End Remote Work? Sell Government Buildings? How About Both?

UW Building Paving the Way for the Bureaucracy

So there was a huge dust-up over at the building commission this past week, with Republicans on the state building commission 86-ing an Evers administration plan to shuffle tens of millions of dollars in University of Wisconsin building funds between projects, prompting Gov. Tony Evers to claim the GOP was yanking the rug from under the UW System and Republicans to counter that the governor was pulling an underhanded bait and switch.

Three guesses which one it was, and the first two don’t count.

Among other things, Evers wanted $29 million redistributed to a planned new UW-Madison engineering building, which was suddenly gaining in such size and cost that it was almost mistaken for one of those government boondoggles that escapes from the zoo and devours an all-you-can-eat buffet of tax dollars before having to be rushed to emergency surgery, during which the boondoggle survives and the taxpayer dies.

But Republicans on the commission were on to the jailbreak and voted to delay the reallocation, though the matter will be taken up again in January and at that point the GOP could melt faster than a snowball in a microwave.

Anyway, for now they pointed out the ins-and-outs of the con artistry surrounding the engineering school project, and, man oh man, the administration’s scheming had all the earmarks of classic bureaucratic colossalization: First, they decided back in March some projects over in Eau Claire were going to cost about $70 million less than originally planned, but neglected to tell the state building commission about it for about eight months, you know, until right before they wanted to spend the money somewhere else.

Then, the UW and the administration actually came up with some concrete plans that catapulted the engineering school cost dramatically skyward, including adding a new floor, but they neglected to tell the building commission about those plans, either, until right before the vote.

In trying to sneak in an expansion of the engineering building, and by getting funds approved for one project that they knew they wanted to spend on another project, the bureaucratic colossus was actually unveiling a new stratagem for funding building and capital projects. Unfortunately for them, state Sen. André Jacque (D-DePere) caught them red handed.

First, Jacque said he was floored to discover that bids for the UW-Eau Claire project came in last March more than 20 percent below what the commission had been told and that the commission “didn’t hear a peep about it” until the week before. Plus there was the fact that the Department of Administration (DOA) and the UW had been working for months on plans to re-spend the money, but no one in the legislature was consulted.

It was a new strategy, and Jacque said he didn’t like it: “I am alarmed that approving this item could establish a precedent and an incentive for pre-bid estimates to come in higher to create cash piñatas for other agency projects.”

Precisely. The bureaucrats get one project approved for ‘x’ amount of dollars, when they know the costs will really be much lower, then ask for the “surprise” surplus to be spent elsewhere on things the commission might not otherwise approve.

You have to hand it to the bureaucrats, though—they are creative in their moral turpitude. Just when you think you have the hatches battened down on every loophole, the rats eat right through the siding and find another loop.

As for Evers, he was mad about the outcome all right. In talking about his overall plan, the governor said it was crucial that we invest in projects across the state not only to meet the needs of the 21st century but to advance “our state agencies, universities, and technical colleges …”

Note that “advancing” state agencies is as important to the governor if not more so than advancing universities and technical colleges. All this is classic Democrat and bureaucratic maneuvering to keep gouging taxpayers for ever larger government.

But then, as if into a pond on a sunny day, a penny drops from the sky, causing a ripple in the timeline...

Rip Tide

The ripple is, Evers and his administration have also been touting plans for consolidating agencies and selling off state office buildings. Under its Vision 2030 plan, the DOA said it was going to sell three state buildings—the Human Services building, the Education building, and the Natural Resources building—and, overall, save taxpayers $541 million by reducing the state office footprint.

That all sounds very un-Democrat like, but one can always hope they’ve seen the light. That optimism always lasts about three seconds, however, then come shenanigans such as that witnessed at the building commission this past week and you realize they haven’t changed at all.

So what are they up to?

Well, for one thing, they want a heavily remote workforce that disappears into the ether. It was hard enough to find an accountable bureaucrat pre-pandemic; it’s been harder still since Evers cranked up the ‘go home and play’ strategy; and it will be tougher still when they sell the buildings and forever scatter bubble-bath bureaucrats, as U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) calls them, to their spas and golf courses. Try and find someone to help you when they’re lining up for that crucial putt on the ninth hole.

