Washington, D.C.Mayor Muriel Bowser had a message for Joe Biden in her inaugural address: please send federal workers back to the office instead of allowing them to work from home because downtown D.C. businesses are dying.
Welcome to the modern, post-pandemic world, Muriel.
Indeed, the pandemic has changed the world in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track. The fact is, many employees absolutely love working from home. It’s good for the kids, it’s good for the federal offices that are saving gobs of taxpayer money on lower overhead, and it’s good for the federal employees, who are happier and better adjusted than they used to be.
But it’s not so good for D.C.’s downtown businesses, which are dying on the vine.
There are days when downtowns in other American towns can almost look like they did before 2020. In the 9-to-5 core of Washington, though, there’s no mistaking the 2023 reality with the pre-Covid world. Streets are noticeably emptier and businesses scarcer. Crime has ticked up. The city’s remarkable quarter-century run of population growth and economic dynamism and robust tax revenues seems in danger.
Officials now privately worry about a return to the bad old days when the District, unable to pay its bills, was forced to throw itself on the mercy of Newt Gingrich’s Congress. And while some of the broad factors that caused the whipsaw change from municipal optimism to civic anxiety are beyond any local pol’s control, bringing Uncle Sam’s workers back is something denizens of D.C.’s government think mayoral cajoling might affect.
The House Republican majority has introduced the “Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems” (“SHOW UP) bill, which would “mandate that federal agencies return to their pre-Covid office arrangements within 30 days,” according to Politico. And House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) has let it be known that his committee will look into inefficiencies and other failures of telework.
Futurists have been predicting the end of work as we know it for decades, and one of the major changes was the effect on cities, with workers spending a lot less time at the office and more time at home. It’s a revolution that Bowser and Republicans may not be able to stop.
But the revolution has come to D.C. before almost anywhere else. And as Ed Morrissey of HotAir points out, it’s COVID authoritarianism that’s keeping federal employees at home.
DC, however, has remained stuck in the shutdown phase. Why? Because the city’s biggest employer is the federal government, and the federal government still claims that a COVID emergency is in place. The reason for that is obvious — Joe Biden and his team want to retain the emergency-decree authority that these continuing declarations allows them to exercise. They are still fighting in court, for instance, to reimpose vaccine and mask mandates on federal contractors and air travelers, respectively, even though we know now that (a) the available vaccines do not prevent transmission and uptake and (b) the masks don’t prevent them either in practice.
Part of that pretense involves keeping federal employees on remote work, even with 92% of the adult population now vaccinated against COVID-19. Even though it makes no sense to keep offices closed, Biden and his administration refuse to order a return to them. Heck, Kevin McCarthy only this week reversed the rule that allowed proxy voting in the House of Representatives for the last two sessions, a rule that Nancy Pelosi refused to reverse for no good reason other than providing an excuse for continued emergency rule.
Someday, the futurists’ visions of what 21st-century workplaces will look like will come to pass. But until it does, federal employees need to go back to work.
And the federal government needs to end the Hitlerian perpetual “emergency” and stop pretending that COVID is still a national crisis.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member