A Republican senator is proposing a bill that she says would give the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency a head start on making government more efficient.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa has proposed the REMOTE Act, which will monitor bureaucrats’ computer use and require agencies to report on the downside of telework, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
The bill would require that agencies review how much work remote federal employees actually do: including the “average number of logins made” by every federal worker and the amount of time spent on the federal network.
“The American people gave us a mandate to shake up business as usual in Washington and drain the swamp. That starts with getting the bureaucrat class to climb out of the bubble bath, put away the golf clubs, and get back to work,” Ernst said, according to Politico.
Ernst is the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus and has met with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to pitch her ideas, according to Fox News.
One of Ernst’s major proposals is to reduce the number of federal employees who do not regularly come into their offices.
Ernst recently released a report saying federal workers “have been found in a bubble bath, on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayers’ time.”
“Just 3 percent of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, 6 percent of workers report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are entirely remote,” the report said.
“Most federal employees are eligible to telework and 90 percent of those are. Some come to the office as infrequently as once a week,” the report said.
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The report said that as thousands of federal workers allegedly do their jobs from home, “no one is checking to make sure everyone made it to work or even logged on to their computer. Backlogs for services are typical and accountability is rare. It took years to fire a senior IRS employee who routinely abused his remote work arrangement by playing golf during the workday for nearly a decade.”
She noted one federal worker who conducted a remote meeting from a bathtub while taking a bubble bath.
Ernst noted that remote work took root at the dawn of the pandemic.
“Washington is still operating as if it’s March 2020. The headquarters of most agencies remain largely abandoned. Government employees are scattered and often unreachable,” her report said.
“The failure of managers to set the right example and properly monitor teleworkers creates an ‘anything goes’ attitude with other employees,” the report said.
The report said that over 90 percent of the employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development work from home with only one day a week in the office required.
The report also said that some federal workers pad their pay by claiming to work in one location while they actually work from home in an area where, according to federal rules, they should receive a lower salary.
Ernst said that the solution requires proof that employees working from home are productive. If not, she wrote, they should be brought back to the office.
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