It’ll be especially hard for lawmakers to keep track of them, and that’s why some state office buildings are virtual ghost towns. Remote government work is all about entrenching bureaucratic power. At least it is to bureaucratic leaders; the rank-and-file just want a get-out-of-the-office-free card.

And all that money the state will save by selling buildings? Rest assured, the Democrats won’t cut taxes but will almost surely “invest” it in things they think you need, such as costly regulations, woke education programs, DEI initiatives, and roundabouts and bike paths and grant writers. You can never have too many grant writers. And don’t forget all the technology and the security for that remote technology, or that extra floor for the engineering building.

Turns out, a lot of workers nationwide were never made to go back to the office. Half the federal workforce is still missing in action, and, as Ernst documents, no one is even checking to make sure workers are actually working or even on their computers. We don’t know how many it is in Wisconsin, but it must be a lot: A state audit of 15 agencies last year clocked the number of workstations in use at the time of auditors’ visits as between 0 percent and 34 percent.

Nice work, if you can get it.

That the shift to remote work is at the center of a new bureaucratic game was highlighted during a little tiff two weeks ago when Assembly speaker Robin Vos complained about the effective truancy. Speaking on WISN’s UpFront, Vos said: “We still have far too many employees that are working from home. We had that audit that came out over the summer. I think it was some employees hadn’t been in the office in months and months. That's really an embarrassment. So, No. 1, we need to make sure people are actually doing their job.”

This statement—in which Vos only suggested making the bureaucrats come back three or four days a week— upset Evers, likely because the idea that government employees should be doing their jobs scares the heck out of him. Either that, or the idea that lawmakers should be able to track down bureaucrats he finds insulting. Where do these Republicans get such crazy ideas?

So Evers naturally said no way, also on UpFront:

As an aside, the governor in his remarks cleverly blurred the distinction between work from home and working in an office in a remote (meaning outside of Madison) location. The idea of relocating agencies and establishing satellite offices around the state is a good one, so long as state workers actually go to them.

But that’s not remotely (pardon the word) what Evers is talking about; he’s talking about defending bubble-bath bureaucrats, and on UpFront he said he would veto the state budget if Republicans had the audacity to include a provision making those workers work from the office.

Here’s the Thing, Part 1

Here’s the thing about those work-at-home bureaucrats—they are less productive than if they were parked in an office.

For starters, it would be good to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all. There are basically two categories of government workers: regulators and service providers. The former group is made up mainly of partisan ideologues, brute enforcers, and progressive snowflakes, while the latter can be grouped into lazy charlatans and dedicated civil servants.

Yes, there are dedicated civil servants, but I’ll deny that I admitted it if you tell anyone.

Without question, the latter group of service providers should be made to work from the office. Mainly that’s because providing services means, or at least it should mean, that customers, otherwise known as taxpayers, have access to them. Even the most dedicated civil servant can’t do her or his job if the people they are serving can’t get to them.

Here’s how the office of the secretary of the Massachusetts Commonwealth put it when he ordered workers back to their desks this past year: “The standard policy of this office is that employees work at their assigned workplace. Many of our divisions are public-facing, requiring most employees to be present to accept filings in person.”

And forget the phone or Zoom. Here’s how state Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander), a member of the building commission, put it earlier this year:

Over in Idaho, a bill to limit work from home to 15 percent for state employees died, but the state itself still established a policy limiting it to 20 percent. Why? Because they were getting so many complaints from residents about bad service delivery. Working from home for these types is so nonproductive that even Zoom, the company largely responsible for making all this remoteness possible, forced its own workers back to the office at least two days a week last year.

As for the lazy charlatans, it’s tough enough making those bureaucrats work when they are in the office. Turn them loose at home and what you have is one day-long Mocha espresso break, interrupted by nap times and those bubble baths.

It’s worse in the government sector, but all this goes on in the private sector, too, which is why the current trend in the private sector is to order employees back to the office. Naturally, our state government heads in the opposite direction. The fall-off in productivity—multiple studies show it is at least 10 percent for fully remote work—led David Sacks, the former PayPal executive and now advisor to President Trump, to say last year that it was time to admit that remote work simply doesn’t work.

