ICYMI: WSJ Ed Board Promotes Ernst’s Telework Transparency Act
WASHINGTON – In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board highlighted Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) oversight of federal telework abuse and her bipartisan Telework Transparency Act, which would bring accountability to the billions wasted on unused space and the bureaucrats failing to serve Americans.
Since August 2023, Ernst has been demanding investigations into 24 federal departments and agencies to determine the impact of telework on their delivery and response times.
The Absent Government Workforce
Fully remote work lives on among federal workers, and it’s costing taxpayers.
By: The Editorial Board
Working from home every day is a fading memory for most Americans, but it’s become a permanent perk of government work, leaving federal offices vacant. Some lawmakers want to give agencies two options: Call your staff back in or sell off wasted space.
Sens. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) and Gary Peters (D., Mich.) are behind the ultimatum. Under their Telework Transparency Act, each federal agency would have to lay out its work-from-home policy and count how many people come into the office. That would give Congress the data it needs to crack down on laggards. The Senate Homeland Security Committee approved the bill by a 12-2 vote last month.
Congressional action is overdue since nearly every agency has let mass absence linger. Not one of the 24 largest agencies used even half of its office space during a three-month period last year, according to the Office of Personnel Management. The Social Security Administration was essentially a ghost town, with 7% of space occupied.
Mass government telework has been costly and sometimes crooked. At the Commerce Department, nearly a quarter of sampled employees continued to claim residence in Washington or other pricey cities after moving to less expensive places, which let them keep a higher pay level. Sen. Ernst has catalogued cases of federal employees golfing, taking bubble baths and even sitting in jail on Uncle Sam’s time.
Yet the Biden Administration has stonewalled attempts to learn the scale of the problem. The nonprofit watchdog Open the Books requested location data for federal workers under the Freedom of Information Act. The Administration returned a document with 281,000 redactions, making it impossible to know how many workers even claim they’re still in the capital.
The bright side is that once the numbers are gathered, an existing law will force agencies to act. The Federal Property Management Reform Act mandates that the executive branch create and carry out annual plans to reduce unused space. Many agencies have dodged this by being vague about how much space they’re wasting, but the Senate bill would shed light into their vacant cubicles.
Federal office space eats up about $7 billion a year, including the cost of leasing, maintenance and operations. Selling even some of that would produce worthwhile savings, and perhaps force an agency or two into running more efficiently.
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