Evidently, 6% is good enough for government work. Cutting government waste is a major focus of Donald Trump’s upcoming administration, as illustrated by his creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), co-led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. A recent report from Senator Joni Erst (R-IA) provides the perfect first step for DOGE.

According to Ernst’s report, just 6% of all federal employees show up to work in the office full-time. The rest either split in-office time with telework or telework full-time.

Upon hearing the report, Musk marveled on X, “If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.”

This represents a massive pandemic-caused shift that has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. “Just three percent of the federal workforce teleworked daily before the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report notes. “Today, six percent of workers report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are entirely remote.”

To make matters worse, Ernst’s report states, “My audits are finding as many as 23 to 68 percent of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay. Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office and one ‘temporary’ teleworker collected higher locality pay for nearly a decade.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that more than 25% of federal employees live over 50 miles from their workplace. Furthermore, it appears that many teleworking federal employees aren’t putting in the hours. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services discovered that of its employees who were teleworking during the pandemic, 30% on any given day were not actually working. And this phenomenon was not unique to HHS.

The Patent and Trade Office, an early adopter of teleworking back in the 1990s, found that during a nine-month period, the agency shelled out $8.8 million in hourly wages for teleworking employees who had not put in the hours. Given the nature of telework, this should come as little surprise to anyone because it offers very little oversight and accountability.

This isn’t exactly shocking to anyone who’s paid attention, but a percentage of the federal workforce is milking the system.

Waste is not limited to paying government employees who aren’t putting in the hours. Much waste is associated with federal buildings that, thanks to the jump in teleworking, are not being used to capacity. Ernst pointedly notes, “The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12 percent.” She adds, “If federal employees can’t be found at their desks, exactly where are they?”

Taxpayers shell out upwards of $8 billion annually to maintain these federal office buildings, many of which are practically empty. A further $7 billion is spent on energy costs, evidently keeping the lights on for the few souls who show up to the office. According to the report, the federal government owns 7,697 vacant buildings and 2,265 partially used buildings. $15 billion is a lot to waste on empty buildings every year.

Joe Biden, who seems to have spent roughly half his presidential term on the beach in Delaware, is apparently hell-bent on making it as difficult as possible for DOGE and Trump to cut the massive waste within Washington. On the way out the door, the Biden administration signed a deal with the American Federation of Government Employees union that guarantees the 42,000 employees of the Social Security Administration will not be forced to return to work in the office upon Trump’s taking office.

While federal employees have been unionized for over a century, America has John F. Kennedy to thank for granting these federal unions collective bargaining rights with his Executive Order 10988. Ironically, it was another Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, who warned against that very action, stating, “The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”

That’s because the taxpayer is ultimately every federal government worker’s employer. And the taxpayer’s only recourse for holding government employees to account is through elected officials. If elected government officials are prevented from exercising management authority over unionized, collective-bargaining government workers, then any hope of delivering a government that meets the expectations and needs of the electorate is severely handicapped, if not entirely thwarted.

Trump definitely has a mess to clean up, but thankfully, this time around, he isn’t facing the same headwinds he was in 2016. The American people have given him a mandate to cut the fat out of Washington.