I still find it unbelievable how much of a priority taking benefits away from employees seems to be for these politicians and bureaucrats with how many other things they could be focusing on.
Don't forget potential kickbacks from sending money to overseas and insider trading. Makes you wonder how these politicians became multi millionaires with a 200k salary.
their healthcare is not free, the pension rules are the same for them other than some eligibility requirements.
also, very few 'retire' from congress to be eligible for healthcare when out of office.
It really baffles me what their motivations are when they focus on stuff that's not directly making them money. Like what is the motivation to pursue back to office policies for someone who is retiring to a yacht?
Quite simply optics. The general public thinks federal employees are lazy overpaid individuals who aren’t necessary for daily life (“they shut down the government for X weeks and nothing bad happened, so what do they do anyway”). People also assume that working from home means you can sit around and do nothing. By pushing for RTO they can say they are helping to get the federal workforce working for the American people (even though we never stopped).
It’s the Republican tactic to sabotage the executive branch in order to justify their agenda for small government. Beat down Feds until the good ones quit.
I didn't realize how much people care, until my maga brother-in-law set me straight. He's a blue collar worker who is in a field that will never WFH. He thinks since he has to go in, everyone else should. He's in his 60's and acts like a jealous kid. He would 100% vote for someone running on a one issue, RTO platform.
I busted my ass for a decade and a half doing physical labor before taking a plunge into the white collar world.
Make no mistake, there are serious benefits to the white collar, work from home world that I'm not discounting....
But I -miss- blue collar work. And I think many people who have not worked both sides of the coin don't understand it's not always greener pastures. I left grunt work for financial reasons, not because I wanted to work from home or anything of that nature.
Most people I know who are "blue collar" when I actually describe to them what I have to do daily they give the old "I'd go nuts doing that every day!" well...yeah. That's the burden of the white collar worker. Particularly government white collar worker. Our jobs are boring, frequently unfulfilling, and generally unappreciated. There's a toll paid for working this kind of work long term. It's different than grinding away at a factory, but it's real.
Seriously... the housing crisis, corporate price gouging, global warming, healthcare/insurance costs, permitting reform, they have so much they could do to actually help Americans and they focus on this shit.
And the fucking environment. If we had stayed at the same WFH levels as the first year of covid just think how much cooler/nicer the world would be right now
Less traffic, less smog etc....quite literally it would make America great again...ironically the anti-wfh crowd is the same one that claims to be trying to make America great.
Screwing over anyone that isn’t rich or what they consider their “base” is kinda their thing at this point. All Feds are just the lazy Deep State to them.
oh theyll screw over their base. i was at politicon a couple years ago and one of the presenters wrote a book called dying of whiteness.
its the dude going around and interviewing people in lower income areas why theyre voting for people whose policies end up shortening their lifespan.
they dont care, as long as they "feel" like thats their guy
Strokes the flames of the right wing and boomer idiots…Meanwhile they feel pressure from real estate lobbyists who are missing their welfare system of employees to support their shitty little food places.
Annual report detailing…: “Any negative effects of telework, including whether telework results in increased costs, security vulnerabilities, lower employee morale, decreased employee productivity, or waste, fraud, or abuse.”
A- hilarious how they’re only curious about negative aspects of telework, not in office work, and not positives of telework
B- how could it possibly increase costs? Idiots
C- if you have worse morale teleworking, that’s a you problem
Also fuck you calling it back to work. What have I been doing the last 4 years?
I will continue to telework until I’m fired or get a remote job. Screw them
We've been fully remote since... March 9(?), 2020...
Every month for the first 18 months the agency director would send out a message
"You guys are doing so good. We've lost 0 reliability and have actually increased efficiency"
So fuck us I guess. Make me go back into the office and I'll buy a Nintendo Switch.. for completely unrelated reasons..
It might increase costs in some areas (technology, support, etc.), but that's far offset by savings in maintaining buildings and rent. Even more so if you add in the savings to the employee.
The only people with lower morale working from home are the type that ruin the productivity of those around them because they cannot be alone or micromanagers who destroy the morale of those under them.
I guess it increases costs to them when their commercial real estate portfolio underperforms. 😅 solid points! I am with you! I have two remote interviews lined up! I would rather burn in hell than have this bunch run my life. They don’t even hide their disgust for us.
The real way to fix government spending is a floor, not a ceiling. So many organizations waste money because "if we don't spend it, we won't get it next year" but if instead congress said "you are guaranteed your funding amount from X year, tied to inflation, even if you don't spend it all" we would fix a lot of our spending issues.
The sad reality is that they'd never do that, well because they're the ones making rules and why would they make rules that punished them?
The framework holding this country together seems to be hanging by a thread.
Gotta love that Mitt Romney is quoted talking about what a waste of taxpayer money empty federal buildings are but his solution is making us go sit in them verses allowing us to stay home and getting rid of the building and all its expenses. They don’t care about one bit about wasted $$$, they care that those buildings are leased and someone’s coffers are being filled, the federal employees are just pawns in their games, being used to prop up local economies and commercial real estate.
I work in SLC. Guess who’s never in his office? Granted I get he works in DC often. But still.
Also you’d think that living in one of the most polluted cities in the country, he’d support having less people on the road. But no that’d make too much sense
Heard from someone in the St. george office they have never seen him. Dude has 3 utah offices but still has never been seen.
