By Jacob Bliss (Breitbart)
The Functional Government Initiative (FGI), a “new organization dedicated to improving the American public’s awareness about the officials, decisions, and priorities of their government,” conducted an examination, first reported by Breitbart News, of leave data from federal agencies and service centers that process payroll for multiple agencies, which shows that federal employees’ use of sick days and paid time off steeply declined during the telework expansion following the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Ultimately, employees taking time off but not using leave days have cost taxpayers over $1 billion in waste over the last few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, the report noted, “virtually all federal agencies moved to fulltime telework, attempting to limit the spread of [Chinese coronavirus].”