and abuse and countering them with specific oversight and legislative solutions lay out the perfect way to carry out these plans in Congress.
In August 2023, Ernst demanded investigations into 24 federal departments and agencies to determine the impact of telework on the delivery and response times of services. Following her advocacy, the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Inspector General responded to her request and is currently considering an audit to examine whether GSA has appropriately evaluated its physical space needs and utilization. A few months later, the GSA announced it would downsize 3.5 million square feet of federal buildings, which would save taxpayers over $1 billion.
In December 2024, Ernst exposed that, almost four years after COVID-19 temporarily closed federal buildings, not a single government agency is occupying even half their office space and called on Biden’s bureaucrats to deck the agency halls with federal workers or sell off unused facilities.
Ernst recently hand delivered a report to Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and President Trump that serves as a roadmap to eliminate more than $2 trillion in waste.
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