It's no wonder federal government employees are fighting so hard to destroy the DOGE effort, but I wonder whether the useless idiots in the street know who they're fighting for?

cheering the 26-hour workday

Such a surprise

Watchdog group reveals that the swamp continues to grow

Open The Books, a project of American Transparency, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, nonpartisan charitable organization, closely tracks government spending and released an expansive report Wednesday ahead of a looming agreement between Republicans and Democrats to reopen the government, showing the swamp has gotten bigger, richer and more secretive since 2020. 

The report, which analyzed all publicly disclosed federal salaries for fiscal year 2024, found a total of 2.9 million civil service employees with a total payroll of $270 billion, plus an additional 30% for benefits. While the total number of employees rose by 5% since 2020, payroll grew nearly five times as much. 

DEPT OF ED SPENDING SOARED 749% DESPITE DOWNSIZING, NEW DOGE-INSPIRED INITIATIVE REVEALS

The current federal workforce is costing American taxpayers $673,000 per minute, $40.4 million per hour and just under $1 billion per day, according to Open The Books. This includes almost 1,000 workers who are making more than the president's $400,000 per year salary, 31,452 non-War Department federal employees who made more than every governor of all 50 states and 793,537 people making $100,000 or more. Those making $300,000 or more have seen an 84% increase since 2020, while there has similarly been an 82% increase in those earning $200,000 or more, the report points out. 

During Open The Book's investigation, the fiscal watchdog group also found that the names of 383,000 federal workers across 56 different agencies were redacted, amounting to a total of $38.3 billion in pay. According to Open The Books CEO John Hart, "You can't have accountability without visibility."  

….

U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has been working with Open The Books to fight for greater transparency. In a letter sent in September to Scott Kupor, the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Ernst said she had identified "numerous examples" of full-time federal employees earning two salaries while moonlighting for other agencies or government contractors, something typically prohibited under the law. Ernst pointed out that this was being done without the approval or knowledge of these workers' managers. 

"From 2021 to 2024, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employee held multiple other full-time government contractor jobs, frequently billing taxpayers for more than 24 hours of work in a single day," Ernst chronicled in her letter. "In addition to HUD, she was paid by AmeriCorps and the National Institutes of Health. Since she teleworked in all three positions, she was able to hide her overlapping jobs and get away with billing taxpayers $225,866 for hours she never worked. She claimed she worked 26 hours on 13 of the 21 workdays in a single month."

Ernst also described a second example of a human resources official at the Peace Corps who was caught falsifying time cards submitted to different agencies, which led to the employee double-billing taxpayers for tens of thousands of dollars. She laid out several other examples in the letter as well.