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.
Honestly(!), we really could cut … Municipal – State – Federal Guv’ments by a minimum of 50%. We would adjust and adapt just fine.
Yes and we need a fixed budget that takes 3/4 of the voters to approve a raise in the budget.
And a private citizens, accounting and oversight department ran by the citizens and not the politicians.
Citizens place the politicians in their jobs to do just that. Goes with the whole contest shall approve the budget thing. Most citizens aren’t qualified persey.
“per se”: by or in itself or themselves, intrinsically.
Mark, the moment we elect “private citizens” to an “accounting and oversight department,” they will then be politicians…. by definition.
I agree we can cut across the board all the fed and sate waste. I know of state agencies that have people working only 1 day a week in office while they are at their kid’s hockey games and out of town still saying they are working. We have empty buildings and cubicles everywhere. There is so much bloat in government it’s ridiculous.
Yall ready to lose VA benefits, SSI and Medicare?
Yep, let’s do it. Then let’s rebuild ONLY the VA. Make it run and operated by the States, no Fed oversight.
Great idea for ending thise, thank youu!!!
We’re not restructuring VA, we’re getting rid of it entirely along with SSI and Medicare for seniors.
Groan! TI you need to get a new playbook!
Since it appears that most work from home anyway, downsizing the physical structure footprint makes sense. In conjunction with that, eliminate locality pay for ALL remote workers and only pay it to individuals, who are physically in the office every day.
To Dwight: National defense and all its adjunct services like the VA are a federal function and should never be administered by the states.
Taxpayer, I believe the idea is to herd all the loafers back into their loafing cubicles in the office buildings. At least then a supervisor can ask them what they accomplished every 4-hours or so. Downsizing the buildings promotes the work-at-home agenda where they steal us blind.
Typical leftist response.
Instead of actually cutting the waste, go after the programs that people have paid into, earned, and benefit from. No better way to get the average voter outraged, and continue to fund the pet projects.
.
Doesn’t it seem odd that the Anchorage Assembly never seems to have enough funding for snow removal, libraries, police and fire services, but they have an unlimited amount of money for the vagrants? That same dynamic happens at every level of government everywhere in the USA. And, people like you support it.
CBMTTek, thank you for that apt comment. Its uplifting to hear rational discourse.
Nope. Not taking our SSI.
Add also it is nearly impossible to fire government employees at all levels. Guaranteed employment, stellar benefits (essentially for life if one stays in their position), that far exceed most of the private sector, above average pay that is no longer in parity with the private sector. With that said, there are also great employees at all levels who work hard and are dedicated. It seems though that along with serious streamlining, some very needed accountability measures are in order. What is described in the article is a form of stealing.
What are you talking about? Federal employees usually make much less than equivalent t jobs in the private sector. You are very uninformed.
Not so cman, the only group that is compensated less than the private sector is the highly educated those with a professional degree or doctorate…about 10% of the federal workforce. The vast majority of federal workers are in fact compensated at a higher amount than similar private-sector employees.
From the CBO:
Comparison of Total Compensation
As with its components (wages and benefits), total compensation for workers in both sectors differed by varying degrees in 2022 depending on those workers’ educational attainment.
Among workers with a high school diploma or less education, total compensation costs averaged 40 percent more for federal employees than for their private-sector counterparts.
Among workers whose education culminated in a bachelor’s degree, the cost of total compensation averaged 5 percent more for federal workers than for similar workers in the private sector.
Among workers with a professional degree or doctorate, by contrast, total compensation costs were 22 percent lower for federal employees than for similar private-sector employees, on average.
Overall, the federal government would have decreased its spending on total compensation by 5 percent if it had adjusted the cost of pay for its employees to match the compensation of their private-sector counterparts.
‘https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235’
Do you even know any Federal workers?
And, if you do, do you have any idea what their actual pay is?
.
I do know several federal workers, from several different departments, and not a single one would switch to the commercial sector for the pay. Not one.
This has been a long time coming and the federal costs of government have now exceeded the possibility of maintaining the status quo. Our state government is equally bloated and that is exemplified by the outrageous amount of money the goes out of the state coffers every year, with ZERO net gain in the public good. There hasn’t been a tangible result from all this spending in years. As for our local municipal spending, it went off the rails 6 years ago and has only continued into the morass of endless spending on nothing tangible or positive for those of us paying the bills.
Remote does not mean non-productive, unless you’re of the suspicious type. Many of the young people I know who work from home are constantly connected and working far more hours than most of us 65+ types ever did. And, it must be asked, does any of the MRAK staff ever work from home?
Don’t sow seeds of doubt where it’s not justified.
Many of the young people I know especially the ones in the government sector spend more time tending their family and running their sidejob businesses and laugh when asked about receiving paychecks for their government job that they actually show up as little as once a week.
WTD, I agree with you that remote work can be very productive and has given many the ability to contribute, while also taking care of non-job related obligations.
There is one issue that I am concerned about. As you mentioned people are constantly connected and many use laptops for their work. This presents an inherent security issue for the privacy of our data. Some years past a federal employee left his government issued laptop in the car, it was stolen and later a breach was detected, personal information stolen. In the past with everyone in the office, there was tighter control of access, now you have thousands of access points.
You must be speaking about yourself when it comes to them working far more hours than 65+types ever did.
Good luck finding a youngster that isnt glued to a cell phone texting checking facebook or watching stupid youtube videos while on the clock.
Shhhhh! Teachers spend many hours working at home.
The idea that you have to be in an office to be productive is ridiculous. I’ve seen people wasting gobs of time in an office setting. Working from home 50% of the time has allowed me to be way more productive without all of the office distractions. This is just blind hate of federal employees because they’re feds.
So try to make steel or drive a cab from home.
Cman you’re one of the reasons this world is in such a mess.
Working from home is not as efficient as everyone thinks I have had a front row seat on this issue.
Really? You certainly have a high opinion of me that I could be a cause of the world being “a mess.”
Did you actually read the report?
The back-log alone can drive anyone trying to get help up the wall. That being said, simply declaring individuals with a legitimate gripe “haters” allows you once again to claim the moral high ground without having to actually address the issues! How pathetic!
Yep. Hate the very country who gave them everything.
“If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Barack Obama
A president that leftists adore. Good example.
Greg thinks the government gives everyone everything they have. Quite revealing…. since its actually the other way around.
My last job, I couldn’t work from home. Its too hard to get permissions to keep radioactive materials in an apartment
Just shut Anchorage BIA down. Nothing but tits on a boar hog.
Working from home can be very productive and the people that I knew who did that actually worked longer hours than if they had been at the office. Much of it depends on what career path you have. I came out of the world wide web community and it made sense for people in my industry to work from home. There are various computer tools for keeping track of what is really being done and measuring the time and actual files the work is being done on. So whether you are working on a program, doing input, or updating a legacy database, your efforts on your laptop are monitored, and have been for years. And in a world of distributive processing, it makes sense to use this capability as much as possible. There are also zoom conferences which are much more convenient than spending hours on a freeway. Less usage of gasoline and automobile wear is also a plus. So for those jobs that can be done at home it makes perfect sense to allocate them there and save the office space for those jobs that have to be done at the office. It is the 21st century, not the 1940’s. We should take advantage of the technology. As for the abusers, fire them.
They’re feds – you can’t fire them, and if you eliminate their jobs they have first shot at the next federal openings.
Yep, and Alaska’s Land Office has three employees (two of which only work remotely so you have to make an appointment with them if you want to see them). Uuuuhhh, we Alaskan’s are paying for them to stay home and NOT work? That needs to change!