A new Senate report that outlines the costs of federal employees working from home shows that only 6% of the government's workers are showing up in person every day.
The report, shared by Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, at the first Department of Government Efficiency caucus meeting Thursday, shows that while 3% of the federal workforce were working from home daily before the COVID-19 pandemic, now a third of them are working fully remotely, reports the Washington Examiner.
The report added that this has caused an increase of people slacking on the job, including bureaucrats being "found in a bubble bath, on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayers' time."
"Things are so upside down in the federal government that it is more common for employees to be overpaid than to work in the office five days a week," Ernst said in a statement. "We need to flip Washington on its head, make bureaucrats show up to work like the rest of us, and evaluate individual performance in the same way every business in America does."
Ernst, who has been leading the congressional support of DOGE, also recently hand-delivered a report to its leaders, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, along with President-elect Donald Trump to outline a plan to cut over $2 trillion in wasted spending.
The senator added that she is "excited to work with DOGE and the Trump administration to disrupt the bureaucrat class and bring common sense to the capital."
The report on Thursday further claimed that government services are suffering because of telecommuters.
"Service backlogs and delays, unanswered phone calls and emails, and no-show appointments are harming the health, lives, and aspirations of Americans" because bureaucrats are "phoning it in," the report said.
Meanwhile, the document argues that if teleworking is going to continue, the government should not persist in maintaining many of its buildings.
"Not a single headquarters of a major agency or department in the nation's capital is even half full," according to the report. "Government buildings average an occupancy rate of 12%."
Instead, $8 billion a year is spent to maintain and lease the government buildings, while another $7.7 billion is spent on keeping them running, as the government owns 7,697 vacant buildings and another 2,265 that are partly empty.
The report concluded that the government should "use it or lose it" when it comes to federal real estate and calls on moving federal employees closer to their workplaces, stopping the blanket use of telework, and tracking employees.