No doubt those employees are already on the street, armed with screwdrivers and molotovs and looking for Teslas (Bumped and updated with additional information from by someone who was there)

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Inside The Now-Shuttered Federal Agency Where Employees Lived ‘Like Reigning Kings’

Employees of DOGE's latest target spent taxpayer money on exotic vacations, portraits, and more.

Luke Rosiak from The Daily Wire

One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.

FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.

This reporter spent a year investigating the agency a decade ago, and I found egregious and self-serving violations of hiring, pay, contracting, and purchase card rules. One thing I could not discover is why the agency actually existed, other than to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees. Endless junkets to resort destinations, which employees openly used to facilitate personal vacations, were justified as building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.

FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: “Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

“Recreation and reception fund.”

Top FMCS official George Cohen used a “recreation and reception fund” to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife. The tiny agency commissioned paintings of its top employees — as one employee told me, “like they were reigning kings or something…I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity.

FMCS employees “unblocked” their government credit cards to turn off typical abuse protections, then used them to apparently fund personal expenses and simply bill anything they’d like to the government. One employee leased a BMW; another (IT director James Donnen) billed the government for his wife’s cell phone, cable TV at both his home and his vacation home, and even his subscription to USA Today.

UPDATE:

A local reader writes,

The Federal Mediation Council reminds me of CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act). Although Nixon started CETA, Carter expanded it. A LOT! I

In the summer of 1975, I was working as a political intern near City Hall. We and the other interns used to order pizza from a place next to CETA HQ. One of the interns was heavily into drugs. I knew he had a connection nearby. But, I found out it was in CETA when, one lovely summer day, we went on our normal pizza run, and the guy said, "Hold on. We gotta go in here." CETA HQ

We went upstairs. Not one single employee was actually working, except for the guy selling cocaine. In fact, the intern -- who was a low level Dem Party operative (Long story.)-- had a couple of other friends at CETA. Spacious offices. Closed doors. Without exception, as we walked in, they whispered, "Hey! Shut the door." I can only guess they didn't want to make it too obvious that they weren't working.

Much, much more on the abuses and theft of taxpayer money over on Twitchy. Here’s one example out of many: