Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) arrived to a hearing of the House Oversight Committee this week with what were evidently a lot of complaints about the general conduct of members of the federal workforce, attempting to depict some of these members of government staff as essentially slackers.
That’s not really an exaggeration. In conversation with the current leader of the Office of Personnel Management in the White House, she went on (and on), raising complaints like about the supposed prospect that significant amounts of the federal workforce aren’t participating in work, either in person or remotely. For remote work, she alleged some might be claiming they’d be doing such a thing while actually going on vacation.
“Normal vacation days no longer have to be reported in the traditional sense under agency telework policies,” Boebert claimed. “Allowing employees to claim that they will be teleworking and instead, well they’re spending all day at a swim-up bar in Cabo. With over 25 percent of department employees not logging into work… are the American taxpayers paying bureaucrats thousands of dollars to vacation under the guise of agencies’ telework policies?”
That’s where a real kicker factored into the conversation. A document that Boebert was citing for her claims about how many workers — specifically at the Department of Health and Human Services — weren’t participating in the job reflected a period of time when Donald Trump was still president. Kiran Ahuja, who Boebert was questioning, wasn’t in her present position at that time, as officials like those administering federal staffing and dealing with the White House’s budgetary moves ordinarily change with administrations. “Well Congresswoman, I actually take issue with the characterization that there’s a change in policy,” Ahuja replied. “I’ll tell you at OPM, individuals have to document their hours every pay period, and so I’m not aware of the policy change that you’re speaking about.”
Boebert’s idea is apparently that people can be secretly taking so-called vacation days while supposedly participating in telework, although the whole point of what distinguishes working remotely from doing so in an office is that you can do it from wherever. With some staff able to get compensation for unused vacation days, she was apparently imagining some kind of kickback was available if secretly taking trips and leaving formal vacations unused — but does she think one-third of the entire federal workforce could be not doing anything, because they forgot or didn’t care while on these feared trips, and nobody would notice? “You’re basing that from 2020, which is in the last administration, and I can’t speak to that particular incident,” the official added to Boebert of her specific claims about the number of federal employees supposedly not working.
Check it all out below:
