AP Photo In this Sept. 9 file photo, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Government employees showing up to work shouldn't be headline news, but lately it has been.
Department of Labor bureaucrats gathered at their workplace earlier this year to protest the “right to work remotely,” and if that wasn't enough, the rally took place outside a federal building named for President John F. Kennedy, the president who inspired the nation with his call to public service: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
In President Joe Biden's antiquated world, Kennedy's call has been turned upside down: Even the best-performing federal agencies are using less than 50% of their office space, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
I recently asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Small Business Administration Administrator Isabella Guzman about the utilization rates at their corporate headquarters (11% and 9%, respectively, according to the GAO) and what they plan to do about it. Their answers were shocking.
Vilsack said that not only was the GAO wrong, but so were his own employees who wrote me a letter calling the USDA headquarters a “ghost town.” Guzman echoed the same sentiment, blaming the GAO for saying the Small Business Administration headquarters was essentially empty.
Meanwhile, the Commission on Public Buildings Reform, an independent agency created by Congress to address the government's excess real estate problem, has found the same thing that the GAO did: These buildings are being abandoned.
On one day in 2023, just 456 employees showed up to work at Vilsack's 7,500-seat USDA headquarters, according to the Public Building Reform Commission.
This isn't just a problem at the USDA: At the Department of Veterans Affairs, home of the bubble bath bureaucracy, only 172 people showed up to work in the building each day of 2023.
All of this is happening despite the Office of Management and Budget directing agencies to bring employees back to the office in April 2023.
So why does the building still stand empty? The unions.
Federal employee unions are so fiercely opposed to returning to work that they have overwhelmed the Federal Labor Relations Board, which resolves disputes between agencies and unions, with telework-related grievances, often forcing key agencies like the Department of Labor and the Federal Aviation Administration to delay return-to-work plans. Let's hope that FAA inspectors, whose job it is to make sure plane doors don't come off in flight, weren't inspecting planes remotely.
And it's not just federal unions: A union representing city government employees in Washington, DC (itself a recipient of large federal funding) told reporters it opposes reducing the two-day work-from-home week to one day for several key reasons, including safety concerns. [and] “Environmental Impact”
Try telling an Iowa farmer or warehouse worker that working one more day in the office creates “safety concerns.”
If unions continue to operate against the interests of the American people, it's time to get serious about taxpayer-funded union hours, which allow federal employees to work for unions and not agencies. That's why I've passed legislation requiring all agencies to report utilization rates and office employee numbers, and to provide Congress with copies of all telework agreements they make with federal employee unions. In addition, I'm working to pass the Taxpayer-Funded Union Hours Transparency Act to expose how much of our taxpayer money is being spent on unions' fight against back-to-work.
Perhaps a new version of Kennedy's inspiring quote would be: “Do public servants serve the people, or themselves?” I know the answer, and so do the American taxpayers.
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Red Oak native and combat veteran Joni Ernst represents Iowa as a U.S. senator.
