Comer pledges to get federal employees back to work
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer made scathing statements in the first session of the 119th Congress, criticizing the Biden administration's handling of remote work policies for federal employees.
Chairman of the Monitoring Committee Rep. James Comer, Republican of Kentucky.is not playing when it comes to bringing federal employees back to the office. At the committee's first session in the 119th Congress, Comer made statements criticizing the Biden administration's “failure” to return federal employees to their positions.
“When President Trump’s team enters the federal agency’s headquarters in and around D.C., they will find it mostly empty,” Coomer said. “This is due to the Biden administration’s failure to end telework and return federal employees to their offices.”
While there are still a few days left in President Biden's term, Washington is preparing for a transformation ahead of President-elect Trump's return to the capital. According to the Oversight Committee report, which cites “the Biden-Harris administration’s own data,” as of May 2024, 1,057,000 federal employees eligible for telework were at their desks three times a week, and another 228,000 teleworkers “never came into the office.” “. “Absolutely.”
A woman works on a desktop computer in a home office in Bern, Switzerland in 2020. (Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The 41-page report, “Lights On, But Everyone's Home: Why the New Administration Will Step into Largely Vacant Federal Agency Offices,” was prepared by Republicans on the committee. The committee explained in its report that remote work policies were “harmful” to government agencies.
At the hearing, Comer pointed the finger at Democrats, particularly Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. He criticized Schumer for allowing the Parade Act to “collect dust.” The legislation would return telework for federal employees to “pre-pandemic levels.”
Rep. James Comer, left, and President Joe Biden. (Getty Images)
House watchdog report says remote work 'wastes billions' of taxpayer money ahead of first hearing
“The Government Accountability Office found that 17 of the 24 largest federal agency headquarters in the D.C. area had occupancy rates below 25%, and some well below 25%. A separate study by the Public Building Reform Council found that occupancy rates were only half as high as 20%,” Comer said at the hearing. The occupancy rate is 12% and 12% is “wasting taxpayer money renting and maintaining all that expensive empty office space.”
The committee wrote in its report that Trump inherits a “largely absent workforce,” blaming remote work policies “entrenched” by the government. Biden administration.
Coomer also noted that the remote work policy for federal workers has led to “less traffic” and is “economically devastating” for D.C., something Mayor Muriel Bowser also noted. Bowser has been “pleading with the White House to change” its remote work policy for nearly two years.
In fact, the Democratic lawmaker met with President-elect Trump to discuss what to do with “underutilized federal buildings” around the city.
Bowser expressed optimism after the December 30 meeting, saying that she and Trump “want Washington, D.C., to be the best and most beautiful city in the world, and we want D.C. to reflect the strength of our nation.”
Shot of young woman using a laptop and checking papers while working from home. (Istock)
The committee's report acknowledges that Trump “resorted to massive telecommuting and telecommuting” at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and adds that he “quickly sought to return federal employees to their offices to provide services to the American people when it became clear that this widespread deployment, operations were not… Random lockdowns are the correct societal solution to the epidemic.”
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Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