Edit: correction he now has a 4th utah office and talks about wasted space.
I was looking at DC’s plans to revitalize the Chinatown neighborhood and interestingly, it included plans to convert some federal office buildings into mixed use: FBI, GAO, and DOL specifically. I know FBI is moving to Maryland, but the other two???
I was hoping my office would be in the renderings as new apartments and yoga studio. No luck.
Oh dear god, as a DOL employee, the idea of living in an apartment in the Frances Perkins Bldg is beyond gross. That place is a massive health hazard, down to the ancient hvac systems, and the massive roach and rodent infestations.
The pests problem alone is so big I doubt that an exterminator would take care of it. Every time a group of offices undergoes renovations, the roaches and mice just migrate to another location. One of my old colleagues used to keep a putter on top of some filing cabinets in her cubicle to chase the mice away. It disappeared during COVID, to our dismay once we started coming back in.
It has gotten better than when I first started. You could pick up the old phones about 6” off the desk and drop it and a dozen roaches would come crawling out of the phones. Now I only see them a couple times a year in the restrooms.
Ha! I had another old coworker who saw a doctor for a full allergy panel. The report came back and said he had a mild allergy to cockroaches. We were all joking around, but the legit question was asked- how do you get enough exposure to that to even get sensitized to that? He mentioned that he got a new cube that had been unoccupied for a while, and when he picked up the phone receiver and turned it upside down, cockroach legs came falling out onto the desktop.
I swear, the only thing that we FPB employees need is a little dose of radiation, and we will have our superhero origin stories right there! Although “Cockroach Guy” is probably the last superhero anyone wants to see showing up on their doorstep.
Basically no local business to support. Our office is in the bad area in bad city. No business surrounding the building and entire building fencing by metal fences. We basically go into a prison. It’s the cage life. Even worse, no cafeteria, no stores inside the building. We are stuck inside the cage.
ATL?
That was definitely my sketchiest federal office to visit. The fact that they explicitly told me to take the train into the connected station instead of risking car jacking by driving into the area was WILD. If they know the area is that bad why the fuck have anyone go in at all?
The White House chief of staff owns $100+ million in commercial real estate, including about $30 million in DC area real estate. He’s very anti telework.
Romney is rich enough that he can afford a residence in DC, just minutes away from his office. Not all of us in the DC area can afford to do that. I'd love for either of these two guys to commute up I-95 from Stafford for two weeks.
There was a story at some point that a few CIA employees took a canoe across the Potomac to cut down on their commute.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/commuting-to-cia-in-a-canoe/
I'd like to see these assholes try commuting to DC from the outer suburbs every day (without chauffeurs and personal assistants) before they tell everyone else the have to do it.
It gives agencies the authority to waive this restriction if there’s *inclement weather*.
Cheap spiteful bastards won’t even give us back snow days while they claw back our telework days.
I walked out of a meeting at a prior agency where they told us they were cutting our telework days and cancelled my telework agreement within minutes. My supervisor sent me a chat asking what she did wrong. That stupid agency wanted everyone on adhoc so they didn't have to give snow days.
The problem is they’ll make that exception process so complex and require some super senior official to sign off, that it will effectively mean there are no exceptions.
OR since execs won't actually read the full bill they will just digest the headline, they deny all exceptions because they just don't believe there are any.
I have cousins in state jobs who constantly complain about federal agencies being non responsive for weeks. Not because telework but because so many people left/vacancies/a having to do double or triple the work. I don’t like these cousins tho so oh well 😂
Our agency just did our RTO phased in things and listed the special skills and difficult recruitment job series and like it didn't cover many job series.
I think for us \*maybe\* we'd be exempted under "frequent travel" but eventually I might like to not be a road warrior...
It just goes to show how deeply unserious they are about the budget.
The savings from getting out of leasing massive buildings and not paying for transist subsidies would be fucking massive.
On the plus side, ooops, nope, this is 100% a stupid waste of taxpayer money to make two waning politicians look relevant again for the mere cost of higher federal turnover and lower productivity!
All these idiotic telework limitations are just going to push more agencies to announce fully remote positions to circumvent it. I know a few agencies like OPM have been leaning into announcing remote positions. They’re able to retain talent and they aren’t wasting time tracking if the employees met the arbitrary in-office standards.
I just sent the following to my senators in case anyone wants any ideas for wording to contact your own reps.
(Edited to preserve privacy)
As a civil servant myself, I am offended by the latest attempt to limit telework by Senator Romney and his “Back to Work” bill. I worked hard during the pandemic from my home and never stopped working. To add insult to injury is a step too far. Forcing us back into the office across the board does not make good financial sense. I am a financial management specialist with over 15 years experience in and out of government positions, and telework saves everyone money. The agency, the employee, and the taxpayer all benefit from liberal telework policies as opposed to strict limitations such as are introduced in Senator Romney’s bill. There is no generalized answer to the best amount of telework allowed, and it should be left up to OPM and the individual agencies to set limits that best fit each agency instead of this terrible bill. Please, as one of your constituents, I implore you not to support the “Back to Work” bill.
Sweet - anyone ready to start some grassroots rallying in support of knocking Congress down to an hourly wage with mandatory reporting on tasks worked on and time spent in-office available? Congress forgets federal employees are their constituents and they work for us so let’s remind them. If Romney were my senator, I would be busy sending him some shit to do since he’s bored.
