Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced workers across the country to stay home, President Joe Biden is leaving federal offices empty with no structure for post-pandemic work schedules, Oversight Chairman James Comer said.
Comer’s committee is trying to get clarity from the Biden administration about how many federal employees are working from home, as Americans struggle to reach agencies like the Social Security Administration, Veterans’ Affairs and the like on the phone.
“Biden’s primary goal with the federal employees, to me, is to keep them happy at all costs so they vote for him,” Comer told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
He said the Biden administration is refusing to provide figures on what percentage of the federal workforce is working from home and how many days a week employees are coming into the office.
“It’s all nonsense. Every caseworker here, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, every office where we have caseworkers, they’ll all tell you it’s impossible to get anybody on the phone right now in any administration, pushing Social Security, whether it’s the VA, you know, trying to get a passport, it doesn’t matter,” Comer continued.
Comer’s committee has been trying to get clarity from the Biden administration about how many federal employees are working from home, as Americans struggle to get agencies — Social Security Administration, Veterans’ Affairs and the like — on the phone
The chairman said he is not opposed to working from home. If the Biden administration showed them data that showed it was more efficient for taxpayers to have federal employees work from home, he would support it, he said.
“They don’t have the data to say whether it’s more efficient or not, and I can tell you it’s not,” Comer said. “But if it is more efficient, then I think we should liquidate a lot of these federal buildings. DC could convert them to affordable housing or something.
“We found in our research that some buildings are only 8% occupied. So we can consolidate workers into buildings and liquidate buildings and save on utility bills – that’s greener – save on repairs and maintenance and things like that. But this administration doesn’t want to do anything. All they want to do is spend more money and attack Donald Trump.”
In the spring, Comer invited Jason Miller, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, to testify about remote work policies.
Miller claimed that federal employees who are “telecommute eligible,” meaning they have jobs that can be performed remotely, are currently working at least half their hours in the office.
The federal government employs about two million people in Washington, D.C. The government spends about $2 billion a year operating federal office buildings and another $5 billion on leases.
“OMB will continue to push agencies to complete implementation,” Miller said. The agency “has issued guidance for agencies to significantly increase meaningful in-person work in federal offices, particularly at headquarters.”
Late last year, Biden’s chief of staff Jeffrey Zients ordered Cabinet leaders to ensure their staff would return to the office this year.
According to a memo obtained by DailyMail.com, he wrote that federal employees must spend at least 50 percent of their working hours in the office to achieve government goals.
Zients stressed that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘expects’ all employees to be in the office at least 3-4 times a week, as there is ‘no substitute’ for ‘face-to-face contact’ when it comes to diplomacy.
But he also acknowledged that “some of your agencies are not yet where they should be.”
Comer said the Biden administration is refusing to provide figures on what percentage of the federal workforce is working from home and how many days a week employees are coming into the office
“It’s all nonsense. Every caseworker here, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, every office where we have caseworkers, they’ll all tell you it’s impossible to get anybody on the phone right now in any administration, pushing Social Security, whether it’s the VA, you know, trying to get a passport, it doesn’t matter,” Comer continued.
In February, a whistleblower at the U.S. Department of Agriculture wrote a letter to Congress warning about the “impersonal and inefficient” work environment that working from home created.
The employee, who describes himself as a supervisor at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says working from home and telecommuting full-time “negatively impacts productivity, efficiency and collaboration.”
They said the “vast majority” of USDA employees are working remotely and the federal office’s unused headquarters resembles a “ghost town” with empty hallways and vacant offices.
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the USDA was only 11 percent occupied between January and March 2023, and more than 75 percent of available office space at 17 different federal agencies remains vacant.