Internal Documents Reveal 25% of Health and Human Services Employees Failed to Check Email in the First Months of COVID-19 ‘Pandemic’

According to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, roughly a quarter of Department of Health and Human Services employees failed to even check their emails as they worked remotely during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“An estimated 25 percent of Department of Health and Human Services employees neglected to log on to the agency’s software suite, which includes their email, work files, video conference calls, and other applications needed to perform remote work, according to the internal documents. The report, commissioned by then-HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison, measured employees’ inactivity on a day-to-day basis between March 2020 and December 2020. The documents, portions of which were leaked by a whistleblower to the Functional Government Initiative and reviewed by the Free Beacon, state that all HHS employees had secure access to these accounts to work remotely,” the Free Beacon reported.

REPORT: Internal Documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon reveal an estimated 25% of Department of Health and Human Services employees failed to even check their emails while working remotely in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

— DailyNoah.com (@DailyNoahNews) June 17, 2022

The Internal HHS Report states:

Today, the Functional Government Initiative announced it has received an internal 2021 report from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that studied employees’ access and use of the agency’s virtual system while working remotely during the first nine months of the pandemic. The report, commissioned by former HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison, found that on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working. The report looked at all HHS employees’ login activity on the Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Microsoft 360 Accounts, which are used by employees to access the agency’s email and file systems remotely.

The report is likely to raise concerns whether this trend continued throughout 2021 and possibly into 2022, as the Biden Administration has made a concerted effort to continue very flexible telework policies well after the vaccines were made available. If so, it could have dramatic implications for the current investigation into the baby formula crisis sweeping the country.

As recently revealed by senior HHS officials in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce and the Senate HELP Committees, the FDA Commissioner acknowledged his agency was “too slow” to act in recognizing and responding to the baby formula shortage. The delayed response occurred despite extensive resources available to government officials, including data analytics tools, pandemic preparedness plans, and a whistleblower complaint filed with the FDA as early as last October. Still, FDA action on a whistleblower complaint faced a months-long delay due to apparent pandemic-related mail room issues.

Although federal employees have started returning to the office in recent months, the Biden Administration wants to make pandemic telework policies permanent.

House Democrats advanced a bill this week that would require agencies to provide advance notice to Congress and the Office of Personnel Management if they want workers to return to the office.

In other words, Democrats want federal workers to vacation on the American taxpayer’s dime.

The Free Beacon added:

Harrison, now a Republican state representative in Texas, said he grew concerned in the early months of the pandemic that lenient telework policies led to inefficient output from employees. He said he began to track office attendance and found fewer than 10 percent of employees showed up at certain points in 2020. The discovery led him to conduct a comprehensive review of how much remote work employees were doing.

“Almost everyone was home at the federal health agency responding to a pandemic—I found that problematic and worked to safely increase those numbers,” Harrison told the Free Beacon. “Biden sent everyone back home, and you can’t run HHS like that effectively.”

If the ‘pandemic’ was so terrible, why did 25% of employees at the federal government’s top health agency neglect their online work?

Were they partying the whole time?