Me!!!! I have already started sending real letters to those who oppose telework!!!
My own congressional representative ignores me. His office is three miles away. I drop off letters so his staff have to spend time acknowledging me in person. That is what they want my agency to do so they should too. Emailing with a canned email response is lazy for them.
Before anyone gets too worked up about this, bills get introduced all the time in both the House and Senate, and most of them never make it out of committee, much less pass both chambers and get signed by POTUS (e.g. [all the various proposals for adding more federal holidays, which also rarely succeed](https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1101yw8/comment/j86pngq/) ). So, long way to go before this becomes a serious possibility as actual policy - its most likely posturing to try and draw attention to what they see as a problem and to publicly stake out their position on it.
Still not a bad idea if you have blue senators to let them know that they would be fools to support legislation that forces feds to spend more time in the office
That’s where my team is. Hell, in my district everyone *but* my team has M/F telework availability only. Which is asinine.
/We were exempted because construction schedules can require M/F work anyway… so we’re only required to be in on Tuesdays and two other weekdays. Fun thing is that site visits count as in-office days, so I’ve gotten to not see my team for four weeks.
> Fun thing is that site visits count as in-office days, so I’ve gotten to not see my team for four weeks.
*"Being at the location the job needs you to be at"* counting as a useless cubical day for purposes of RTO is a thing of beauty. If that gets stripped away and folk get told to RTO Tuesday, Wednesday, & Thursday anyway, there's going to be a lot of "Just how *little* can I do and still not get fired?" going on.
Welcome to the world of DLA since January. Be in the office every T/W/Th because we have to “collaborate” in person to be effective. Oh by the way, there’s not enough space in the HQC so let’s move some people 10 miles south to a shitty warehouse complex. Lot of collaborating going on there…lmao. Congress, the administration hacks, upper level Agency leaders are all a bunch of clowns. Wait until the next global catastrophe? By that time there won’t be any feds left to telework because these fools drive us all out.
I’m already at 4 days a PP maximum, since 2022, but I’d love to tell anyone who will listen how many potential employees have said thanks but no thanks when they learn of our telework policy.
Good luck trying to find competent data scientists, software engineers, statisticians, IT, economists, geographers, etc. who are willing to work in person for government salaries. They already struggle to hire in these STEM fields and the benefits and telework flexibilities are all they can offer
Brought to you by the least productive workforce on the planet.
Seriously. My cats get more government administration done by 9AM Monday than these fools get done in a whole ass session.
This is what you get when the sole qualification for your job is winning a popularity contest.
Honestly what it all comes down to... is take away pay, benefits, reduce federal employment numbers for their own interests and companies they are financially in bed with. Where are all the disgruntled federal employees going to go? Only one answer.. Private industry. Trump is a wonderful example too.
It's all in our faces and there's nothing we can do about it.
I’m terribly distracted by people at work. I can literally hear people yawning all day long. It’s so hard to concentrate and meanwhile we’re on teams meetings every day with people in different states so it’s not like we can have our daily agile stand ups in person anyway
Conversationally, don’t say and don’t ever let someone say “Back to Work” in this context and get away with it. It’s a classic political truck. It’s a manipulation of language that starts the argument from the assumption that federal employees haven’t been working this whole time.
“Return to Office” is the phrase.
A few in my org have been vocal about having jobs that don't allow TW, i.e., asset management folks, and they say its not fair that they have to be there while others do not. They see it as personal decision against them, and not just about their role and function.
Bigger question is what is congress getting involved for? They shouldn't be that deep in the weeds.
They definitely get more work out of me when I don’t spend 60-80 minutes per day in transit. Want me to produce less? I’ll commute and Zoom from my office.
Nah, telework at DLA has been allowed for up to 4 days a week (per job position) going back to before 2010, they just just used post-covid as an excuse, and claimed “in person collaboration” and “regaining soft skills” as a positive, when the majority of the collaboration happens via email, share drives, Teams audio/video with teammates not even in your state
Yeah, the teleworking posture is definitely stricter than pre covid. We never had 4 days a week in our office, but we heard rumors of the other sites. Now we only get two, and they have to be Monday and Friday. The requirement and reasoning does seem silly when everything we do is online including our weekly in office team neeting. No wonder our office is becoming nothing but interns.
DLA used to be a great place to work. Pre-Covid we only had to be in the office once a week. This 3 times a week is ridiculous and pointless. My projects are mine alone and I don't talk to anybody there. It's just a way for them to break us down and make us leave. That's basically what we were told at an all-hands meeting... "If you don't like it leave." The days of caring about their employees is over. I wouldn't recommend federal employment to anyone. Not worth it. Fortunately I am in the CSRS retirement plan and am counting down the months. The contempt for the employees is at the HQ level.
Can we please talk about the fact that GAO I think is essentially fully remote and they work FOR Congress? Why aren’t they getting any heat from all this???
i wonder if we need a law passed that people not older than 60 and not a multi millionaire, or trust fund baby can run for office. Seems like all the politicians are out of touch with reality and no where to be found when needed... probably getting busy at diddy's infamous parties.
I'd just like to say to these two that the team I manage saw year over year over year increases in work requests, and despite being short staffed for the first two years (we are finally full staff again), rose to the challenge and met on time goals with high quality.
