‘We Need Peo­ple In The Office’: EPA Admin­is­tra­tor Reveals Just How Few Fed­er­al Employ­ees Show Up For Work

‘We Need People In The Office’: EPA Administrator Reveals Just How Few Federal Employees Show Up For Work

Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency Admin­is­tra­tor (EPA) Lee Zeldin told CNN host Phil Mat­ting­ly Tues­day that accord­ing to a brief he received, as few as 5% of EPA employ­ees showed up to the office on Mon­days and Fri­days.

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump ordered fed­er­al employ­ees to return to the office in an exec­u­tive order signed Jan. 20. Zeldin said that “show­ing up” was impor­tant dur­ing the inter­view on “CNN News­room.” (RELATED: ‘Account­abil­i­ty Is Com­ing’: Joni Ernst Sends Musk’s DOGE ‘A Tril­lion Dol­lars’ Worth Of Ideas To Gut Gov’t Spend­ing)

“I think it’s impor­tant for our team to be show­ing up. I was just briefed yes­ter­day that on Mon­days and Fri­days, the EPA head­quar­ters was aver­ag­ing about 5 to 8% capac­i­ty. I mean, think about how low that num­ber is,” Zeldin told Mat­ting­ly. “We need peo­ple in the office col­lab­o­rat­ing, work­ing togeth­er. We need to be pro­duc­tive and effi­cient. As far as ramp­ing up efforts on the ground, right now in Los Ange­les, EPA has just launched what is the largest wild­fire cleanup in the his­to­ry of the EPA.”

WATCH:

“As of today, the last num­ber that I got, we have over 1,100 peo­ple in the field clean­ing up haz­ardous mate­ri­als,” Zeldin con­tin­ued. “We’re still fin­ish­ing up in west­ern North Car­oli­na, but I think it’s very impor­tant, Phil, that we have our team here in head­quar­ters and in the regions show­ing up, work­ing hard and mak­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic proud.”

The EPA sent the Dai­ly Caller News Foun­da­tion datasheets show­ing occu­pan­cy at the EPA head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. dat­ing from April 2024 to the present when asked for com­ment.

“I went through an entire wing where no door was open and no one was inside,” Zeldin said in a state­ment pro­vid­ed to the DCNF. “I went to oth­er offices where there were lots of peo­ple there, work­ing hard. We’re occu­py­ing a beau­ti­ful, his­toric, mas­sive build­ing. And we shouldn’t have hall­ways that are this qui­et. The Amer­i­can peo­ple pay us to work for them.”

Repub­li­can Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa issued a 60-page report Dec. 5 that cov­ered find­ings from her inves­ti­ga­tion into fed­er­al employ­ee tele­work after send­ing let­ters to 24 gov­ern­ment agen­cies in August of 2023 seek­ing answers on the sev­er­al issues that have arisen due to remote work.

Ernst’s report also detailed the impact vacant office build­ings have on the work­force.

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has also eyed ways to reduce the fed­er­al office space in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. that costs mil­lions of tax­pay­er dol­lars to keep open and oper­a­tional, despite the scarce num­ber of in-per­son fed­er­al work­ers occu­py­ing the build­ings on a dai­ly basis.

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