Bureaucrats Ordered to Go Back to Work

The offices where Washington D.C.’s bureaucrats work were largely empty on Monday, January 20, 2025, as Donald Trump was inaugurated as U.S. President for the second time.

But they weren’t empty for the inauguration. Because that Monday coincided with the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal holiday, most U.S. government employees had a paid day off work.

But then, many of the federal government’s buildings continued to sit empty on Tuesday, January 21, and again on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Truth be told, many of the office buildings that occupy prime real estate in the District of Columbia have sat mostly empty for nearly five years now. They emptied with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Federal bureaucrats exploited advances in computing technology that allowed them to work from home during the national emergency.

During that time, the bureaucrats discovered they greatly liked working from home. So much so that even after President Biden declared the pandemic a national emergency on April 11, 2023, they kept doing it. It’s become quite a popular perk among the ranks of the U.S. government’s civilian employees.

A Popular and Costly Perk

Senator Joni Ernst issued a report on the cost to taxpayers of the bureaucrats’ latest addition to their benefits. Here are some excerpts of her report with its major takeaways:

• Just three percent of the federal workforce teleworked on a daily basis before the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the temporary pandemic-era practice is a presumed public employee perk. Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.
• Some bureaucrats are padding their paychecks by claiming to be working in areas with higher pay rates while actually living elsewhere. My audits are finding as many as 23 to 68 percent of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay.
• Billions of dollars are being spent heating, cooling, and maintaining largely empty buildings. Billions more is being wasted on new office furniture. Meanwhile, getting rid of just 23 of the government’s many underutilized buildings and properties will save taxpayers more than $1 billion. This is a small fraction of potential savings if other unused space was sold off.

What Whistleblowers Are Saying

Ernst included several anecdotes from whistleblowers to accompany her findings. Here’s one for the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

A whistleblower who is a current supervisor within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) informs me “the vast majority of USDA employees are not working in person. On the occasions I have gone to USDA headquarters in Washington, D.C., it resembles a ghost town. Hallways are mostly empty, and offices are unoccupied.” This whistleblower says, “remote work and telework employees are often unreachable and do not respond to simple email questions for hours. This leads to inefficiency in completing tasks in a timely manner and to delays in clearing documents and reports due to the inability to reach colleagues.”

Here’s another from a government employee who requested anonymity because they are among the very few showing up at the office:

A federal employee who wished to remain anonymous says “he is one of few who reports to the Washington, D.C., office, and contractors have commented to him about the whereabouts of agency employees.” He observes, “it’s all empty around me. I’m the only person within three rows where I sit. It doesn’t look good.”

Here’s a final note about the Department of Veterans Affairs, highlighting a bureaucrat behaving poorly:

When a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) manager posted a picture of himself “working” from a bubble bath on social media, his frustrated coworkers became whistleblowers. One of which stated, “If you think that this is not a big deal then what is a big deal? Is it a big deal when a veteran dies?” That’s right, the employees of the agency turned in their own manager for abusing telework.

To Americans who work in the real world, it’s obvious the bureaucrats’ continuing absence from the office cannot be sustained. It’s no accident that one of President Trump’s first-day executive orders was directed at teleworking bureaucrats. On January 23, the government’s Office of Personnel Management ordered all federal agencies to comply with that executive order within 30 days.

By then, it will have been nearly five full years since federal bureaucrats last reported to work at their offices.