Iowa Senator Joni Ernst is chairing the Senate companion committee for the DOGE initiative. DOGE has a mission to make the Federal Government more efficient and less bloated. Ernst issued a press release this week outlining her committee’s commitment to the project with some details about one particularly troubling aspect, which is an opportunity to deal with some very low-hanging fruit.
You will likely be familiar with some of this.
- Ninety percent of federal employees telework;
- Pre-COVID this number was 3%;
- Just 6% of workers report in-person on a full-time basis;
- Nearly 33% of federal employees are entirely remote;
- Depending on the agency, 23-68% of surveyed teleworking bureaucrats are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay;
- Some employees lived more than 2,000 miles from their office;
- Not a single headquarters of a major agency in Washington is even half-full;
- Average occupancy is just 12%;
- Maintaining and leasing government office buildings costs more than $8 billion every year; and
- Another $7.7 billion is spent on the energy to keep the buildings running.
The savings potential is more than adequate, not just in shedding staff but in maintaining physical assets. Ernst wants to take a long hard look (not too long, we hope) at,
- Draining the swamp and relocating the federal workforce;
- Downsizing the federal government by implementing a “use it or lose it” approach to government real estate; and
- Tracking individual employee productivity and tying it to their privilege to telework.
- Click here to view the full report and here to view a summary.
All well and good and any reduction is a move in the proper direction but the thing that caught my attention was employees who lived thousands of miles from DC. What if they all did? If some number of federal jobs, after a healthy culling, can be done outside the beltway, that should be at the top of the list of reasons to retain or hire quality candidates.
The further from DC, the better.
Part of the power of the swamp is the infection we call the Georgetown Flu. Federal group think. To unravel that, even just a bit, you need more people working in the real world. Remote work that can be monitored is better in that instance. And if you fire them, they look for work someplace else instead of down the hall or across the street in another bureaucracy.
The other idea that Trump suggested this last go-round is to move agency headquarters out into the flyover country. The Bureau of Land Management should have much less land to manage, but most of it is out west, so they should be there. And so on. Delete unnecessary agencies, get rid of duplicative processes and overlaps, cull the payroll everywhere, and while we’re at it – have a gun and ammo sale with all the no longer needed firearms and ordinances in federal custody.
A “citizens buy back guns from the feds sale.”
Use the funds to help buy down the debt.
It’s an idea. And no, I’m not super optimistic about the likely results of any of this, but they are trying and need our support, and I’m there for them.
We need less Federal everything, and Trump and DOGE are saying all the right things. Let’s see how it goes.
