Sen. Ernst launching series of bills to move federal workers out of DC
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EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, is going to be introducing legislation to relocate federal workers from Washington, D.C., to other areas across the U.S. as part of her efforts to fix what she says is a broken government bureaucracy.
The Iowa Republican will introduce the first of those bills, obtained exclusively by FOX Business, on Thursday.
The legislation, dubbed the "Returning SBA to 5 Main Street Act," would move nearly a third or more of the employees at the Small Business Administration's (SBA) Washington, D.C., headquarters (HQ), to duty stations outside the D.C. metro area.
The bill reduces SBA’s HQ office space and "100 percent telework" ability, by moving at least 30 percent of HQ employees into various regions across America and reducing HQ office space by an equal amount. It comes after the SBA stated that even if 100% of SBA employees came in-person to the Washington, D.C., HQ, only 67 percent of SBA’s HQ capacity would be used.
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Ernst's new legislation also follows a September Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee hearing on the impact of telework to SBA services, during which a witness from Iowa detailed how they had an extremely difficult time getting in touch with anyone at the agency.
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"Ask any small business owner — if your customers can’t reach you, your doors won’t be open very long," Ernst told FOX Business. "The SBA is supposed to serve Main Street, but there might as well be a ‘closed for business’ sign up at the agency because it is nearly impossible to reach anyone with all the bureaucrats permanently out of office."
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She added, "I can think of no better way to help the SBA connect with the people it serves than to take some of the employees out of Washington and relocate them across the country."
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, speaks during a news conference following the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Ernst is founder and chair of the Senate's "DOGE" caucus, which supports the efforts of the incoming Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency co-led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have vowed to force teleworking federal employees to return to the office. But the GOP lawmaker has been on the warpath against government workers "abusing" telework for years.
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Last week, Ernst released a report claiming the federal government has a "chronically absent workforce," and called for relocating federal workers out of D.C., implementing a "use it or lose it" approach to government real estate, and tracking individual workers' productivity and tying it to their privilege to telework.