Federal employees in the hot seat as GOP senator pushes transparency proposal: 'Historic opportunity'
FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, introduced legislation that would compel the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to create a public directory of federal government employees, including their salaries, job descriptions and other details.
Ernst's introduction of the Where’s the Workforce At Listed by Duties and Office (Where’s WALDO) Act follows a report from conservative fiscal watchdog group Open The Books showing that the swamp has gotten bigger, richer and more secretive since 2020. Besides raking in massive paychecks, including close to 800,000 non-War Department employees who make $100,000 or more per year, hundreds of thousands of government workers' names and information were redacted from the information Open The Books was able to obtain for it's "Mapping The Swamp" report.
"Like a twisted game of reverse Secret Santa, taxpayers are gifting paychecks to bureaucrats who remain anonymous," said Ernst. "The American people should not be forced to play ‘Where’s Waldo’ when it comes to figuring out where federal workers are during the workday. I will be embracing the Christmas spirit by creating a list, that anyone can check twice, to clearly state where every federal employee is and how much they are being paid."
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 last month that analyzed all publicly disclosed federal salaries for fiscal year 2024. The group found a total of 2.9 million civil service employees with a total payroll of $270 billion, plus an additional 30% for benefits.
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According to the data, while the total number of employees rose by 5% since 2020, payroll grew nearly five times as much.
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.
"The Trump administration has a historic opportunity to bring transparency to the administrative state. While federal employees don't add as much to the debt as safety net programs or defense spending, they do cost us a billion dollars per day. Their performance for taxpayers can be the difference between efficient, effective services and a vicious cycle of administrative bloat," Open The Books CEO John Hart told Fox News Digital.
"Our investigators found far too many redactions and blind spots, including a vast ecosystem of contractors, that DOGE could have fixed. Accountability for taxpayers is impossible without real-time transparency. Making these disclosures a routine responsibility of OPM is an excellent step toward the real-time transparency our founders would have written into the Constitution had they been alive today."
When reached for comment, an OPM spokesperson told Fox News Digital that it "is proud to support" Ernst's new bill, describing the legislation's suggested measures as "common sense."
"Transparency and accountability in the federal workforce are essential to maintaining public trust," the spokesperson said. "Providing the public with clear, standardized information about federal positions, duties, and compensation while appropriately protecting employee privacy is an important part of good government."
Ernst's Where’s WALDO Act would include both direct employees of the government and federal contractors. Once the bill has passed, OPM will have 18 months to develop the directory.
The directory, according to the bill, must include each worker's name, job title, description of duties, agency of employment, primary duty station, their annual rate of pay including bonuses, and the date at which the individual started working in their position.