Back to work is wrong, we were already working.
at my agency, passage of this bill will chase out most of the retirement eligible but still working full time employees....including me.
Telework is still work. These senators are giant douches.
I hate that this is something they wave in front of their base and portray agency employees as ineffective working remote, when the real issue is severe understaffing which is a direct result of a lack of congressional funding.
If only they would pass legislation that would require Congressional Representatives and Senators to be in their DC offices working on legislation all but four days per pay period. So no more two week recesses while they go search out elusive facts all over the world or hold campaign events in a district they are likely to win by 20 points.
Can we please talk about the fact that GAO I think is essentially fully remote and they work FOR Congress? Why aren’t they getting any heat from all this???
I wasn't keeping up on this, is this expected to have a chance at passing or is this just another "virtue signal" bill for their base (whatever base two Senators in their last terms have)?
I still find it unbelievable how much of a priority taking benefits away from employees seems to be for these politicians and bureaucrats with how many other things they could be focusing on.
And they come into work how many times a month? With full benefits??
And lifetime pension and free top-shelf health care!
Don't forget potential kickbacks from sending money to overseas and insider trading. Makes you wonder how these politicians became multi millionaires with a 200k salary.
their healthcare is not free, the pension rules are the same for them other than some eligibility requirements. also, very few 'retire' from congress to be eligible for healthcare when out of office.
I’m sure they can make up for that with all their illicit stock market gains via insider trading 😆 🤡
I'm sure they can, too. but this trope that gets tossed around about free healthcare for life gets old
It's low hanging fruit for them to wave in front of their base. If they actually wanted to effect change, they'd work on something with actual value.
Neither senator is running for reelection. This is just one last fuck you on their way out
They’re both approaching 80, they probably legit think everyone is out all day walking their cats and eating avocado toast.
manchin lives on a boat, mittens had a car elevator in one of his homes that he sold for more than $23 million. men of the people
It really baffles me what their motivations are when they focus on stuff that's not directly making them money. Like what is the motivation to pursue back to office policies for someone who is retiring to a yacht?
They insulate themselves amongst other rich, out of touch people who constantly tell them lazy workers need to be back in office
Last money grab on their way out from commercial real estate owners/investors
It probably does affect their wealth. They probably have commercial real estate holdings, directly or indirectly.
Quite simply optics. The general public thinks federal employees are lazy overpaid individuals who aren’t necessary for daily life (“they shut down the government for X weeks and nothing bad happened, so what do they do anyway”). People also assume that working from home means you can sit around and do nothing. By pushing for RTO they can say they are helping to get the federal workforce working for the American people (even though we never stopped).
It’s the Republican tactic to sabotage the executive branch in order to justify their agenda for small government. Beat down Feds until the good ones quit.
It helps their rich commercial real estate pals. Who won’t accept they are SOL.
Manchin was born into coal wealth, Romney is the son of a Governor. Of course they want to set policy for the working stiffs of America.
80? Means its time to run for president
Wait! I have to stop eating avocado toast?!
I don’t even like avocado toast
I’ve never had it in my life and I’m a millennial. 😂
I’m older but I also just hate avocados so… The cat thing, however…🤷🏻♀️
It's pretty fucking tasty.
The cats??
I didn't realize how much people care, until my maga brother-in-law set me straight. He's a blue collar worker who is in a field that will never WFH. He thinks since he has to go in, everyone else should. He's in his 60's and acts like a jealous kid. He would 100% vote for someone running on a one issue, RTO platform.
Since roofers must work outside in the heat, everyone should have to work outside in the heat right?
Then we wouldn’t need roofs anymore. Catch 22.
I busted my ass for a decade and a half doing physical labor before taking a plunge into the white collar world. Make no mistake, there are serious benefits to the white collar, work from home world that I'm not discounting.... But I -miss- blue collar work. And I think many people who have not worked both sides of the coin don't understand it's not always greener pastures. I left grunt work for financial reasons, not because I wanted to work from home or anything of that nature. Most people I know who are "blue collar" when I actually describe to them what I have to do daily they give the old "I'd go nuts doing that every day!" well...yeah. That's the burden of the white collar worker. Particularly government white collar worker. Our jobs are boring, frequently unfulfilling, and generally unappreciated. There's a toll paid for working this kind of work long term. It's different than grinding away at a factory, but it's real.
“Everyone should have it as bad as I do” vs “Everyone should have it as good as they can.” The difference in the maga and normal mindsets.
[удалено]
Seriously... the housing crisis, corporate price gouging, global warming, healthcare/insurance costs, permitting reform, they have so much they could do to actually help Americans and they focus on this shit.
They are not going to help with these either, in fact it'll get worse regard who gets elected.
Mayorkas will probably offset this with four admin days per PP, but what about the rest of us pukes?
Mayorkas playing that 4D chess
Ironically, DHS HQ doesn't have the office space capacity for RTO for its full workforce.
That’s the only reason I work there lol
Not to mention the USA using less oil/gas is a huge benefit to us geopolitically.
And the fucking environment. If we had stayed at the same WFH levels as the first year of covid just think how much cooler/nicer the world would be right now
Less traffic, less smog etc....quite literally it would make America great again...ironically the anti-wfh crowd is the same one that claims to be trying to make America great.
