Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa reintroduced legislation to move nearly a third of Small Business Administration (SBA) bureaucrats outside the Washington, D.C., area Wednesday.
Ernst, who re-introduced a package of legislation intended to move bureaucrats across multiple agencies out of the Washington D.C. area Jan. 7, submitted similar legislation in December. The legislation, called the “Returning SBA to Main Street Act,” requires the agency to move at least 30% of its employees outside the Washington, D.C. area and to reduce its office space by a similar percentage.
“Every small business owner knows that if your customers can’t reach you, your doors won’t be open very long,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The SBA might as well have had a closed for business sign on its door for the last four years with bureaucrats permanently out of office. There is no better way for the Trump administration to help the SBA improve its customer service and better serve the American people than to get bureaucrats out of the beltway bubble and closer to Main Street.”
Taxpayers will no longer be forced to pay for vacant buildings!
We are going to continue to condense office space, sell off the excess, and downsize government. https://t.co/y8yQdTelnP
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) January 28, 2025
The legislation is a scaled-down version of the Decentralizing and Reorganizing Agency Infrastructure Nation-wide To Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration, and Management Practices Act (DRAIN THE SWAMP Act) that Ernst re-introduced in January, which targets multiple government agencies with a similar mandate to move workers out of the D.C. area and to cut back their office space.
The legislation requires the SBA to “promote geographic diversity, including consideration of rural markets” when relocating employees from the D.C. area and to ensure adequate staffing throughout the regions of the Administration, to promote in-person customer service.”
Witnesses from Iowa told a Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee during a Sept. 19 hearing of difficulties in getting assistance from the SBA, which Ernst attributed to liberal telework policies in place during the Biden administration. The legislation prohibits granting relocated employees permission to telecommute.
Trump signed an executive order Jan. 20 requiring federal employees to return to working on-site. A Jan. 21 executive order by Trump directed federal agencies to shut down Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices.
Ernst issued a 60-page report Dec. 5 that covered findings from Ernst’s investigations into telework since she sent an August 2023 letter to 24 government agencies seeking a review of the issues involved with telecommuting.
The report detailed issues telework created involving locality pay, an adjustment to the basic pay of civilian employees in the federal government intended to make sure that federal employees have comparable compensation to private-sector counterparts in a given area of the country, and from the effects that largely vacant office buildings had on the working environment.
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