(PatriotWise.com)- According to internal papers, over 25% of Department of Health and Human Services employees failed to log on to the organization’s software, including their email, work files, video conference calls, and other programs required to complete remote work.
The report, which Brian Harrison, the then-HHS chief of staff, ordered, evaluated how inactive employees were daily between March 2020 and December 2020. According to the records, all HHS personnel had safe access to these accounts to work remotely, portions of which were disclosed by a whistleblower to the Functional Government Initiative.
In recent months, federal employees have started to return to work, but the Biden administration has looked into methods to make pandemic telework policies permanent. The initiative has the support of House Democrats, who on Wednesday passed a bill that would mandate agencies to notify Congress and the Office of Personnel Management in advance if they want employees to return to the office.
In the early months of the pandemic, Harrison, a current Republican state representative in Texas, claimed he began to worry that lax telework policies were causing workers’ production to be ineffective. In 2020, he claimed to have started keeping track of employee attendance and discovered that, in some instances, fewer than 10% of workers were present. He investigated how much remote work employees were doing in-depth due to his discovery.
The report’s findings were not made available to Harrison until January 2021, one week before the Biden administration started office. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order that required government employees to wear masks and instructed agencies to research new telework practices. Days later, a directive that read: “Every effort will be made to maximize the use of remote work during extensive community transmission” was put into effect by the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for overseeing the operations of all federal agencies.
In May, House Republicans filed a bill that would reinstate the pre-pandemic telework standards for federal employees and mandate that agencies produce a report on the results of their telework policy since 2020. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-NM), stated that the Biden administration must convince taxpayers of the need for increased telework.
According to Functional Government Initiative communications director Peter McGinnis, the Biden administration’s promotion of unneeded telework has hurt taxpayers.
HHS has more than 80,000 employees and has asked for a $1.7 trillion mandated budget for 2023.
We tried to contact the Biden administration about slacking workers and the wasteful spending of make-work
