Advice for federal teleworkers

Hey, federal teleworkers, your days of working from home appear to be numbered.
According to the New York Post, only 6% of federal employees work in the office full time and more than a third work from home full time.
Before the Covid pandemic, only 3% of the federal workforce worked from home.
These are the findings from a scathing report by Sen. Joni Ernst that identifies a number of government inefficiencies, including various abuses among unsupervised teleworking employees.
One employee posted a video of himself taking a bubble bath during work hours.
Others conduct “meetings” from the beach or the golf course.
One clever teleworker held two full-time government jobs with two different agencies and neither agency was the wiser.
Such discoveries do not bode well for some federal employees who work from home.
That’s because President-elect Donald Trump has created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Led by billionaire businessman Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE is determined to end wasteful government spending and inefficiency — and make teleworking employees return to the office.
As a long-time teleworker in the private sector, let me offer government teleworkers some advice.
The only difference between me and federal teleworkers is that all my clients are driven to make a profit, which places a lot of pressure on me.
If my clients don’t find value in my work — if my marketing content doesn’t help them grow their business — I don’t get more work and I go broke.
But in the public sector, where there are no profits and the goal is to increase annual funding so you get paid more money, it’s best that you and your work skills remain unnoticed.
Please allow me to explain.
Look, government spending has grown unchecked for years.

You don’t spend $2 trillion a year more than the government takes in, as we’ve done the past few years, without some effort.
You don’t grow the national debt to more than $36 trillion without growing multiple government agencies, many of which are unnecessary.
Sure, there are essential government organizations tasked with defending our freedom, ensuring the rule of law and protecting our rights.
Then again, why, reports Reader’s Digest, did our government spend $500,000 to study how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese quails?
In any event, if the DOGE team is successful in shutting down unnecessary government activities, job terminations will happen.
That means the DOGE people are likely to ask you to justify your position.
You must ignore them.
Because it is the invisible federal teleworker — the one who produces no reports and never visits the office — who will survive.
Why? Because our government is so massive and disorganized — the Pentagon recently failed its 7th audit — that nobody really knows where the money is going or who is doing what.
Remember that several presidents have tried to tame government waste, but nobody has been very successful at bringing it under control.
Hopefully, for the sake of the country, the DOGE team will finally succeed. But in the meantime, hide!
Do not answer your phone or reply to work-related emails. Just disappear.
They can’t terminate you if they can’t find you.
You’ll be especially hard to find if you hide below the bubbles in your taxpayer-funded bathtub.

Copyright 2024 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.