Only 6% of federal employees work from an office full-time, and a third are fully remote. And some aren’t actually working when they “work from home,” a Senate investigation found.
“Washington is still operating as if it’s March 2020,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R‑IA), the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus and the report’s author, wrote.
“Just three percent of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, six percent of workers report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are entirely remote,” the report states.
Government office buildings have an occupancy rate of only 12%, yet the government spends $16 billion a year to operate them. Even the head of the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, works from home in Missouri.
“You may be more likely to see a ghost than a bureaucrat haunting the halls of some government buildings in Washington, D.C. these days,” Ernst continued.
Office buildings are so empty that the water supply at the office of the Environmental Protection Agency — which is tasked with ensuring clean drinking water — was left stagnant for so long that it developed dangerous bacteria, according to the audit. But unions have demanded that full individual workstations for each employee be maintained for the rare occasions they are used, in addition to demanding that members be allowed to work from home.
Elon Musk, co-chair of the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, has signaled that federal employees should have to work from the office — and those who don’t want to can quit, resulting in a leaner government.
President Joe Biden used his 2022 State of the Union to say that federal employees must return to the office, and his chief of staff repeatedly demanded that cabinet officials follow through because “there’s no substitute for face-to-face.” Yet the Biden administration signed a contract, in the waning days of his presidency, with the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) union locking them into telework through 2029.
That’s despite the fact that administration just completed a $120 million office renovation on a massive SSA headquarters that is 91% unused. One SSA employee ran a personal home inspection business for three years while supposedly doing his job from home, having his mother occasionally send emails from his computer
“Apparently, the president of a public employees union, not the President of the United States, is currently deciding personnel policy for the U.S government,” Ernst wrote.
Federal employees get paid more when their offices are in high cost-of-living areas. But at some agencies, up to 80% of teleworking employees now live in lower cost-of-living areas, while still collecting the higher pay. Some agency heads have told Congress that they have implemented policies requiring employees to come to work a few days per pay period, but reports from the ground suggest that’s not actually enforced.
More than 90% of Department of Housing and Urban Development employees work from home and are not required to come to the office more than once a week. One HUD employee — a former union president — allegedly got a DUI while supposedly working from home. Remote work enabled another woman to hold two six-figure government jobs at the same time, with each employer thinking she was working full-time.
The Patent and Trade Office considers itself a pioneer in teleworking, having widely done so since the 1990s. But in one nine-month period, it paid at least $8.8 million in hourly wages that “teleworking” employees didn’t actually work, its inspector general found.
The federal government doesn’t have widespread systems monitoring whether employees log in to their computers, or from where, each day, Ernst said. When the Department of Health and Human Services did look at employees’ computer logins, it found that up to 30% of “teleworkers” on any given day were not actually working during the COVID pandemic, when the health department was presumably needed.
The VA’s website advertises to prospective employees: “At VA, you can break away from the traditional 9 to 5, 40-hour workweek without sacrificing the opportunities and benefits that come with job security.” Despite an epidemic of veteran suicides, one-third of calls to a mental health hotline for veterans went unanswered in Atlanta, with “no sense of urgency.” Therapists didn’t show up for appointments with veterans, while the Veterans Affairs manager responsible for scheduling the appointments posted a photo online showing he was “working” from a bubble bath.
The report said that only two of 76 local offices actually picked up the phone at the IRS, whose inspector general said “maximizing telework in response to the pandemic … may have contributed to declines in productivity.” The Biden administration has also made a massive number of new hires at the IRS, even though it’s not clear the existing employees are working to their potential.
Ernst said, “If bureaucrats don’t want to return to work, make their wish come true.”
She proposed that the government be required to sell off any real estate that is not being fully used, and that agencies should also be relocated across the country to lower-cost areas that have a connection to the work being done—with the Department of Agriculture, for example, being in farm country. The Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement (SWAMP) Act, and several other pieces of proposed legislation, would do that.