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Top DOGE Elon Musk, House speaker balk at Senate report showing only 6% of federal workers show up in person on full-time basis: ‘Absurd’
College kids are never given a dime from the federal budget besides covering the interest.
Top DOGE Elon Musk, House speaker balk at Senate report showing only 6% of federal workers show up in person on full-time basis: ‘Absurd’
Bureaucrats Are Playing Hide-and-Seek
Bureaucrats 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. Members of President Biden’s
own cabinet claimed to be on the clock while being out of office and unreachable.
Just three percent of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, six percent of workers report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are
entirely remote.
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 Biden administration redacted the locations of over 281,000 rank-and-file federal
employees.
Services Suffer as Taxpayers are Put on Hold by Bureaucrats
Phoning It in
Service backlogs and delays, unanswered phone calls and emails, and no-show appointments
are harming the health, lives, and aspirations of Americans.
Thousands of calls from veterans seeking mental health care go unanswered. Remote work may
be partly responsible for the recent baby formula crisis. Small businesses, students, and other
taxpayers seeking assistance are instead getting sent to voicemail.
Public Employees Padding Their Paychecks by Avoiding the Office
Some bureaucrats are claiming to be working in areas with higher pay rates while actually living
elsewhere.
My audits are finding as many as 23 to 68 percent of teleworking employees for some agencies
are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay.
Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office and one “temporary”
teleworker collected higher locality pay for nearly a decade.
Why did kids backslide so much during the period of scamdemic Zoom edumacation then?
Your kids didn't backslide because youtube replaced the school or because two college-educated parents de-facto homeschooled them? There is a difference between these two scenarios, donchathink?
Next, do you really claim based on your set of one, that none of kids backslid during the time zoom replaced in-person lessons? Because I remember lots of hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and teeth-gnashing accompanying demands to re-open schools on this very site and on many other platforms. Now it turns out school closures weren't a problem?
It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.
It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.
Biden can’t lock anything in, he has no such power. everything executive order does can be undone.
mell says
It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.
Can confirm this via wife's experience as a teacher.
The pension is supposed to be good, but I don't know how good. She's been a teacher for only three years.
I think it's fractional depending on years worked.
The DOGE people in the Trump administration are considering shedding a big portion of the massive office space that the government owns or leases nationwide, managed by the General Services Administration (GSA), including selling two-thirds of the office space the government owns and terminating three-quarters of the leased office space, according to the WSJ.
Much of this office space is vacant or underused and poorly maintained due to lack of funding, according to GSA testimony before Congress in 2023, cited by the WSJ, which further noted:
“A recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, found that not one of the headquarters for any major agency or department in Washington is more than half full. GSA-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.”
The office sector is already in a depression, with default rates that exceed those during the worst moments of the Financial Crisis. Putting this inventory on the market for sale is going to weigh on the already collapsed prices of older office buildings – prices of 50-70% below the last sale before the pandemic are now common.
And terminating leases is going to stress office buildings, their landlords, and their lenders even more, likely entailing more defaults and foreclosure sales. This is a much needed but very bitter medicine to alleviate government waste.
What office landlords and their lenders are facing.
Here we look at the leased office space, where those buildings are, and what portion of the leased space the GSA has the right to terminate in 2025, and also through 2028 (Trump 2.0), based on an analysis from Trepp, which tracks commercial real estate debt and CMBS.
- GSA leases 149 million square feet (msf) of office space around the US.
- GSA pays $5.2 billion in annual rent to private-sector landlords.
- Through 2028, GSA has the right to terminate 53.1 msf of leases, or 35.5% of its leased space, spread over 2,532 properties.
- In 2025, GSA has termination rights on 21.2 msf spread over more than 1,000 properties,
If GSA terminates all possible leases during Trump 2.0, it would save the government $1.87 billion in annual rent after 2028.
- In the vast Washington DC metro, GSA leases nearly 10% of the entire office market, 35.8 msf in 446 buildings, and can terminate 9.6 msf of that in 2025.
