Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg blasted the Biden administration for not following through on a pledge to get federal workers back to their offices — which has turned Washington into a ghost town.
“The pandemic is over,” Bloomberg wrote in a scathing op-ed for the Washington Post.
“Excuses for allowing offices to sit empty should end, too,” added the billionaire co-founder and CEO of the financial media company that bears his name.
Bloomberg, who made a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, took a shot at the party’s leader for allowing federal offices to remain empty.
The former three-term mayor cited President Biden’s March 2022 State of the Union address, in which he promised that “the vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
However, Biden only announced the end to the COVID health emergency this past May 11 — the same day federal workers were no longer required to be vaccinated.
Washington “remains a shadow of its former self,” Bloomberg wrote, blaming the shift on “too many federal employees [who] continue working from home.”
Several federal agency headquarters have occupancy averaging less than 10%, including the Agriculture Department, the General Services Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration, according to the GAO.
“In other words: Federal offices are mostly empty,” Bloomberg said, noting that taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for empty floor space and the cost of maintenance at federal agencies’ offices.
“At some agencies, employee absences have negatively affected customer service. This has gone on too long.”
Democratic DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has also urged “decisive action by the White House” for a return-to-office mandate, Bloomberg noted.
Bloomberg’s company requires staffers to work from its Midtown Manhattan offices at least three times per week — and he said the news outlet will up its return-to-office mandate an additional day in the fall.
“At Bloomberg, for more than a year, we have been asking employees to work in our offices at least three days a week,” he wrote. ‘There will always be a need for exceptions, of course, but more than 80% of our people have been meeting the standard.”
Representatives for Bloomberg did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Nationwide, 59.1% of workers report to an office five days a week, according to a report published by Forbes in June.
However, 65% of workers would prefer to work from home all the time, the outlet found.
Bloomberg argued that not reporting to an office, especially for young people just starting their careers, “hurts their professional development and prospects for career growth — and the future of the organization, too.”
“Overall, there’s no good reason why government workers have been so much slower than everyone else to get back to the office at least a few days a week, especially when so many jobs — from social services to law enforcement — require people to be present,” he wrote.
Bloomberg concluded the piece with a call to action for Biden to give taxpayers “hard deadlines” on when he expects staffers at federal agencies to be in the office full-time.
“The federal government should lead by example, and the president should keep his promise.”
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