Remember when federal employees were “working from home” during COVID and we were told everything was fine? Productivity was up, actually. The future of work had arrived. Anyone questioning it was a dinosaur who didn’t understand modern employment.
Yeah, about that.
The War Department’s Inspector General just dropped a report revealing that Biden-era telework policies wasted at least $665,000 in improper locality pay alone. But here’s the kicker—they admit the actual number is almost certainly much higher because the Pentagon literally couldn’t track who was working and who wasn’t.
Nobody Was Keeping Records
The War Department was “unable to reliably determine how many employees were teleworking.” That’s a direct quote from the report. The agency responsible for national defense couldn’t tell you which of its civilian employees were actually showing up.
Why? A complete collapse of basic recordkeeping. Individual agencies within the department developed their own policies. Employees used wrong timesheets. Remote workers weren’t properly coded. The whole system was a mess designed—whether intentionally or not—to make accountability impossible.
In one case, a single employee received incorrect locality pay for four straight years. The error was only discovered when investigators started asking questions. “After we requested supporting documentation for this employee, DCSA HR personnel noted that this was an error,” the report says. Four years of overpayment, and nobody noticed until someone came looking.
The $665,000 Floor
That $665,000 figure is just what investigators could definitively prove. The report explicitly warns it’s an undercount.
“If a remote work employee was not using the proper Remote Work timesheet code in their timesheet or took leave during the pay period, they were not included in our review,” the OIG explained. “Consequently, the number of employees receiving the incorrect locality pay could potentially be much greater.”
Translation: we only caught the people who were obvious. Everyone else who gamed the system more carefully got away with it. For now.
Bubble Baths and Golf Courses
Senator Joni Ernst launched this investigation back in August 2023 after reports emerged of federal workers doing anything but working. One VA employee attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath. A Patent and Trademark Office employee received $25,000 while spending over 730 hours at golf courses and happy hours.
These weren’t isolated incidents. They were symptoms of a system with zero accountability.
“From bubble baths to the beach and beyond, I’ve been warning that Biden’s bureaucrats were everywhere except the office,” Ernst said. “The days of federal workers missing in action at the expense of hardworking taxpayers is coming to an end.”
Ernst shared her findings with Elon Musk when he headed the Department of Government Efficiency early in Trump’s second term. The crackdown that followed wasn’t random—it was informed by exactly this kind of documented waste.
The Pentagon Can’t Pass an Audit
Ernst pointed out the obvious connection: “If the Pentagon can’t keep track of its personnel or our tax dollars, no wonder it can’t pass a clean audit.”
The Defense Department—now the War Department under the Trump administration’s reorganization—has failed its audit every single year since audits became mandatory. Trillions of dollars flow through an organization that cannot account for where the money goes.
Telework fraud is a symptom of that larger disease. When nobody’s checking, nobody’s accountable. And when nobody’s accountable, waste becomes inevitable.
The Biden Resistance
The report notes that during the Biden administration, “some agencies refused to send data” when Ernst requested information about telework policies. They stonewalled oversight for years, knowing what investigators would find if they actually looked.
That obstruction alone tells you everything. Agencies confident in their practices don’t refuse to share data. Agencies hiding something do.
Now the data is finally coming out. And it confirms what taxpayers suspected all along—millions of federal employees weren’t working from home. They were just not working.
Showing Up Is Half the Battle
Ernst put it simply: “Showing up is half the battle, and Biden’s bureaucrats were in full retreat.”
The telework experiment proved something important. Not that remote work can’t function in certain contexts—it can. But that remote work without accountability, without tracking, without consequences for abuse, becomes a license to steal.
Federal employees in Washington receive locality pay based on the high cost of living there. But if you’re “working” from a beach house in Florida while collecting D.C. wages, that’s fraud. And under Biden’s policies, nobody was checking.
The $665,000 in documented waste is embarrassing. The unknown millions more that slipped through is infuriating. And the four years it took to catch a single employee’s pay error tells you everything about how seriously the previous administration took stewardship of your money.
At least now someone’s finally counting.