- In the Washington D.C. metro, GSA currently pays $1.47 billion in annual rent.
- GSA leases nearly 6% of the office space in the Kansas City metro (DoD, USPS, Treasury, VA, and USDA), 4.3 msf, of which it can terminate 1.0 msf in 2025.
Wife makes about $80K, but works 12 hours a day between teaching, correcting homework, and preparing lessons. Around here, that's not enough for a middle-class lifestyle.
On the other hand, it's her choice because we don't really need the money. She could quit and we'd still be fine.
The pension is supposed to be good, but I don't know how good. She's been a teacher for only three years.
I saw a few videos on TikTok where the video makers were talking about their experiences working for the Government which amounted to them watching their fellow workers waste time and brag about it.
And Amy Sukwan wrote about working for the census bureau and being told to work slower by her fellow workers because she was making them look bad.
Her experience reminded me of when I worked at the IRS in college. (Don’t hate me, I needed the money and the pay was good.) I was a Math major at the time and the IRS put notices in our building that they needed seasonal temporary workers for Tax Season. ...
Once I got to the PreAudit Department no one wanted to examine Schedule G’s. If you ever had to do one you’d remember why. Very long and complicated and lots of math with big numbers. But a friend and I were really good at them so the other workers gave them all to us and we’d have a contest every night to see who got the most done. He was only 16 and I was only 18 and we were processing these things 5 times faster than the permanent workers.
This was a huge problem for those permanent workers because it made them look bad. They were always telling us to slow down because we were making the average higher and then they had to work harder.
Truthfully, having those contests was the only thing that made a monotonous job fun so we didn’t listen to them. Once again I got promoted and this time it was to the full Audit Department. I think the permanent workers told their bosses to move us. And they split us up. He went to a different section of the PreAudit Department. We’ll handle the Schedule G’s ourselves! “So what if we’re slow? Who cares, it’s taxpayer money anyway.” That was the prevailing attitude.
And once again, me, the lowly college student was outperforming the permanent workers so they started sabotaging me. I could not believe that they were okay with mediocrity…I mean it’s our taxpayer dollars paying these people and they intentionally were working slow and trying to keep me from doing my job since it made them look bad.
We had to lock up all the returns when we left for the day, and somehow mine would be lost and I’d have to spend time locating them. Of course this would lower my productivity numbers. And I had clerks to take care of files for me and they would hide them and put them at the bottom of the pile to slow me down. And take stuff out of my desk so I’d have to spend time finding my stuff.
I remember walking by carts of tax returns waiting to be processed and thinking “I wonder if anyone just throws these away to help their productivity numbers?” Years later I read in the newspaper that a few hundred workers were found to have been routinely throwing tax returns in the trash to make their productivity look better. This was at the Austin, Tx service center but I bet it has happened elsewhere…
The thing is that these workers are almost impossible to fire! Once they get through the probabion period, they have to be guilty of gross negligence to be terminated. Just being slow is not really enough to get you fired. A lot of the workers just want to do as little as possible to get by. ...
My boss told me that I wasn’t finding enough extra overlooked tax. Our job is “revenue,” she told me. “I thought it was to collect the correct tax,” I told her. You can see why I was really popular there.
When I didn’t produce enough revenue, they started auditing me. By this time I was a permanent employee too, so they couldn’t easily fire me. And since I don’t cheat on taxes and they couldn’t find anything wrong, they audited my parents. Who also never cheated on anything in their entire lives, I’m quite sure of that. Lots of wasted audit dollars there. My parents took them to court and won. I actually didn’t start out to write a post about the IRS per se, it’s just that so much is wrong with it!
My boss told me that I wasn’t finding enough extra overlooked tax. Our job is “revenue,” she told me. “I thought it was to collect the correct tax,” I told her. You can see why I was really popular there.
experiences working for the Government which amounted to them watching their fellow workers waste time and brag about it
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