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As the #Trump admin throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about #FederalWorkers 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 & figures flooding the zone…. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the WH press sec, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that #ElonMusk’s #DOGE & the #OMB had “found that there was about to be 50M 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, #Trump doubled down, saying his admin prevented delivery of $100M of “condoms to Hamas.”

A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from #USAID showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; & it would mean >1B condoms for the ~1M Palestinian males living in Gaza.

It took #Musk 2 wks to disavow the condom claim….

A look at how the #Trump admin handled the quickly debunked & obviously wrong statement about who is working from home shows that correcting “mistakes” is far from standard practice recently for either the #WhiteHouse or prominent #Republicans.

The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early Dec of last year when Sen #JoniErnst (R-IA) released a report on #FederalWorkers w/the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach & in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support #DOGE, & she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as *wasteful* spending.

#Musk retweeted the Post story to his >200M followers soon after it appeared. He said things were even worse than the report had found, asserting that “if you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person & do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.”

The 6% figure struck Stephen Engelberg as highly implausible. Engelberg began his career at a newspaper in Norfolk, VA, home to the world’s largest Navy base. He thought about the number of people needed to staff an aircraft carrier battle group on deployments that last for months. After Norfolk, Engelberg spent years covering #NationalSecurity. Given the restrictions on handling #classified information, hardly anyone at the #intelligence agencies, #State or the #Pentagon can work from home.

Engelberg searched…the #JoniErnst report & quickly found the passage that said, “6% report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a ⅓ of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news org in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of #GovernmentWorkers. The org had invited readers to answer an online survey about work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2M.

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 #JoniErnst 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, & who were self-selected.”

The editors said they had also added data from an Aug 2024 study by the #OMB, which found that 54% of the #FederalWorkforce 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.

In the world of #journalism, this is how editors try to address egregious misreadings of their work.

Jared Serbu, the deputy editor of Federal News Network, said he and his colleagues were taken aback by how his organization’s clearly unscientific survey had somehow been transformed into a defining statistic about #FederalWorkers.

“It was a survey of our niche audience for our niche audience,” Serbu said. “Nobody’s ever been confused about it before this.”

Later in Dec, a TV report cited the editor’s note & labeled the 6% number as “false.” At about the same time, PolitiFact looked at #MikeJohnson’s claim that only 1% of #FederalWorkers show up to work each day & labeled it “pants on fire,” the fact-checking site’s lowest rating for a statement that is “not accurate & makes a ridiculous claim.”

That should have ended the conversation. But it didn’t.

On Jan. 20, #Trump’s first day in office, the White House issued a statement that obliquely referred to #Musk’s coming assault on #FederalAgencies. It said Trump was “planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.”

A week after that, a senior #Trump admin official cited the 6% figure in explaining plans to slash the size of the federal workforce through buyouts. “We’re 5 years past COVID & just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office,” the ofcl told Axios & NBC News. The quotation also appeared in a memo sent by the White House to #Republican allies….

Engelberg asked #JoniErnst’s press sec…whether the senator planned to correct the record or amend her report. He said neither was in the offing.

The White House did not respond to Engelberg’s questions about why its Jan 20 statement cited a claim about #FederalWorkers that had been so clearly refuted. The portrayal of federal workers as lazy & indolent continues to be a central aspect of the #Trump’s plans to slash govt employment.

On Wed in Miami, #Trump said #FederalWorkers should “show up to work in person like the rest of us,” adding that: “You can’t work at home. They’re not working. They’re playing tennis, they’re playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard.” (Multiple news outlets noted that Trump golfed on 9 of his first 30 days in office.)

@Nonilex I think it's fascinating how often you can take one of Trump's obvious lies, do a ctrl-F find all and replace "they" with "I", and arrive at the truth.