Here’s more evidence that the COVID pandemic was a massive vacation for hundreds of thousands of federal workers

The United States government takes in so much money, is so massive, and so bloated that there literally is hardly any effort at all to make employees accountable.

That fact was laid bare again recently by a report in the Washington Free Beacon pertaining to federal worker behaviors during the years-long COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ which, for hundreds of thousands of them turned out to be a massive paid vacation.

“In the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, a quarter of employees at the federal government’s top health agency failed to even check their emails as they worked remotely, according to internal documents” obtained by the outlet.

And if this occurred at one federal agency, you can be sure it occurred at nearly all of them (of which there are currently 432).

The outlet continued:

An estimated 25 percent of Department of Health and Human Services employees neglected to log on to the agency’s software suite, which includes their email, work files, video conference calls, and other applications needed to perform remote work, according to the internal documents. The report, commissioned by then-HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison, measured employees’ inactivity on a day-to-day basis between March 2020 and December 2020.

The documents, portions of which were leaked by a whistleblower to the Functional Government Initiative and reviewed by the Free Beacon, state that all HHS employees had secure access to these accounts to work remotely.

Federal employees started returning to their offices only in recent months, well after most private sector businesses required their workers to return to their jobs. However, the Biden regime is looking at ways to make as many federal positions remote as possible.

Congressional majority Democrats advanced legislation last week on a measure that requires agencies to provide advance notice to both Congress and the Office of Personnel Management if they want to require workers to return to their offices.

Harrison, who is now a GOP congressman from Texas, told the Free Beacon that he began to become concerned in the earliest months of the pandemic that lax, remote work policies would lead to inefficiency among federal workers (and he appears to have been right). He also noted that he began to track in-office attendance and discovered that fewer than 10 percent of federal workers showed up to work in person at certain points during the first year of the pandemic, 2020. That led him to conduct a more thorough review of remote work to see how many federal employees were not in offices and what kind of work product they were turning out.

“Almost everyone was home at the federal health agency responding to a pandemic—I found that problematic and worked to safely increase those numbers,” Harrison told the Free Beacon. “Biden sent everyone back home, and you can’t run HHS like that effectively.”

Peter McGinnis, the communications director for the Functional Government Initiative, told the outlet that the Biden regime’s push for unnecessary telework has really harmed American taxpayers who foot the bill for salaries.

“Work from home? Perhaps not working at all,” McGinnis told the Free Beacon. “Sadly, this dysfunction now threatens the health of mothers and children.”

The problem is so serious that House Republicans, who are looking to regain congressional majorities in the fall midterm elections amid Biden’s horrible term, introduced legislation last month that reestablishes pre-pandemic telework policies for federal employees and would require federal agencies to submit a report on how telework has impacted their policies and productivity since 2020.

Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.), the bill’s sponsor, said the regime must be made to justify the need for keeping federal workers at home.

“Extending pandemic-era telework for no good reason hurts Americans who need in-person attention and care,” Herrell told the Free Beacon. “The first priority of public employees should be to serve their employers, the American people.”

Sources include:

FreeBeacon.com

NaturalNews.com