SAUNDERS: The missing chief executive and the bubble-bath bureaucrat

“Washington is still operating as if it’s March 2020. The headquarters of most agencies remain largely abandoned,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, wrote in a report released Thursday that paints a dystopian picture of the federal workforce inside the vaunted beltway.

It’s been nearly five years since COVID knocked on America’s door. Most schools and businesses opened up years ago. But federal government operations in Washington, D.C., are way behind the flyover states.

Because of COVID, President Joe Biden campaigned from home in 2020. He has been a frequently absent executive since he took the oath of office in 2021. Ernst figured Biden “was out of office 532 days over the last three-and-a-half years, about 40 percent of the time he was expected to be in the Oval Office.”

The no-show mentality has filtered from the top down.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin didn’t bother to inform Biden when he was hospitalized for days. Defense Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks ran the Pentagon while on a beach vacation in Puerto Rico.

Moscow and Beijing must be gleeful.

Federal agencies are supposed to serve the public — inspecting baby formula, screening calls from veterans who desperately need mental-health services, processing student aid applications — but how many of them are actually working?

Americans don’t get time off from paying taxes.

Ernst is a founder and member of the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) caucus that is preparing to go after the worst abuses in the federal workforce.

According to Ernst, “the nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12 percent.”

The Biden administration has been in no hurry to get federal workers back to the office — to the displeasure of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, as well as area eateries and businesses. An updated contract between the Social Security Administration and the American Federation of Government Employees extends work-from-home policies — reporting to the office between two and five days a week — into 2029.

TrumpLand has a better take.

In a piece that ran in The Wall Street Journal last month, DOGE czars Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote of common-sense reforms that should send a thrill up voters’ legs — most notably, a requirement that federal workers in the D.C. area come to the office five days a week.

The DOGE duo expect that the policy “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

Federal employees who show up for work and do their jobs diligently must be enraged at these abuses.

According to Ernst, 3 percent of the federal workforce telecommuted daily before COVID. Now 6 percent report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third work entirely remotely.

The arrogance of those who abused COVID measures can be breathtaking.

A Veterans Affairs manager dialed into a meeting from his bathtub. He took a selfie of himself in the tub with the headline, “my office for the next hour.”

“Instead of pulling the plug on these ‘bubble bath bureaucrats,’ taxpayer dollars keep going down the drain, paying their salaries and maintaining their empty offices,” Ernst wrote.

I’ve been in this business for so long that I remember when even partial government shutdowns generated horror stories about the disasters about to fall upon a vulnerable public. Now we learn that nearly one-third of the federal government workforce is entirely remote.

Sort of like Joe Biden.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.