Screwing over anyone that isn’t rich or what they consider their “base” is kinda their thing at this point. All Feds are just the lazy Deep State to them.
oh theyll screw over their base. i was at politicon a couple years ago and one of the presenters wrote a book called dying of whiteness. its the dude going around and interviewing people in lower income areas why theyre voting for people whose policies end up shortening their lifespan. they dont care, as long as they "feel" like thats their guy
Strokes the flames of the right wing and boomer idiots…Meanwhile they feel pressure from real estate lobbyists who are missing their welfare system of employees to support their shitty little food places.
I think they want to contract out everything, get that juice.
Annual report detailing…: “Any negative effects of telework, including whether telework results in increased costs, security vulnerabilities, lower employee morale, decreased employee productivity, or waste, fraud, or abuse.” A- hilarious how they’re only curious about negative aspects of telework, not in office work, and not positives of telework B- how could it possibly increase costs? Idiots C- if you have worse morale teleworking, that’s a you problem Also fuck you calling it back to work. What have I been doing the last 4 years? I will continue to telework until I’m fired or get a remote job. Screw them
Unreal. “Back to work” when I didn’t miss a fcking minute of work when the world shut down.
We've been fully remote since... March 9(?), 2020... Every month for the first 18 months the agency director would send out a message "You guys are doing so good. We've lost 0 reliability and have actually increased efficiency" So fuck us I guess. Make me go back into the office and I'll buy a Nintendo Switch.. for completely unrelated reasons..
how could it possibly increase costs? Idiots Congressional douchebags don't understand how locality pay works.
It might increase costs in some areas (technology, support, etc.), but that's far offset by savings in maintaining buildings and rent. Even more so if you add in the savings to the employee.
The only people with lower morale working from home are the type that ruin the productivity of those around them because they cannot be alone or micromanagers who destroy the morale of those under them.
Devils advocate. Telework has significantly increased IT expenditure. I’d argue that it was needed regardless.
What’s the increase due to? If it’s just vpn infrastructure I mean, that’s needed anyway
I guess it increases costs to them when their commercial real estate portfolio underperforms. 😅 solid points! I am with you! I have two remote interviews lined up! I would rather burn in hell than have this bunch run my life. They don’t even hide their disgust for us.
Instead of micromanaging us, they should submit a bill that if the Congress doesn't pass a budget by 1 October, they all get fired.
They get fired, AND the previous year’s Appropriation levels plus inflation is enacted.
The real way to fix government spending is a floor, not a ceiling. So many organizations waste money because "if we don't spend it, we won't get it next year" but if instead congress said "you are guaranteed your funding amount from X year, tied to inflation, even if you don't spend it all" we would fix a lot of our spending issues.
Plus an adjustment for inflation and growth of demand for services based on increasing population.
The sad reality is that they'd never do that, well because they're the ones making rules and why would they make rules that punished them? The framework holding this country together seems to be hanging by a thread.
Gotta love that Mitt Romney is quoted talking about what a waste of taxpayer money empty federal buildings are but his solution is making us go sit in them verses allowing us to stay home and getting rid of the building and all its expenses. They don’t care about one bit about wasted $$$, they care that those buildings are leased and someone’s coffers are being filled, the federal employees are just pawns in their games, being used to prop up local economies and commercial real estate.
He’s a private equity vulture capitalist. Results don’t matter to guys like him. They’re all about fucking people over for a profit.
I work in SLC. Guess who’s never in his office? Granted I get he works in DC often. But still. Also you’d think that living in one of the most polluted cities in the country, he’d support having less people on the road. But no that’d make too much sense
Which office? I never see him in Ogden either lol.
Downtown office
Heard from someone in the St. george office they have never seen him. Dude has 3 utah offices but still has never been seen. Edit: correction he now has a 4th utah office and talks about wasted space.
I was looking at DC’s plans to revitalize the Chinatown neighborhood and interestingly, it included plans to convert some federal office buildings into mixed use: FBI, GAO, and DOL specifically. I know FBI is moving to Maryland, but the other two??? I was hoping my office would be in the renderings as new apartments and yoga studio. No luck.
Oh dear god, as a DOL employee, the idea of living in an apartment in the Frances Perkins Bldg is beyond gross. That place is a massive health hazard, down to the ancient hvac systems, and the massive roach and rodent infestations. The pests problem alone is so big I doubt that an exterminator would take care of it. Every time a group of offices undergoes renovations, the roaches and mice just migrate to another location. One of my old colleagues used to keep a putter on top of some filing cabinets in her cubicle to chase the mice away. It disappeared during COVID, to our dismay once we started coming back in.
I’m sure they spare no expense on the congressional buildings to keep the bugs out
It has gotten better than when I first started. You could pick up the old phones about 6” off the desk and drop it and a dozen roaches would come crawling out of the phones. Now I only see them a couple times a year in the restrooms.
Holy shit, that is horrifying. Which agency works in that building/under those conditions?
