We Need To Talk About The Changing Office Landscape. The GOP Would Rather Talk About Hunter Biden's Dick.

It's impossible to govern with a pack of lunatic saboteurs.

Your Wonkette gives Politico a lot of shit — mostly deserved! — but props to senior editor Michael Schaefer for his Capital City column in this weekend's magazine. His piece on the rift over DC office space gets to the heart of a complicated issue and the impossibility of addressing it while Republicans control any part of the federal government.

The piece centers around comments made by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser when she was sworn in for a third term on January 2. Announcing a goal to add 100,000 residents downtown, quintupling the area's population, she offered a mild rebuke of the executive branch, currently led by a member of her own party.

"The federal government represents one quarter of DC’s pre-pandemic jobs and owns or leases one third of DC’s office space," she said. "We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by non-profits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it."

The mayor is in a rough spot. With so many federal employees working from home, downtown offices are empty, and the knock-on effects for the District are severe. Businesses catering to commuters are closing, revenue from mass transit is down, and crime is up because there's no one on the streets. And because Republicans continue to block DC statehood, Bowser can't enact policy solutions like a normal state executive — she's dependent on the executive branch and Congress, which is half the time controlled by nihilistic loons who use the majority Black city as a punching bag.

As Schaefer points out, this puts Bowser on the same side as Republicans who demand that federal employees return to the office full-time now that Covid restrictions have largely been lifted. Rep. James Comer, that nutjob House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put in charge of Oversight, made it clear that he doesn't give a shit about telework — he just wants to use the issue of flexible working arrangements to embarrass the Biden administration.

“President Biden’s unnecessary expansion of telework crippled the ability of departments and agencies to fulfill their responsibilities and created cumbersome backlogs," he blustered, adding that he is "seeking information from the GSA regarding reports indicating Administrator [Robin] Carnahan was routinely absent from her Washington office. Biden Administration officials must lead by example and work in person for the American people.”   

Yeah, that's the same party hot to defund the IRS so it cannot possibly stop rich people from cheating on their taxes, while simultaneously blocking Biden from lifting Covid restrictions at the border to justify summary expulsion of migrants. They're full of shit.

Sure, there were delays in service at the beginning of the pandemic when everything shut down. (Who was president then?) But if there were any evidence that longterm telework caused "cumbersome backlogs,” that gas bag Comer would have cited it. Here on Planet Earth, there's a mountain of data showing that employees are no less productive working remotely. And, as Schaefer points out, federal workers are paid less than private sector employees, meaning they likely can't afford to live in the District. So if we want to keep them from taking their skills elsewhere, we have to compensate them some other way .

Spoiler Alert: Republicans do not want to keep government employees working. They want to blow up the government, and then say, "See, that shit never works, guess we should cut taxes so our rich donors will love us more."

That's not a governing philosophy. That's a plan to retain power as a minority party by watching what Democrats do and immediately taking the opposite position, even on stuff like public health where it results in the death of tens of thousands of their own supporters. These are not partners in government — they're saboteurs.

And meanwhile, telework isn't going away. It's very clear that there's not going to be a return to five-day, full-time, in-office work for knowledge employees. Everyone answers email (or Slack DMs) all day and night long. We take work calls on the sidelines of our kids' soccer games. We have Zoom meetings with people five time zones away, long after our office is theoretically closed. We are functionally living at work, and it's preposterous to pretend that there's going to be a return to some pre-pandemic "normal."

We will have to figure out what to do with all those empty office buildings hulking over America's downtown cities. And yet we're paralyzed because half the time the government is controlled by a bunch of freaks who want to talk about Hunter Biden's dick pics instead of crafting policy.

It's a problem. Maybe we should just scream about Antifa and unwed mothers, then call it a day — you know that's what Republicans would do.

[ Politico ]

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