From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Harold Hutchison

Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said Thursday night that the Democratic Party could face a “tea party” movement after the Biden administration concealed the truth about President Joe Biden’s health.

A Wall Street Journal article published Thursday revealed White House aides “insulated” Biden, even from Cabinet members, from the first year of his presidency. Roginsky said that the “lying” about Biden’s health would have consequences for Democrats.

“There is a bigger problem here, and that is that I think Democrats are at the point where Republicans might have been right after the Bush election or after the Bush term was up, which is that I think Democrats are starting to mistrust their institutions,” Roginsky said. “And this goes back to a bipartisan effort to lie us into the Iraq war, not just by George Bush, but also by a lot of Democrats.

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“It has to do with the fact that Barack Obama did not hold anybody accountable after the 2008 crisis, which also happened on George Bush’s watch, but he became president, he never threw a hostage on the tarmac from Wall Street,” Roginsky continued. “You saw the rise of Bernie Sanders as a result of that, and you saw a lot of institutional Democrats, me included, saying, no, no, no, this is not the time. We have to stick with the institution.”

Similar articles published by the Wall Street Journal earlier in the year to their Thursday article generated pushback from some media outlets, with many pundits claiming Biden’s health was not in decline.

“I think you have a lot of Democrats now, me included, who are pretty sick of the institution and trusting people in the institution and this is just one example, the most recent example, I think of people institutionally lying to the American people and what you’re ultimately going to see,” Roginsky continued. “And I don’t have a problem saying this as a Democrat, is that you’re going to see a tea party version rise up in the Democratic Party based on the fact that this is yet another marker of people just not trusting our leaders anymore. And I’m sorry to say that, but I think we brought this on ourselves.”

Democratic Rep. Adam Smith of Washington told the Wall Street Journal about having difficulty reaching Biden during the disastrous August 2021 pullout from Afghanistan. The only time Smith spoke with Biden directly during Biden’s term in office was after a heated exchange with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

On multiple occasions during his presidency, Biden has said he spoke with people who had died, including claiming to have spoken with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and former French President Francois Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996. In September 2022, Biden asked for Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana at a conference on hunger that took place several weeks after Walorski and two staffers were killed in a car crash.

Biden also has suffered multiple falls during his term in office, including one at the Air Force Academy in June 2023, falling down while on his bike in June 2022 and stumbling on the steps of Air Force One on multiple occasions. Biden now takes a different set of stairs onto the VC-25 used as Air Force One, among other concessions to his age.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Harold Hutchison

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa introduced legislation Thursday that would send nearly a third of the federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

The bill, known as the ‘Decentralizing and Reorganizing Agency Infrastructure Nation-wide To Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration, and Management Practices (DRAIN THE SWAMP) Act, is far more sweeping than the “Returning SBA to Main Street Act,” legislation introduced by Ernst Dec. 12 that focused on the Small Business Administration (SBA). Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the move would improve services for Americans while saving billions of taxpayer dollars.

“Federal employees don’t want to work in Washington, so why should taxpayers be footing the bill? By relocating at least 30% of the federal workforce, we will save billions and improve service for veterans, small businesses, and all Americans. The bureaucrat laptop class has been out of the office for far too long, and it is time to get them back to work for the American people,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The legislation requires most government agencies to “promote geographic diversity, including consideration of rural markets” when relocating employees from the D.C. area and to “ensure adequate staffing throughout the regions of the Administration, to promote in-person customer service.” Exceptions are made for fewer than 10 agencies, most involved in national security, like the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.

The legislation also requires most federal agencies to reduce the total office space in their Washington, D.C., headquarters by at least 30% in a two-year timeframe following the bill’s enactment.

Ernst issued a 60-page report Dec. 5 that covered findings from Ernst’s investigations into telework since she sent an August 2023 letter to 24 government agencies requesting a review of the issues involved with telecommuting.

Previous investigations by Ernst into telecommuting by federal employees detailed the issues that telework created involving locality pay, an adjustment to the basic pay of civilian employees in the federal government intended to make sure that federal employees have comparable compensation to private-sector counterparts in a given area of the country. In the August 2023 letter sent to 24 government agencies requesting a review of the issues involved with telecommuting, Ernst cited a media account of a VA employee who attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath.

Ernst issued a 60-page report Dec. 5 that covered findings from her investigations into the issues  involved with telecommuting by federal employees. Those findings detailed issues that telework created involving locality pay, an adjustment to the basic pay of civilian employees in the federal government intended to make sure that federal employees have comparable compensation to private-sector counterparts in a given area of the country.

In one case cited by the senator on multiple occasions, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employee received locality pay for the Washington, D.C., area despite living full-time in Florida. The employee in question retired before the conclusion of the probe, according to a summary posted on the USAID inspector general’s site April 30.

Ernst’s legislation mandates that affected federal agencies “ensure that the rate of pay of the employee is calculated based on the pay locality for the permanent duty station of the employee.”

The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.