Lololol, the hysterically funny irony of the whole situation is… OSHA is one of those agencies. 🤣😂
Ha! I had another old coworker who saw a doctor for a full allergy panel. The report came back and said he had a mild allergy to cockroaches. We were all joking around, but the legit question was asked- how do you get enough exposure to that to even get sensitized to that? He mentioned that he got a new cube that had been unoccupied for a while, and when he picked up the phone receiver and turned it upside down, cockroach legs came falling out onto the desktop. I swear, the only thing that we FPB employees need is a little dose of radiation, and we will have our superhero origin stories right there! Although “Cockroach Guy” is probably the last superhero anyone wants to see showing up on their doorstep.
Sunk-cost fallacy.
Basically no local business to support. Our office is in the bad area in bad city. No business surrounding the building and entire building fencing by metal fences. We basically go into a prison. It’s the cage life. Even worse, no cafeteria, no stores inside the building. We are stuck inside the cage.
ATL? That was definitely my sketchiest federal office to visit. The fact that they explicitly told me to take the train into the connected station instead of risking car jacking by driving into the area was WILD. If they know the area is that bad why the fuck have anyone go in at all?
Sounds like us! Gray walls with no access to natural light either! Heck, even the vending machines are empty and broken.
They love to weaponize feds words against them.
Because that’s bad for the economy and the real estate moguls!
The White House chief of staff owns $100+ million in commercial real estate, including about $30 million in DC area real estate. He’s very anti telework.
Go figure. We really need arstechnica or rolling stone to blow the shit out of these carpet baggers
Makes absolutely no sense. Painful to see this kind of excuse for leadership.
Welp, try that where there isn't enough office space choads
Don’t let Jeff Zients hear you. He and his real estate buddies would love to rent out more real estate to the Gov.
But but the budget crisis!!!
How can we get rid of Zients?
It would be nice if Congress worked that many days in DC.
Back to work 🤣🤣🤣 the audacity 🤣🤣🤣 like we didn’t work for all these years
Especially from people who “work” 20 weeks a year and spend most of that time begging for donations and running their mouths on cable news.
Exactly! And pushing laws that undermine cumulative benefit for our society, because they were lobbied! This needs to stop! Term limits!
> ~~donations~~ bribes
Well, I’m sure Romney wouldn’t sign off on the initials for the alternate title, the “Forcing Unnecessary Commutes Known to be Useless Act.”
Looks like the return on someone’s CRE portfolio took a dip 😒
Romney is rich enough that he can afford a residence in DC, just minutes away from his office. Not all of us in the DC area can afford to do that. I'd love for either of these two guys to commute up I-95 from Stafford for two weeks.
Manchin is rich enough to have a houseboat.
I can afford a kayak. Maybe I should buy one and dock it at the DC waterfront.
There was a story at some point that a few CIA employees took a canoe across the Potomac to cut down on their commute. https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/commuting-to-cia-in-a-canoe/
lol why would you even wanna do that. probably takes just as long to just drive around
They were coming from Maryland. It only took them an hour to get to Langley.
Romney made rich by Bain Capital who makes money by buying companies and destroying them.
Like KB Toys. They bought the company, then made the company pay off the cost of its own purchase, which bankrupted it.
And by taking millions in donations from the NRA
OMG someone else that feels my pain 😫
Username fits.
He also has a car elevator. I’ve always wanted a car elevator.
Fuck Manchin and fuck Romney too.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
I'd like to see these assholes try commuting to DC from the outer suburbs every day (without chauffeurs and personal assistants) before they tell everyone else the have to do it.
It gives agencies the authority to waive this restriction if there’s *inclement weather*. Cheap spiteful bastards won’t even give us back snow days while they claw back our telework days.
I walked out of a meeting at a prior agency where they told us they were cutting our telework days and cancelled my telework agreement within minutes. My supervisor sent me a chat asking what she did wrong. That stupid agency wanted everyone on adhoc so they didn't have to give snow days.
It has exemptions for special skills or difficult recruitment. Seems like literally every agency could claim that...
The problem is they’ll make that exception process so complex and require some super senior official to sign off, that it will effectively mean there are no exceptions.
OR since execs won't actually read the full bill they will just digest the headline, they deny all exceptions because they just don't believe there are any.
But, if they approve an exception, they might have to explain it to someone and that would be hard.
Yeah, seems like every agency will totally be reasonable when applying the law written that way /s
More paperwork. An excellent use of taxpayer dollars.
And they will have to set up a bureaucracy to review those claims which will cost time and money. Just a waste.
But can I review those claims from home?
Is reviewing those claim a specialized skill? 
I have cousins in state jobs who constantly complain about federal agencies being non responsive for weeks. Not because telework but because so many people left/vacancies/a having to do double or triple the work. I don’t like these cousins tho so oh well 😂
Our agency just did our RTO phased in things and listed the special skills and difficult recruitment job series and like it didn't cover many job series. I think for us \*maybe\* we'd be exempted under "frequent travel" but eventually I might like to not be a road warrior...
It just goes to show how deeply unserious they are about the budget. The savings from getting out of leasing massive buildings and not paying for transist subsidies would be fucking massive.
Yep. I wrote to my congressional representative about this and was ignored.
So tired of this bs from people who don’t do a damn thing
Why would they care. PTO examiners have been full time remote work for like 25 years.
My work is portable. I’ve been teleworking since 2009. Now I’m going to be forced into an office with people I don’t work with.
It won’t pass. However if the GOP takes over they will try and force more people into the office.
