Sen. Joni Ernst scrutinizes remote work by federal workers after COVID-19

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) wants most civil servants in the federal government to return to their offices or face the music.

President Joe Biden predicted in last year’s State of the Union address that the “vast majority of federal workers” would “once again work in person,” Ernst, the ranking member of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, pointed out.

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However, “a year and a half later … federal offices remain a ghost town,” Ernst wrote in a Sept. 13 New York Post op-ed, which was one part of a broader push. “At least 75% of the office space at most federal agencies’ headquarters is not being used. Taxpayers are picking up the cost of maintaining these mostly empty buildings.”

Ernst declared she has “had enough” and is taking steps to require “‘teleworking’ federal bureaucrats to show up and investigating how many tax dollars bureaucrats phoning it in from far away while getting DC pay are abusing.”

The Iowa senator complained that veterans with mental health issues are being ignored by helplines, passport issuance delays are forcing would-be travelers to cancel trips, and the Social Security Administration is doing a poor job of answering questions from retirees.

Ernst blamed shirking by government workers for some of this. She alleged, “bureaucrats are too busy taking bubble baths during work meetings or playing golf on the taxpayer’s dime.”

That golf shot was grounded in fact, though specific to one case from well before the COVID-19 pandemic made remote working a large part of how America’s government and economy function.

In 2015, the Office of Inspector General issued a report about an unnamed patent examiner who had resigned from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after an anonymous tip led to an internal investigation, which spiraled into an embarrassing external investigation.

The OIG determined that the former examiner “committed at least 730 hours of time and attendance abuse, resulting in the payment of approximately $25,500 for hours not worked in FY 2014 alone.” One of the things that the examiner did while he reported to be working was play golf.

The OIG report also telegraphed what would later become a contentious issue for a good portion of the federal workforce.

“While this report presents a case study of only one individual’s time and attendance abuse at USPTO, it illustrates the difficulties in preventing and detecting such activity in USPTO’s geographically dispersed workforce,” the OIG wrote. “According to public information, as of fiscal year (FY) 2014, over 9,400 USPTO employees were ‘working from home at least one day a week,’ and approximately 5,000 were ‘working from home’ four or five days per week.”

From the federal government’s point of view at the time, this created a huge oversight problem.

“Although the USPTO has touted the benefits of its telework program, such as a reduction in rent, increases in employee satisfaction and retention, and a workforce much less affected by severe weather and traffic, this and other OIG efforts show that these programs also carry risks for abuse,” the report warned.

Reeling federal workers back into offices is something that many officials in Washington, D.C., of both parties have been calling for. For instance, in her third inaugural speech this year, Democratic Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser called for “decisive action by the White House” aimed at getting “most federal workers back to the office most of the time.”

In both public and private sectors, the post-COVID re-officing of workers is proving surprisingly hard to pull off.

One problem with trying to implement this in the private sector is the low unemployment rate of 3.8%, according to the August numbers. In a tight labor market, workers simply have more options.

Companies from Google to Zoom — yes, Zoom — are issuing ultimatums to workers: come in more often or else. Many of those workers are either taking other jobs or quietly daring said companies to cut them loose.

That labor market factor is making a federal back-to-work push harder as well. Many government workers could take jobs in the private sector instead.

Another factor is the age of the federal workforce. The current median age of U.S. workers is 42.3 years old, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Federal workers tend to be several years older and in some agencies much older.

The Office of Personnel Management found that the average age of federal workers was 47.5 years old back in 2017. That average has likely crept up by a year or two since.

That means more members of the federal workforce are eligible for or close to retirement. Call them back in and many will collect a pension instead. An older workforce also has more health problems, and the latest COVID spike has made many skittish.

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Environmentalists, who hold much sway with the Biden administration, may end up siding with the remote federal workers as well. That’s because of the findings of a paper in the September issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“[I]n the United States, switching from working onsite to working from home can reduce up to 58% of work’s carbon footprint,” researchers from Cornell and Microsoft write in the paper’s abstract, “and the impacts of IT usage are negligible, while office energy use and non-commute travel impacts are important.”