Republican Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas said empty federal office buildings wasted “billions of dollars” Thursday during an appearance on Fox News, adding that a cannon could be fired in the deserted spaces without harming anyone.
A Government Accountability Office report released July 13, 2023 found that 75% of office space in federal buildings was not being utilized, prompting President-elect Donald Trump and Department of Government Efficiency co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to state their intention to get workers back in office. Van Duyne shared her experience with remote workers from her time in Trump’s previous administration, noting that the lenient in-office requirements posed a serious problem.
“I worked at HUD and they had three-day-a-week telework, this was way before Covid ever hit,” Van Duyne told “The Faulkner Focus” guest host Julie Banderas. “There were people in the office I never met because they figured out how to either take their two days off that they were supposed to be in the office either on vacation or an event or something like that. But literally, how do you build a team when you don’t have people coming to work, not to mention the fact — the waste that we spend on leases?”
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“You could shoot a cannon through many of these federal buildings and never touch a single soul because they are empty, and yet, we have to spend all that money on leases every year,” Van Duyne continued. “There is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse. You start looking at the COVID dollars and how they were fraudulently accepted and taken. There is a lot of waste and I can’t imagine anybody defending the waste.”
Multiple lawmakers have called for restricting or ending remote work for federal employees, such as Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who sent letters to 24 government agencies in August 2023 requesting a review of the issues involved with telecommuting. In the letters, Ernst cited a media account of a VA employee who attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath. She later shared a 60-page report on Dec. 5 that covered the findings from her investigation into government employee telework.
Previous investigations by Ernst into telecommuting by federal employees 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.
“Why would you spend billions of dollars on lease money for buildings that are empty? Who does that help?” Van Duyne asked. “It doesn’t help the American citizens. It just continues to take tax dollars and divert them away from programs we actually do need, to programs that are a waste.”
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