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Cockburn spent his long weekend the same way most Americans did: reading the Functional Government Initiative’s recent report. It found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working.”
Government inefficiency is nothing new, but in this case teleworking is exacerbating the problem. And that isn’t about to improve — at least not under this administration. Biden continues to push for more teleworking options, even as the pandemic finally begins to fade.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that Brian Harrison, the former HHS chief of staff who commissioned the investigation of telework participation, speculates that many recent federal agency errors may be due to an inactive teleworkforce.
For instance, Food and Drug Administration top officials recently missed a whistleblower report because it sat in the mailroom for four months. The New York Post reported that during that time “four infants had become ill and two may have died after ingesting formula made at the Michigan facility.”
With 20 to 30 percent of HHS employees not showing up to work, Cockburn wants to know where his tax dollars are going.
To that end, Representative Yvette Herrell is sponsoring the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems (SHOW UP) Act. She said in a press release, “Americans are struggling to receive their tax refunds, veterans are having difficulties accessing their benefits, and it’s all because of backlogs created by expanded telework policies for federal bureaucrats. It is long overdue for the federal workforce to return to work in person.” The bill requires agencies to publicly report the effects of teleworking.
Representative Gerard Connolly, who represents thousands of federal employees, once told the Washington Post that the “cultural barriers to telework have essentially collapsed.” Cockburn thinks the government should caveat this turn with a focus on productivity and responsibility to American taxpayers.
Cockburn has come to expect the government to be slower than himself after a gin-fueled bender, but at least he bothers to log in and check Slack. Our civil servants, not so much.
