A “survey of our niche audience for our niche audience” was the source for the claim that only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices. The number isn’t true. Why do administration and elected officials keep relying on it? As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices. By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week. It’s also completely untrue. You might ask why it’s worth grabbing onto one particular false assertion when there are so many incorrect facts and figures flooding the zone of public conversation. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Musk shared a video of the briefing on X, saying it was the tip of the iceberg. Days later, the president doubled down, saying his administration prevented delivery of $100 million of “condoms to Hamas.” A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from the U.S. Agency for International Development showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; and it would mean more than 1 billion condoms for the roughly 1 million Palestinian males living in Gaza. It took Musk two weeks to disavow the condom claim, saying that “we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” (…) The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support DOGE, and she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as wasteful spending. (…) I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office. The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.” The editors said they had also added data from an August 2024 study by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that 54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
via propublica: The Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers