Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, chair the Senate’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) Caucus, publicized a new report that shows that as little as 6% of federal employees work in a federal office full time. Nearly one-third of non-military federal workers never show up at an office but are teleworking from home.
Before the Covid pandemic, the number of teleworking federal workers was about 3%, the report shows.
“Bureaucrats have been found in a bubble bath, on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayers’ time. Members of President Biden’s own cabinet claimed to be on the clock while being out of office and unreachable,” the report says in the introduction. “Most federal employees are eligible to telework and 90 percent of those are. Some come to the office as infrequently as once a week. The Biden administration redacted the locations of over 281,000 rank-and-file federal employees.”
DOGE is an initiative of the incoming Trump Administration, led by entrepreneurs Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, with the intention of ferreting out government waste, fraud and abuse.
“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 Musk on X, the social media site of which he is majority owner. “Almost no one.”
With federal office space at about 12%, the cost of heating and maintaining these empty buildings is a significant waste.
In the Senate, Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan is a member of the DOGE Caucus.
“Excited to be an original member of the Senate @DOGE Caucus. One big issue I’m focused on in the caucus is permitting reform and litigation abuse that makes it impossible to build things in America – roads, bridges, ports, gold mines. This issue unites so many. There is no reason it should take nearly 8 years to permit a bridge, up to 19 years to permit a road, and 20 years to permit a gold mine in Alaska, all while costing millions in fees just to meet the permitting requirements. No other country does this!” Sullivan said on X.
The Senate DOGE report said, in part:
- 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.
Click here to view the full report and here to view a summary.
