Top DOGE senator to demand lame-duck Biden agencies halt costly telework talks, citing voter mandate

The top Republican in the Senate will send 24 letters — one to the head of each major federal agency — demanding a last-minute end to work-from-home negotiations before President Biden returns to Delaware.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, chairwoman of the Senate GOP Policy Committee, made the request days after drafting the 2025 bill that would “decentralize” and move one-third of the federal workforce outside of Washington, D.C.

That long acronym of the law reads “SWAMP DRAINING Law.”

Ernst said no government agency’s office space has been half-occupied in more than two years since the COVID-19 pandemic, and she previously called on the Biden administration to sell off unused real estate to benefit taxpayers.

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In her letters, Ernst noted that 90% of federal employees eligible to telecommute still work from home, with only 6% reporting that they work “full-time.”

Furthermore, she wrote that public sector unions allegedly “dictate personnel policy” regardless of federal directives from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which creates enormous costs and wastes time, space and money.

“Union bosses are rushing to hammer out lavish, long-term deals with the Biden administration at the last minute — extending beyond President Trump’s next term — that guarantee bureaucrats can stay at home for another four years or longer,” Ernst wrote in a letter prepared for the Office of the Director. to manage Robert Shriver III’s staff.

“Clearly protecting telecommuting benefits for public employees is a higher priority than serving the American taxpayer,” she wrote, calling Biden’s submission to union demands “shocking and unacceptable.”

She noted that it was a similarly liberal president who vocally opposed the unionization of public employees, as Democrat Franklin Roosevelt wrote in a letter to a union boss rejecting a 1937 invitation to a national federal labor union convention.

“All civil servants should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as commonly understood, cannot be transferred to the public service,” Roosevelt said.

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“It has its clear and insurmountable limitations when applied to the management of public personnel. The very nature and purpose of government precludes administrative officers from fully representing or binding the employer in negotiations with government employee organizations.”

“The employer is the whole people, speaking through the laws passed by their representatives in Congress.”

Ernst suggested federal workers and their union representatives have forgotten Roosevelt’s warning, citing last-minute efforts to ratify collective bargaining agreements and pacts on telecommuting privileges before President-elect Donald Trump can begin his oversight efforts through DOGE.

Ernst pointed to situations which, as she said, show that union bosses from the show and management agencies for career development are “twisting the government around their finger”.

In the letters, she included a photo of former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, when he was Biden’s head of the Social Security Administration, wearing a Captain America T-shirt to a party with an alleged union official.

Ernst cited news reports that O’Malley went to Florida to party with union members before confirming the contract, which prevents easy cuts to work-from-home options.

She said O’Malley spent the trip “humming” Irish ballads on his guitar and drinking alcohol.

“This cronyism between the Social Security commissioner and the union bosses who represent his workforce during what should be negotiations has resulted in a contract incredibly tilted toward the union and against the interests of taxpayers and the agency’s mission,” she said. he said.

In another case, she pointed to Housing & Urban Development employees who may not have earned the TFUT or “taxpayer-funded union time” they applied for.

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One such worker successfully claimed compensation while in prison.

Ernst required agencies to report data on TFUT claims and disbursements, unused or underutilized properties designated for use through collective bargaining and any instances where each agency allowed unions or their employees to use department property at a discount or for free.

“Giving bureaucrats another four-year vacation from the office is unacceptable. Bureaucrats have had enough years off – it’s time to put them back to work,” she said.

Fox News’ Julia Johnson contributed to this report.