By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Congressman Sam Graves wants federal employees to return to the office.
Graves, a Republican who represents northern Missouri, chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee which oversees all federal public buildings. Graves says the federal government hasn’t required employees allowed to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic to return to the office.
“Right now, all of our buildings out there are occupied at somewhere between, depending on the agency, at 9 or 18%,” according to Graves. “And they don’t want to come back to work.”
Graves says not having anyone in the office is causing some very real headaches.
Graves says the federal government has a huge backlog of passport applications, because the Department of State doesn’t have workers in the office to process requests. Graves says, in response, his office has dedicated one staff member to help with constituents waiting for their passport applications to be approved.
“We have one person just solely doing passports, because they won’t come back to work,” Graves says. “They’re doing all this from home and it’s just simply not working. That’s the reason we have this huge backlog in passport issuance, because we can’t get them to come back to work.”
Graves calls the problem within governmental agencies an unintended consequence of the federal government’s COVID policy.
Graves says governmental agencies simply cannot keep up with their workload on a timely basis when few employees are actually in the office. He points out those agencies assign certain employees to venture to the office periodically to gather mail, check on any correspondence that might have come into the office, and begin processing requests. The Congressman says that simply isn’t adequate.
“Because what they do is they come in once a month and they take down their messages,” Graves says. “They do this in the FAA. They take down the messages and they get back to them. It takes another month to get back to them to work through all the messages on their answering service. It’s a problem. It’s a huge problem.”
Graves says Congress is powerless to address the problem. Graves says it’s up to the Biden administration to fix the problem.