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Spending freezes, blanket firing of tons of provisional workers (fun fact: the recently-promoted are also provisional, this doesn’t just mean brand new workers), and other measures have probably also disrupted the ability of offices to sensibly execute the orders. That is, it’ll take them longer to get the offices ready.
One might begin to think it’s not about waste.
The point you missed in the parent comment was that this is temporary. I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it. I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional. We have discovered something bad...which would seem to be part of the reason of doing it.
The counterargument is obvious to anyone willing to think about it for a few seconds, but the article doesn't even bother addressing it. They even admit that the headline office without wifi was only without wifi for a few hours:
> In one Department of Health and Human Services office, there was no Wi-Fi or full electricity in the first hours when people returned last week.
...and yet this is in the headline. This all reeks of cherry-picking.
> I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it.
This doesn't save anything. Now utilities and maintenance costs are higher. It's more spending. Leasing out or selling the buildings would have cut waste.
> I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional.
I don't know how many times and ways people involved in the admin have to say that their goal is to wreck the federal bureaucracy before people believe them.
Sure, by not having the vacant offices in the first place. Different ways to achieve that goal include: not allowing huge numbers of employees to stop coming into the office; or if you do allow that, by then competently following up on the implied reduction in office usage.
There are clearly lots of ways to avoid this kind of waste, but all of them go back for years, and were not done. So here we are. And instead of being critical of that, you're choosing to fixate on the most recent events, where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
What waste? The offices? Filling them doesn't reduce the waste.
No, the waste is lost hours of productivity, and chaos making these offices less efficient. You solve that by rolling this out very differently. The waste I'm talking about is entirely avoidable and 100% DOGE's fault.
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> where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
What underlying problem? This 1) didn't need to be done, and even if that weren't true, 2) was done in a hamfisted way that wasted money.
Small waste: the few hours/days of lost productivity while offices are re-opened.
Big waste: the empty offices that were sitting there while nobody was using them, for years.
Maybe they could have avoided the small waste by being more careful and methodical, or maybe that would have taken 10x longer. I don't know, and it's not worth arguing about.
Occupied offices cost more.
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Let me put it this way:
I have two cars. I don't need two. I need one. I never use one of them.
You're telling me I can make that wasted second car non-waste by towing it everywhere with the first one.
No, that increases costs. Getting rid of the car would reduce waste.
If I was knowledgable about government contracting, I would scoop up a bunch of those folks for a government-certified TaskRabbit service.
After all, private sector is always more efficient.