WASHINGTON—Last year, with Democrats running the Senate, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, pursuing party myths about lazy, overpaid federal workers, cosponsored legislation demanding counting their telework and evaluating its efficiency. Now she wants to evict thousands of them.
Never mind that studies of workers who have hybrid half-office half-home schedules after the coronavirus pandemic show the employees are actually more efficient than before. Never mind that almost seven out of every eight federal workers toil outside metropolitan D.C.
Ernst assumes that’s all a lie. Her bill also mandates “agency reports which shall include a description of the adverse effects of telework policy on the performance of the executive agency.” Note she demands only negatives.
Now, with the GOP in charge, Ernst’s not stopping with counting teleworkers. She wants to evict 30% of headquarters staffers among the approximately 300,000 federal workers in the metro D.C. area from the nation’s capital and close that same share of federal offices in the city.
“I will be leading the fight in the Senate to disrupt the business-as-usual bureaucrats who spent the last four years out of office. The federal workforce has shown they clearly don’t want to work in D.C., and I am going to make their dreams come true,” her press release on the legislation trumpeted. She’s not the only critic.
And if workers don’t quit, Ernst’s legislation says, they must move to new sites within three months at their own expense. And their pay will be cut because they won’t get higher “locality pay” they now receive for living in a high-cost area. And all this is supposed to occur within a year.
Needless to say, unions and workers don’t like her scheme, or those of other ruling Republicans.
The Government Employees (AFGE) posted “Myths and Facts” about federal workers on its website, in advance of its legislative conference in February. The union says the GOP onslaught is “an attempt at tarnishing civil servants and to make it easier to contract out their jobs to for-profit corporations.” While the government employs two million workers, contractors—everyone from janitorial firms to civilian computer specialists for the Navy—employ about 2.8 million.
Among the myths: “All the federal workers live and work in the D.C. area,” when 85% don’t. “There are too many workers,” when workforce numbers grew only 6% over the last 50 years. A third is that they’re overpaid, lazy bums, when non-partisan studies show federal workers lag 25% behind private-sector counterparts with the same education and experience.
“We believe that facts matter, and AFGE will continue to debunk these misconceptions as they come in,” the union says.
Ernst not alone
Ernst isn’t the sole right-winger who’s used the opening days of the new Congress to once again make the nation’s two million federal workers their favorite piñatas.
And in his prior White House term, Republican President-elect Donald Trump threw three agencies out of D.C. He moved the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation to Lakewood, Colo.
Trump transferred two Agriculture Department science-oriented agencies, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, to Kansas City, over the protests of the workers and AFGE. Many workers quit, decimating both.
“There was definitely antagonism within the Trump administration towards federal workers,” Tom Bewick of USDA’s agriculture institute told National Public Radio then. “There was also hostility in the Trump administration towards science, and so, if you were a federal employee and a science agency, that was the double whammy.”
Trump wants to do it again, and force other workers to resign, again, Governing reports. Other Republicans are joining anew in the party’s anti-fed crusade.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., reintroduced two anti-worker bills. They’re significant because he’s the new chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which writes labor legislation. Cassidy displaces the Senate’s longest and strongest supporter of workers, Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt.
One Cassidy bill would let all federal workers telework once a week, at the cost of a pay cut for workers in high-cost areas, such as D.C. Their extra “locality pay” would be eliminated, costing each one thousands of dollars a year. The other would eliminate counting the locality pay as part of the pay base—the highest three years of a worker’s career earnings—for calculating her pension. The average pension pays $2,126 monthly.
Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., would impose a one-year federal pay freeze and a three-year cap on hiring, regardless of vacancies, retirements or workload. Tenney would also establish so-called “merit pay” at the discretion of bosses. The top of three tiers of workers would get 10% hikes and added perks. The middle would suffer a pay freeze. The lowest tier of workers would suffer 10% cuts.
There are, however, two ideas missing, so far, from the Republicans’ anti-worker crusade. One is to trash the federal workers and then do the same thing to the private sector. Right-wing Heritage Foundation ideologues within Trump’s White House during his first term floated that. It went nowhere.
The other missing idea is to “drain the swamp”—the Republicans’ pet phrase—by moving the capital itself. Oh, wait, Rep. Halbert Paine, R-Wis., tried that…157 years ago.
Paine claimed moving would put the capital closer to the center of the country. He actually wanted to tear down the White House and Capitol and other main buildings, block by block, and ship them westwards to St. Louis for reassembly. What Paine didn’t say was that D.C., even then, was a top urban destination for citizens of color.
Amidst ridicule from Eastern lawmakers, Paine’s plan failed in an 1868 House vote, 77-97.
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