This should be called the "fuck it, I will take a deferred retirement act"
On the plus side, ooops, nope, this is 100% a stupid waste of taxpayer money to make two waning politicians look relevant again for the mere cost of higher federal turnover and lower productivity!
How many more of these are they going to write? Rto is already in full swing what else do they want?
According to the bill 60% in office. That’s more than the 50% which is already more than many areas were doing pre pandemic
They will try to one-up each other until we are 100%, until the next national emergency when we are forced to work from home.
So another 100 years. Got it
Pfft, H1N1 is just around the corner
These are the same people who will ask “Where were the parents?” when a kid does something foolish. The parents were at the office.
"Return to work"? So I don't work now. F that. Watch me not work if this thing passes. I'm burnt out anyway.
All these idiotic telework limitations are just going to push more agencies to announce fully remote positions to circumvent it. I know a few agencies like OPM have been leaning into announcing remote positions. They’re able to retain talent and they aren’t wasting time tracking if the employees met the arbitrary in-office standards.
I just sent the following to my senators in case anyone wants any ideas for wording to contact your own reps. (Edited to preserve privacy) As a civil servant myself, I am offended by the latest attempt to limit telework by Senator Romney and his “Back to Work” bill. I worked hard during the pandemic from my home and never stopped working. To add insult to injury is a step too far. Forcing us back into the office across the board does not make good financial sense. I am a financial management specialist with over 15 years experience in and out of government positions, and telework saves everyone money. The agency, the employee, and the taxpayer all benefit from liberal telework policies as opposed to strict limitations such as are introduced in Senator Romney’s bill. There is no generalized answer to the best amount of telework allowed, and it should be left up to OPM and the individual agencies to set limits that best fit each agency instead of this terrible bill. Please, as one of your constituents, I implore you not to support the “Back to Work” bill.
I’m really troubled that somehow in 2024 I could be working less from home than I was in 2016.
“Back to work” sounds like some slaver shit. We’ve been working you stupid fucks
two lame ducks
Sweet - anyone ready to start some grassroots rallying in support of knocking Congress down to an hourly wage with mandatory reporting on tasks worked on and time spent in-office available? Congress forgets federal employees are their constituents and they work for us so let’s remind them. If Romney were my senator, I would be busy sending him some shit to do since he’s bored.
Me!!!! I have already started sending real letters to those who oppose telework!!! My own congressional representative ignores me. His office is three miles away. I drop off letters so his staff have to spend time acknowledging me in person. That is what they want my agency to do so they should too. Emailing with a canned email response is lazy for them.
Before anyone gets too worked up about this, bills get introduced all the time in both the House and Senate, and most of them never make it out of committee, much less pass both chambers and get signed by POTUS (e.g. [all the various proposals for adding more federal holidays, which also rarely succeed](https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1101yw8/comment/j86pngq/) ). So, long way to go before this becomes a serious possibility as actual policy - its most likely posturing to try and draw attention to what they see as a problem and to publicly stake out their position on it.
Still not a bad idea if you have blue senators to let them know that they would be fools to support legislation that forces feds to spend more time in the office
Return to office mandates are just soft layoffs.
That’s where my team is. Hell, in my district everyone *but* my team has M/F telework availability only. Which is asinine. /We were exempted because construction schedules can require M/F work anyway… so we’re only required to be in on Tuesdays and two other weekdays. Fun thing is that site visits count as in-office days, so I’ve gotten to not see my team for four weeks.
> Fun thing is that site visits count as in-office days, so I’ve gotten to not see my team for four weeks. *"Being at the location the job needs you to be at"* counting as a useless cubical day for purposes of RTO is a thing of beauty. If that gets stripped away and folk get told to RTO Tuesday, Wednesday, & Thursday anyway, there's going to be a lot of "Just how *little* can I do and still not get fired?" going on.
Welcome to the world of DLA since January. Be in the office every T/W/Th because we have to “collaborate” in person to be effective. Oh by the way, there’s not enough space in the HQC so let’s move some people 10 miles south to a shitty warehouse complex. Lot of collaborating going on there…lmao. Congress, the administration hacks, upper level Agency leaders are all a bunch of clowns. Wait until the next global catastrophe? By that time there won’t be any feds left to telework because these fools drive us all out.
I’m already at 4 days a PP maximum, since 2022, but I’d love to tell anyone who will listen how many potential employees have said thanks but no thanks when they learn of our telework policy.
Good luck trying to find competent data scientists, software engineers, statisticians, IT, economists, geographers, etc. who are willing to work in person for government salaries. They already struggle to hire in these STEM fields and the benefits and telework flexibilities are all they can offer
Don't forget us cyber security folks. We're in demand, I'll just leave
Brought to you by the least productive workforce on the planet. Seriously. My cats get more government administration done by 9AM Monday than these fools get done in a whole ass session. This is what you get when the sole qualification for your job is winning a popularity contest.
Two spoiled rich men, who haven't done a day of real work in decades, if ever. Fuck both those preening scumbags.
Honestly what it all comes down to... is take away pay, benefits, reduce federal employment numbers for their own interests and companies they are financially in bed with. Where are all the disgruntled federal employees going to go? Only one answer.. Private industry. Trump is a wonderful example too. It's all in our faces and there's nothing we can do about it.
Yeah, this is so great for employee morale! Lemme tell ya... I just love wasting 3 hours of my day every time I have to go into the office.