“WFH [Work From Home] Friday is a four-day work week. Full WFH is a two-day workweek. When people are not in the office, every interaction has to be planned in advance. And that means a lot of information-sharing doesn’t happen. Remote is a great lifestyle, not a way to build a great company.”

Unfortunately, enforcers and regulators and rule-writers are also far more productive in the office. They are the most hive-minded, and as such they need the bureaucratic environment to live and thrive. The most devious regulatory schemes aren’t dreamed up in a vacuum, or while doing whatever it is you’re doing during your Zoom meeting, no, the schemes that most wreck lives and make people miserable are born in musty cubicles of camaraderie.

After all, misery loves company, and making misery for others requires even more company. The truth is, a lot of the regulators are still in the office, scheming. But many of them shouldn’t be. As lower level regulators and service providers are made to return to the office, there should be a long line of regulators filing out the door on the other side.

But not to work at home.

Here’s the Thing, Part 2

What the Evers administration is hiding in all this talk about defending remote workers and selling buildings is not just the ulterior bureaucratic motives behind it—enhanced unaccountability and a bloated workforce—but the fact that far more buildings and facilities could be sold than the governor is letting on.

First, an inability to track how much remote work there is translates into an inability to determine how much office space there needs to be. Indeed, in the legislative audit bureau audit of remote work released late in 2023, the auditors all but threw up their hands, confessing that they simply couldn’t track who was working remotely and who was not: “The precise extent to which employees worked from the office was not known.”

Among other things, there was agency complacency when it came to compliance. The audit reported that “state agency-specific procedures were not fully compliant with policies and standards” and a review at 10 state agencies found that there were 36 concerns in the four areas reviewed. The data the auditors did have indicated that 3,439 employees used their key cards an average of 1.3 days per week from January 1, 2023, through June 2, 2023, at four buildings where they were headquartered, indicating that “at least some employees may not have worked in the office as frequently as expected, based on their agreements,” the audit reported.

Likely, the administration does not want auditors or lawmakers to know exactly what’s going on because buried in the audit was this nugget: The bureau’s analysis indicated that “the state could consider additional consolidation of office space beyond the amount anticipated by the Department of Administration’s (DOA’s) Vision 2030.”

In other words, the audit guesstimates of how much excess space there is, and the administration’s rush to look good by selling buildings, doesn’t even begin to tell the story of how many buildings could be jettisoned. Not to mention workers. And the building commission fiasco last week showed everyone that Democrats are not really about reducing infrastructure through remote work but about playing a zero-sum game for the palace loungers of the administrative state.

The logic and the math add up. Right off the top, because those who work at home are far less productive, as multiple studies show, by returning workers to the office the state could slash 10 to 20 percent of its work-at-home workforce and not lose any more productivity that it already has.

Then, too, as Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) has observed, slashing bloated administrative overhead, particularly in the UW System, could open the door to further staff reductions and then to further infrastructure reductions. And how about cutting regulations? Truly reining in regulations would allow many of the enforcers who write and implement and enforce rules to be liberated to pursue infinite bubble baths and rounds of golf. Start with the most poorly performing of the work-at-home regulators.

With audit in hand and with Evers’s true motives exposed by the building commission, the legislature needs to sort out exactly who is working at home and who is not and then begin to bring the workforce back sooner rather later. Vos was right to push the point. And accountability is not impossible, it’s the will that’s lacking. As Ernst pointed out in her federal report, employees’ locations and work product can be monitored via virtual private networks (VPNs), office swipe-ins, and network traffic, and tracking employees’ locations and work products can identify poor performers.

Then lawmakers can truly determine what buildings can be sold. The overall savings by pursuing both staff reductions and building sales would likely swell far beyond Evers’s projected half-billion in savings, maybe well beyond several billion dollars.

With the private sector now souring on remote work, with the nation now literally having voted for fewer regulations, and armed with the audit and the tools necessary to fulfill the mission of ordering the audit in the first place, the legislature is primed to make historic cuts by bringing back the a smaller, leaner workforce to state buildings, and selling the surplus buildings.

But remote work has served one useful purpose. It has shown us just how useless many state workers were. Now is the time to get rid of them, and the buildings they once occupied.