A top Senate waste-watcher says the Biden administration is in the process of signing more long-term agreements with federal employee unions letting them work from home.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, wrote to 24 agencies on Thursday demanding they cease efforts to bind President-Elect Donald Trump’s hands before he takes office in a month.
“I am calling on you to stop all collective bargaining or any other contractual arrangements related to telework for federal employees extending beyond the few weeks remaining in the Biden administration. Giving bureaucrats another four-year vacation from the office is unacceptable. Bureaucrats have had enough gap years—it’s time to get them back to work. Americans are tired of being put on hold by bureaucrats who are phoning it in,” she wrote.
She said a whistleblower told her that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is on the verge of signing a contract that would run through 2029, “the top four priorities of which are, in order: solidifying telework and remote work privileges, limiting accountability through hamstringing employee performance review processes, maximizing use of taxpayer-funded union time, and lastly, permitting the use of agency facilities for union offices.”
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is frantically working to unionize lawyers at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division, explicitly using the potential of continuing to work from home to gain buy-in, she added.
