Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa introduced a package of legislation Tuesday seeking to move over a quarter of federal bureaucrats out of the Washington, D.C. area and address issues with remote work.
The package of legislation includes a bill known as the Decentralizing and Reorganizing Agency Infrastructure Nation-wide To Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration, and Management Practices Act (DRAIN THE SWAMP Act), a bill known as the Requiring Effective Management and Oversight of Teleworking Employees Act (REMOTE Act) and a bill called the Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement (SWAMP) Act. Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the package would improve service for Americans while saving billions of dollars and address abuses of telework.
Ernst introduced versions of these bills during the 118th Congress, but they died when that Congress adjourned Friday.
My report exposes rampant telework abuse in Washington and around the country.@DOGE and I will be giving bureaucrats a simple choice – get back to work or be fired. #MakeEmSqueal pic.twitter.com/DfwlT2w3HR
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) January 2, 2025
“It is week one of Republican control in Congress, and I am already working hard on my top priorities – to drain the swamp, save tax dollars, and get federal employees back to serving the American people,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “While DOGE stands ready to clean house, 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.”
The DRAIN THE SWAMP Act requires most government agencies to “promote geographic diversity, including consideration of rural markets” when relocating employees from the D.C. area and to “ensure adequate staffing throughout the regions of the Administration, to promote in-person customer service.” Exceptions are made for fewer than ten agencies, most involved in national security, like the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy.
The SWAMP Act would move the headquarters of multiple government agencies outside of Washington, D.C., with exceptions for fewer than ten agencies, most involved in national security or foreign policy.
The REMOTE Act addresses issues with government employee telework, which Ernst previously identified in a 60-page report published Dec. 5. Ernst, in August 2023, sent letters to 24 agencies regarding remote work abuses and cited one report revealing that a Department of Veterans Affairs employee attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath, and another which found that a government employee went “golfing on the taxpayer’s dime.”
My 2025 New Year’s resolution is to put Washington on a permanent diet.
Time to trim $2 trillion in excess waste with @DOGE.
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) January 2, 2025
Previous investigations by Ernst into federal employees’ telecommuting detailed issues that remote work created, such as locality pay, an adjustment to the basic pay of civilian employees in the federal government intended to make sure that federal employees have comparable compensation to private-sector counterparts in a given area of the country.
In another case cited by Ernst, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employee received locality pay for the Washington, D.C., area despite living full-time in Florida. The employee in question retired before the conclusion of the probe, according to a summary posted on the USAID inspector general’s site on April 30.
President-elect Donald Trump recently said that remote federal employees who do not want to return to the office will be “dismissed” in his upcoming administration. The newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy also promised to pursue a mandatory return-to-office policy across the federal government.
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