Perhaps you should sit down for this.
A new report found federal agencies spent $4.63 billion on furniture in the Covid years to furnish the mostly empty offices of overpriced federal government buildings.
The new expenditure check by government tracker Open the Books (OTB) shows a host of absolutely insane purchases on the taxpayer’s dime — from $182,000 on plexiglass panels for IRS offices as part of a scientifically stupid Covid mitigation plan, to $237,000 for solar-powered picnic tables with charging stations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Remember, the CDC was the same government agency whose absurd social-distancing guidance urged Americans to stay at least six feet apart at all times. Gee, Yogi, it’s hard to social distance around a picnic table.
All of this wasteful spending was going on, as the OTB report notes, during the height of Covid and the prolonged remote-working policies for federal workers when occupancy rates at government buildings in Washington, D.C. were between approximately 2 percent and 26 percent capacity, according to a 2024 report to Congress by the Public Buildings Reform Board. The study noted the properties’ average occupancy rate in 2023 — when U.S. health agencies declared the end of Covid — was an obscene 12 percent.
Federal workers are now having to do what has been the unthinkable under President Joe Biden: show up to work. One of Trump’s first orders of business was to tell bureaucrats to stop clocking in remotely and head back to their “respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”
Hellbound and Down 
What are the odds that all that furniture comes from China?
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