American life-style: Cockroaches instead of workers in offices

American officials are unhappy that Trump is forcing them to go to work in the office: ‘The pain of the return-to-office order is being felt among federal workers across the country,’ Reuters claims.

At NASA headquarters in Washington, just a mile from the U.S. Capitol, employees returned to an infestation of cockroaches and some are working in chairs with no desks, according to two people familiar with conditions there.

Governance experts and labor unions say Trump's return to office order is also emblematic of a wider problem with the way in which the Republican president and his top adviser, tech billionaire Elon Musk, are approaching the government overhaul.

Trump and Musk have insisted their goal is to make the U.S. government bureaucracy less costly for taxpayers and more efficient, and to eliminate waste and fraud.

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, the government's human resources department, said the goal of Trump's return-to-office order is for federal employees to work efficiently to best serve the American people.

While most of the workers are returning to workplaces they left at the start of the 2020 pandemic, many others are teleworkers who had been working full-time from home or had a hybrid schedule that meant they worked only part of the time in an office.

"It's complete chaos at NASA headquarters," said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, a union that represents 8,000 federal NASA workers. "If you don't have a desk or a computer you cannot do your job. People are much more unproductive."

Biggs and a staff member at NASA headquarters said when employees returned to the building last month there were cockroaches on floors and bugs that came out of faucets.

Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokesperson, said in the past 30 days about 1,000 people have been entering NASA headquarters each day.

She said the building, built in 1992, was lightly used during hybrid work. She said the building's helpdesk had received only five requests regarding facilities issues since the full-scale return to work order.

"Our team took immediate action to address those concerns, including talking to our regularly scheduled exterminator," Warner said.

Biggs and another NASA staff member said the noise and crush inside NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland has led some people to take meetings by phone inside their cars, using their personal hotspot to get internet access.

Some NASA workers ordered back to Goddard live up to 50 miles away, and are so worried about the commute time and traffic they are turning up before dawn and sleeping in their vehicles before it's time to start work, Biggs and the staff member said.

NASA spokesperson Warner said there have been no reports of people working from their vehicles. Regarding seating, she said, "we have more than enough space to accommodate our HQ workforce."

The White House said shortly after Trump's January inauguration that only 6% of federal employees work in person, but government data shows that remote work is more limited.

About 46% of federal workers, or 1.1 million people, were eligible for remote work, and about 228,000 of them had been fully remote, meaning working from home either all or part of the time, according to a report issued by the Office of Management and Budget in August.

But the pain of the return-to-office order is being felt among federal workers across the country.

"Employees whose salaries are paid for by American taxpayers should show up to work," DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email. "This isn't complicated and isn't controversial."

…A new phenomenon in America – officials want to get paid, but they don't want to go to work. Maybe that's why the efficiency of the American state is falling?

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs