‘You Can’t Make This Up’: Ernst Says Remote Workers Came Back Only To Protest Returning To Office

According to Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst, some federal employees who were forced to go back to work rather than work from home showed up at work only to protest being there.

“We actually had workers that showed up at the office to protest having to come back to work at the office,” she told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “So we’re finding all kinds of things with the DOGE work, the SQUEAL work that I have done for ten years, and thank goodness we have President Trump and DOGE, the Office of Government Efficiency, that’s finally cracking down on these types of activities.”

You can’t make this up…

Federal employees showed up to the office — not to work — but to protest returning to work.@DOGE and I are fighting to get Washington working for YOU! pic.twitter.com/qrriphp0Fn

— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) April 9, 2025

The day President Trump was inaugurated, he issued a presidential memo that stated:

Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.

Last Thursday, Ernst delineated some of the shocking remote-work abuses she had been made aware of, telling a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing:

A Veterans Affairs manager responsible for scheduling veterans appointments posted on social media that he was “phoning it in from a bubble bath” while calls to the VA have gone unanswered. An Army veteran gave up on getting mental healthcare from the VA because after years of trying to get an appointment, he met with a therapist who “spent the appointment singing the praises of remote work with a cat draped around her neck.” He said that it was such a disaster that “now I’m just on my meds doing my best.” A HUD employee was arrested for drunk driving at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Friday and may have been paid for time spent sitting in jail, HUD had no idea until I told them.  For more than three years, a Social Security employee was running a home inspection business. Meanwhile, his mother was responding to his emails.