Published at The Wall Street Journal

Working from home every day is a fading memory for most Americans, but it’s become a permanent perk of government work, leaving federal offices vacant. Some lawmakers want to give agencies two options: Call your staff back in or sell off wasted space.

Mass government telework has been costly and sometimes crooked. At the Commerce Department, nearly a quarter of sampled employees continued to claim residence in Washington or other pricey cities after moving to less expensive places, which let them keep a higher pay level. Sen. Ernst has catalogued cases of federal employees golfing, taking bubble baths and even sitting in jail on Uncle Sam’s time.

Yet the Biden Administration has stonewalled attempts to learn the scale of the problem. The nonprofit watchdog Open the Books requested location data for federal workers under the Freedom of Information Act. The Administration returned a document with 281,000 redactions, making it impossible to know how many workers even claim they’re still in the capital.

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