Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.
It’s a startling statistic, but it’s not true.
Joni Ernst has gotten a lot of attention recently for her claim that only 6 percent of federal employees work in person on a full-time basis.
The New York Post ran with it. So did Elon Musk. The Des Moines Register quoted it, too.
It’s not true.
Before I dig into the details, a little background:
Telework is a growing phenomenon. It existed before the pandemic, and it’s grown since then.
This is true in both the private and public sectors. In 2022, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that 22 percent of federal employees “usually” teleworked, while 25 percent of their private sector counterparts did so.
Some, like banker Jamie Dimon, don’t like it. But there have been studies that say it’s good for employee retention.
Regardless, congressional Republicans are using the telework trend to target federal workers.
Joni Ernst is playing her role to the hilt. The 60-page report she issued last week, which includes the 6 percent claim, also makes a number of other assertions that shouldn’t be taken at face value.
So where did the Iowa senator get the claim that only 6 percent of federal workers were in the office full-time?
Her report says it came from the Federal News Network, which is based near Washington, D.C. In April, it asked federal employees to respond to a survey about return-to-office changes at their agencies, and about 6,600 people responded. (The news outlet clarified Friday that its survey was not scientific and involved respondents who self-reported they were federal employees.)
Ernst then juxtaposed the 6 percent figure with a different number: Before the pandemic, she said, just 3 percent of federal employees were daily teleworkers.
Where did that number come from?
From the 2020 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. The survey is published every year by the Office of Personnel Management.
So why didn’t Ernst also use government data to come up with a figure for how many people work in the office?
Perhaps it’s because it didn’t give her the number she wanted.
A report this year from the federal Office of Management and Budget, said April and May payroll data for more than two dozen federal agencies covering 2.2 million civilian employees showed that 54 percent “worked fully on-site, as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours.” That’s a far cry from the 6 percent Ernst claims.
The report also said that, excluding the 10 percent of federal civilian employees who are in remote positions and don’t have work sites to report to, nearly 80 percent of hours worked by federal employees were performed on site.
The OMB report to Congress was published four months ago.
I don’t know whether Ernst saw the report or ignored it. She is a member of Congress. Presumably she had access to it.
Ernst also claims nearly a third of federal employees are entirely remote. That’s not true, either. Only 14 percent telework full-time, according to the 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. And as noted, the OMB report says that 10 percent of workers are fully remote.
Why are Ernst and other Republicans painting a false picture?
Probably because if people can be convinced the federal workforce is lazy and absent, it will be easier to cut. This is what Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have in mind as part of their misleadingly titled “Department of Government Efficiency.” (It is not a federal department, just an advisory group.)
As Brian Riedel, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in Reason magazine recently, even slashing a quarter of the full-time, permanent civilian workforce would only save about 1 percent of the federal budget. He also notes federal civilian employment, which he believes is excessive, has nonetheless remained at about two million for at least 40 years, even as demands on the federal government have grown significantly.
Elsewhere, Riedel offers what he calls a comprehensive budget plan to avert a debt crisis.
The fact is, cutting federal spending will be hard. Riedel writes in Reason, “roughly 75 percent of all federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans, and interest.”
The rest of the budget goes to line items that include infrastructure, border security, disaster aid and national parks.
These are popular programs that would be hard to cut. Which may explain why spending keeps rising. It has gone up 65 percent since Joni Ernst went to Congress. Couple that with tax cuts and you get a debt that’s doubled on her watch.
I agree the federal government needs to get its fiscal house in order. But it will take hard work for lawmakers to fix the mess they made.
That will be a challenge.
Of course, it might help if Congress showed up to work more often.
The Washington Post reported last week that the 2025 calendar for the U.S. House was recently published. The Post says:
“There are precisely three — three! — weeks in which the House will be in session on every weekday next year. On the other hand, there are 17 weeks in which the House will not be in session at all.”
The Senate did a little better:
“There, the plan is to be in session for 33 full weeks of weekdays, with only 14 weeks during which the chamber isn’t in session. In total, the House will be in session on 52 percent of weekdays next year while the Senate will be in session on a much-nicer 69 percent of them.
Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to be at work for 31 percent of your workweek?
To be sure, members of Congress will tell you they aren’t really off work during that time. They say they’re working in their districts.
As the Post put it: They’re working …. just remotely.
Top photo of Senator Joni Ernst holding her report on telework in the federal government was first published on her official Facebook page on December 10.