A Sweetheart Union Deal Underlines the Fact That Only Six Percent of Federal Workers Work Full Time

In the fading hours of arguably the worst administration since Herbert Hoover, Joe Biden's Social Security Commissioner, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley signed a five-year contract with the American Federation of Government Employees guaranteeing continued work-from-home, or telework, for up to four days per week for the agency's workers.

“This deal will secure not just telework for SSA employees, but will secure staffing levels through prevention of higher attrition, which in turn will secure the ability of the agency to serve the public,” he said. “This is a win for employees and for the American public.”

Not everyone was quite as enthusiastic.

The news was less celebrated among congressional Republicans and a co-leader of President-elect Donald Trump’s planned government efficiency commission, Vivek Ramaswamy. Elon Musk and Ramaswamy have repeatedly said they would seek to roll back telework usage at federal agencies, if not end it entirely, and have suggested the move as a tool to shed federal jobs.
“Thousands of federal employees just landed a work from home deal ahead of [President-elect Trump] taking office,” said House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., on X.
“These midnight-hour maneuvers by the Biden administration are illegitimate and will be scrutinized,” Ramaswamy posted on Twitter. “All new proclamations made by executive fiat can be reversed by executive fiat.”

Outside of some finding of malfeasance that could lead to a court voiding it, the Trump administration is stuck with this stinker of a deal. It was just the kind of chicken-poo move that wouldn't surprise anyone who lived through O'Malley's two terms in Maryland's statehouse.

This points to two major problems in the federal workforce. First, the idea that a union should represent federal employees is ridiculous. The whole thing is a gift. That's a subject for a different day. The second problem is that telework and its abuse are the norm, and there is no doubt it cheats taxpayers out of money and services.

A new report by Iowa Senator Joni Ernst details just how the system is abused.

A paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily, a report from Sen. Joni Ernst’s office found.
Ernst (R-Iowa), who has long crusaded against the rise in remote federal work, is planning to reveal the fruits of her office’s year and a half inquiry to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy during their visit to the Capitol Thursday.

While the reporter for GovExec claims SSA has a "1.3%" telework rate, in terms of numbers, that would mean only 780 people of SSA's 60,000 employees work from home. If that was the case, then it hardly seems like something that AFGE would make a big deal about. The truth is probably much worse. Ernst's investigation found a space utilization rate of just 7% at the SSA headquarters campus; see page 3. The union claimed that work-from-home was all that was holding back a cascade of resignations and retirements.

“It is well documented that changing our [telework] levels would accelerate an ongoing staffing crisis,” the union wrote. “More than a quarter of employees are retirement-eligible and 60% say they will seek other jobs if telework ends. Eliminating telework while the agency is already at a 50-year staffing low threatens Social Security operations nationwide, which would harm vulnerable Americans. Arbitrarily removing a highly effective telework program would be an intentionally fatal strategy for the Social Security Administration.”

I'm just a dumb-sh** infantryman from Southside Virginia, but that sounds like a helluva lot more people than approximately 728.

There are several areas of waste, fraud, and abuse at work here. The one most overlooked is the cost of leasing and operating massive buildings that only have, on average, a 12% utilization rate. And then there is the flagrant abuse of a privilege.

Perhaps no one better represents President Biden’s time in office than the bubble bath bureaucrat at the VA who was phoning it in from the tub while veterans were put on hold.#BureaucratOfTheYear pic.twitter.com/ibcSnojT6l
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) December 8, 2023

In short, between lost productivity, overcapacity of office space, overstaffing, and outright fraud, telework costs billions of dollars each year while providing little beyond a cushy lifestyle for some federal employees.

President Trump has sworn to crack down on this.

“When Donald Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20 and that new golden age of America begins, he’s going to tell the federal workers of this country who your viewers pay for to get back into the office and do their jobs or find another line of work,” Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters during an interview.

He should. Americans are tired of their money being wasted, and if stopping telework results in a tsunami of retirements and resignations, then it's a twofer.