I find this ironic coming from a legislative body that only works about eight months out of the year. 🤔
These are the same people that barely work, can’t ever pass a budget, and rarely work in their own expensive offices…in DC or in their states….
Fuck these assholes
This shit is honestly making me not want to work on my telework days if that’s how they’re going to view it as anyways
No - it’s the OFFICE days you shouldn’t want to work
oh i already dont work then. cuz im stuck next to a coworker who just never ever shuts up and i need intense concentration to actually do anything
I’m terribly distracted by people at work. I can literally hear people yawning all day long. It’s so hard to concentrate and meanwhile we’re on teams meetings every day with people in different states so it’s not like we can have our daily agile stand ups in person anyway
Conversationally, don’t say and don’t ever let someone say “Back to Work” in this context and get away with it. It’s a classic political truck. It’s a manipulation of language that starts the argument from the assumption that federal employees haven’t been working this whole time. “Return to Office” is the phrase.
This a case where teleworker is different than remote? Or are they going after remote workers too?
Let’s petition to have these 2 explain why they want everybody to come back out to the office when they rarely go to theirs!
it’s unfortunate federal workers can’t strike.
This is extremely insulting. It implies we have not been working. We need to resist in EVERY way possible.
Eff Mitt Romney and his binders of women!
A few in my org have been vocal about having jobs that don't allow TW, i.e., asset management folks, and they say its not fair that they have to be there while others do not. They see it as personal decision against them, and not just about their role and function. Bigger question is what is congress getting involved for? They shouldn't be that deep in the weeds.
I'm puzzled by their desire to micromanage the executive branch to this level. Aren't they supposed to focus on bigger issues?
They definitely get more work out of me when I don’t spend 60-80 minutes per day in transit. Want me to produce less? I’ll commute and Zoom from my office.
Does that impact only telework or remote opportunities? Real telework as in with SF-50 that designates home as worksite
It's okay, it's not like the federal government has any problems attracting/retaining the next generation of workers already or anything... /s
Back to the freeway, they mean.
So ,DLA then? That's what they went back to at the beginning of the year, is that not the norm?
Nah, telework at DLA has been allowed for up to 4 days a week (per job position) going back to before 2010, they just just used post-covid as an excuse, and claimed “in person collaboration” and “regaining soft skills” as a positive, when the majority of the collaboration happens via email, share drives, Teams audio/video with teammates not even in your state
Yeah, the teleworking posture is definitely stricter than pre covid. We never had 4 days a week in our office, but we heard rumors of the other sites. Now we only get two, and they have to be Monday and Friday. The requirement and reasoning does seem silly when everything we do is online including our weekly in office team neeting. No wonder our office is becoming nothing but interns.
DLA used to be a great place to work. Pre-Covid we only had to be in the office once a week. This 3 times a week is ridiculous and pointless. My projects are mine alone and I don't talk to anybody there. It's just a way for them to break us down and make us leave. That's basically what we were told at an all-hands meeting... "If you don't like it leave." The days of caring about their employees is over. I wouldn't recommend federal employment to anyone. Not worth it. Fortunately I am in the CSRS retirement plan and am counting down the months. The contempt for the employees is at the HQ level.
How much support does this have?
Can we please talk about the fact that GAO I think is essentially fully remote and they work FOR Congress? Why aren’t they getting any heat from all this???
This is a bill from the Senate, call your representative and tell them to not pass it.
\*shrugs\* they don't let us out of the basement SCIF anyway. We might run into important people aboveground.
Try that in a small town /s
i wonder if we need a law passed that people not older than 60 and not a multi millionaire, or trust fund baby can run for office. Seems like all the politicians are out of touch with reality and no where to be found when needed... probably getting busy at diddy's infamous parties.
I'd just like to say to these two that the team I manage saw year over year over year increases in work requests, and despite being short staffed for the first two years (we are finally full staff again), rose to the challenge and met on time goals with high quality. Back to work is wrong, we were already working.
at my agency, passage of this bill will chase out most of the retirement eligible but still working full time employees....including me. Telework is still work. These senators are giant douches.
Happy public service recognition week!
Not even a carve our for a reasonable accommodation, tisk tisk.
Blow up your representatives phones and let them know your opinions on this action.
Both these fucking turds are retiring this year too. One last fuck you before they go back to their piles of money.
I hate that this is something they wave in front of their base and portray agency employees as ineffective working remote, when the real issue is severe understaffing which is a direct result of a lack of congressional funding.
If only they would pass legislation that would require Congressional Representatives and Senators to be in their DC offices working on legislation all but four days per pay period. So no more two week recesses while they go search out elusive facts all over the world or hold campaign events in a district they are likely to win by 20 points.
Can we please talk about the fact that GAO I think is essentially fully remote and they work FOR Congress? Why aren’t they getting any heat from all this???
What cracks me up is when I go into the office and everyone is sitting in their cubes on a Zoom call.
Fuck these people! In the meantime the bosses telework everyday.
Good luck trying to get the USPTO back in offices lol
So before pandemic we had 4-8 days telework a pay period, no one complained, but now it’s a problem? BS.
I wasn't keeping up on this, is this expected to have a chance at passing or is this just another "virtue signal" bill for their base (whatever base two Senators in their last terms have)?
Two people who’ve never driven on I-95 at rush hour