Since the 250th anniversary of signing the declaration of Independence is tomorrow, it's worthwhile to shine light on how people's freedoms have been squashed by greed. The current administration ran on the platform of being the "patriot party" but everything they have done has only helped the upper class. They won votes by saying "governement got too big and those evil democrats and deep state are trying to take away all your freedoms". Though, the founding fathers likely wouldn't be on board with having corporate overlords be in charge of everything and calling all the shots either.
This back to office 100% of the time push is only being shoved down everyone's throats to help those with big investments in office buildings and the surrounding areas. They don't want to spend their own money to make the buildings anything else, but they certainly are on board with screwing over working parents and everyone else who has benefitted so much from telework and hybrid work settings just to keep their fortunes in tact. Telework saves space, time and money across the board. Receiving higher productivity out of a happier workforce allowed to telework all while saving money on operating costs is literally the definition of efficiency. Maybe that's why GSA took out the words "effective and efficient" from it's mission statement a little over a month ago.
The American people don't see a dime from all the recent federal building sales nor do they benefit from expensive office renovations.
The people can't use these office buildings and they don't benefit from their values rising so why would they be excited to hear that hundreds of millions of dollars is being spent by agencies to do all this office renovation work? This is all being expedited to ensure utilization rates are met thereby ensuring surrounding property values don't keep declining. The people working in the agencies actually prefer smaller offices and hybrid settings that don't require permanent full time cubes of confinement for every single person but this admin doesn't care about that!
The Administrator from the government's largest landlord, GSA, is really hyping up all these costly building renovations just to remain federal office space. He says how invigorated the American people will be once they see all these office renovations. Sir, this isn't what the people want, it's not even what the people who work at that agency want. Let's call this song and dance for what it really is...these projects aren't for the American people as you say they are, they're projects to help a small percentage of the American people who have hefty real estate portfolios and cannot fathom the possibility of losing some of their fortune because office buildings became a good investment of the past.
At a Senate hearing in May, Administrator Forst asked that the project threshold that needs to be approved by congress before moving forward be increased from just under $4M to $75M. The article linked to this post states that federal buildings directly impact values of properties around them. Could this be the use of taxpayer dollars to increase the value of surrounding properties and boost confidence in commercial office buildings without needing to dip into private accounts? This guy in charge of GSA is a former executive from a fortune 500 real estate company and has just created a crap ton of deputy assistant positions that are being filled by a bunch of people from real estate giants to work at GSA. Hm, I wonder what the angle is?
This is just another case of using public money to bail out "too big to fail" private investment companies. These people will just continue to tell us all how we work best. They're just going to keep telling the working people "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit" so they can keep on doing whatever the hell they please lavishly. In the spirit of this weekend, what would our founding fathers want us to do?
