Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst is calling for the government to shut down San Francisco’s main federal office building — which was recently renamed after ex-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi — because of the dangerous conditions around the building.
Ernst said that the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco is a “threat to public safety,’ the New York Post reported.
The Iowa Republican’s call to shutter the building comes after months of warnings issued by building staff and department heads for government employees to work from home and not travel to the building because the streets around the facility are so unsafe.
The warnings to workers first surfaced in reports in August, when the Department of Health and Human Services told employees to stay home where it is safe.
Employees were formally advised in an Aug. 4 memo to stay away from the building because of the crime in the streets surrounding the facility, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Aug. 11.
With the reports echoing across Washington D.C., the 53-year-old Ernst said that employees should be relocated to other government office locations where employees won’t be “fearing for their lives” just for going to work.
“Working at a Department of Health and Human Services building shouldn’t be a risk to your health or life, but it is now due to former Speaker Pelosi and the other liberal politicians that have allowed criminal chaos to overtake the streets of San Francisco,” Ernst told the Post.
“If it’s not safe for federal employees to work here, it certainly can’t be safe for businesses to operate and families to live here,” she exclaimed. “I’m calling to shut down the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building. After all, they’ve already been forced to abandon it, so why should taxpayers keep the lights on in Nancy Pelosi’s haunted house?”
The building, renamed for one of the most divisive House Speakers in recent years, opened as a government office in 2007 and houses Pelosi’s local office as well as offices of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Transportation.
Should the Nancy Pelosi Building be shut down?
Yes: 98% (300 Votes)
No: 2% (5 Votes)
But San Francisco has been quickly devolving into a hellscape of open drug sales/use, homelessness, a rising murder rate crime, retail theft, car vandalism and carjacking, not to mention being strewn with human feces and garbage.
In her official letter to Robin Carnahan, the administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration, Ernst called the downtown area “dangerous.”
“The plaza is a dangerous, open-air drug market, with addicts shooting up, snorting, and smoking drugs in plain view,” Ernst wrote. “Drug users pass out on the public benches and used needles litter the ground. Overdosing is ‘a commonplace horror,’ with nearly 150 suspected overdoses— including more than 30 deaths—on the block surrounding the Federal Building reported in the first half of this year. Dozens of dealers show up daily, one of which opened fire with a gun near the building recently. While fencing has been put up, addicts and dealers still hang out around the plaza.”
“According to its designer, the building was set up to represent ‘the way government should be and how the workplace should be.’ Ironically, the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is instead a symbol of the way government doesn’t work, with offices and workplaces largely empty due to drug and crime problems resulting from the misguided policies of the state and city governments,” Ernst added.
“Federal employees report having knives pulled on them and one was chased with a hammer. Working at a Department of Health and Human Services building shouldn’t be a risk to someone’s health, or life!” she added.
“It’s extremely concerning that the city’s inability to control crime is endangering civil servants, children, and visitors,” the senator said.
Ernst noted that there are five other government office buildings in the city where workers could be distributed to have a safe work environment and she wants the GSA to provide data on how many workers need to use the Pelosi building and how they could be reassigned office space elsewhere.
The dangerous location was only recently renamed for Pelosi. The homage to the former Speaker was a nice little provision tucked away on page 610 of a spending bill that provided funds to have signs changed to add Pelosi’s name to the building.
The name change was coupled with a similar provision for Sen. Patrick Leahy, which cost the American taxpayer $65 million and was hidden in the 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus bill passed in 2022.
$65 million in two programs for Senator Leahy, and a federal building named for Nancy Pelosi.
Swamp gonna Swamp. pic.twitter.com/NCEv8NtvdY
— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) December 20, 2022
As noted, the area where the Pelosi Building sits is one of the most dangerous parts of the rapidly deteriorating city.
But like so many other deep-blue Democrat-run cities, including Portland, Oregon, Chicago, and New York City, San Francisco is only getting worse as the leftist ideology of its captors causes chaos for its citizens.
