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Forfeiture Action is the Latest Disruption of an Indicted North Korean Official’s Efforts to Generate Revenue for North Korea and its Weapons Program Through Illegal IT Worker Schemes and Cryptocurrency Theft The Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleging that North Korean information technology (IT) workers obtained illegal employment and amassed millions in cryptocurrency for the benefit of the North Korean government, all as a means of evading U.S. sanctions placed on North Korea. The funds were initially restrained in connection with an April 2023 indictment against...

The entire staff of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), the Pentagon’s decade-old technology development office, is leaving by the start of May, with nearly all individuals resigning, a current member of the office confirmed to The Hill on Tuesday. The mass exodus, first reported by Politico, means the service will effectively shutter in less than a month. Of the 14 members of the office, a dozen including Director Jennifer Hay have requested the Trump administration’s deferred resignation option and plan to leave by May 1. Two other staffers are also leaving in that time frame. “Although DDS was excited to...

Joe Biden allowed remote work dominate the civil service for so long, a cafeteria in the Department of the Interior remained shutdown years after the pandemic ended. Similarly, the department of housing and urban development resembles 'a taxpayer-funded Spirit Halloween' that looks almost like no one has been inside since Biden took office. The Interior was one of many departments that did not require employees to return under the Biden administration and a photo taken Thursday shows it as a complete ghost town, according to Fox News Digital. 'You have federal workers showing up to protest President Trump's plan to...

VIDEOMany federal workers are highly upset that President Trump has ordered that they can no longer work remotely and must return to work at their offices again. Here you see a group of federal workers a few days ago protesting against that order. This particular group of feds are also upset that Kash Patel will soon be ending their funding for remote work special projects. In addition, they will soon be losing the protective services of police escorts and the U-Haul federal discounts. Federal cuts has already meant they can no longer afford marching drums.

-President Donald Trump has ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week, signing an executive order in front of cheering supporters at Washington's Capital One Arena on Monday. The move would force large numbers of white-collar government employees to forfeit remote working arrangements, reversing a trend that took off in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Biden administration appointee has reached a contract agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing more than 40,000 Social Security Administration workers, that would allow federal workers to work from home until 2029. This comes amid a series of organized efforts from Biden's White House to impede President-elect Donald Trump's efforts to reform the federal workforce through his newly implemented Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Bloomberg reported that the deal was brokered by President Biden's recently departed Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O'Malley. The updated contract protects telework until 2029. The agency will maintain its...

Only 6% of federal employees work from an office full-time, and a third are fully remote. And some aren’t actually working when they “work from home,” a Senate investigation found.“Washington is still operating as if it’s March 2020,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus and the report’s author, wrote.“Just three percent of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, six percent of workers report in-person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are entirely remote,” the report states. Government office buildings have an occupancy rate of only 12%, yet the government...

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental entity helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is expected to make a push for an end to remote work across federal agencies as a way to help reduce the federal workforce through attrition. Both Musk and Ramaswamy have recently publicly lamented the number of employees working remotely across the government. A source familiar with early discussions about the focus of DOGE, as the initiative is known, told CNN that while nothing is final, early priorities include an effort to immediately end...

More than 500 employees from Amazon’s cloud-computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January. The new policy requires workers to be in the office five days a week, an increase from the current three-day-a-week mandate that has been in place since May 2023. Amazon workers protested the initial three-day-a-week mandate as well, but Amazon did not change course. About 15 months later, it increased the requirement for in-office work in an effort to return to pre-pandemic norms. The employee letter is in response to comments from Garman at a recent...

Starbucks (SBUX) CEO Brian Niccol has a stern message for his employees, and many may not be too thrilled about it. As companies across the country are starting to cut back on remote work, with some even forcing employees to return to working in the office five days a week, Niccol revealed in his first staff address as Starbucks CEO that there is “power in having everybody together,” according to a new report from Bloomberg. “My point of view is we should be together as much as possible,” said Niccol in his address. “You need to figure out where you...

In 2006, the hulking office building at 135 West 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan sold for $332 million. Tenants occupied nearly every floor; offices were in demand; real estate was booming. On Wednesday, it changed hands again, in an unusual online auction — for $8.5 million. The staggeringly low sale price of the 23-story glass behemoth that was once the headquarters of Sports Illustrated is the latest and perhaps most surprising sign of how the pandemic has upended the state of office buildings in New York City, home to the largest central business district in the United States. Several large...

A digital security firm got the shock of a lifetime when it came to light that one of its remote workers was actually a North Korean hacker after he infected his new company laptop with malware. "The moment it was received, it immediately started to load malware," security firm KnowBe4 wrote in a blog post about the incident. The company stressed that "no illegal access was gained, and no data was lost, compromised or exfiltrated on any KnowBe4 systems." "KnowBe4 needed a software engineer for our internal IT AI team," the company explained. "We posted the job, received resumes, conducted...

Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based banking giant, has fired a small group of employees who allegedly tampered with their computers to fake the appearance of working. The company’s St. Louis-based subsidiary, Wells Fargo Clearing Services, filed five disclosures with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority saying that it had fired workers in early May. Each disclosure said the worker was “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” Bloomberg, which first reported the firings on Thursday, wrote that “more than a dozen” employees were fired from Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management arm. SFGATE...

During an address on Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey took a jab at remote work while praising the benefits of downtown Minneapolis. While speaking at the Minneapolis Downtown Council’s annual meeting, Mayor Frey, a Democrat, joked that remote work ultimately turns you into “a loser.” “I don’t know if you saw this study the other day, what this study clearly showed… is that when people who have the ability to come downtown but don’t,” Frey explained. “When they stay home, sitting on their couch with their nasty cat blanket, diddlin’ on their laptop. If they do that for a few...

The number of American workers hired by international companies grew 62% last year, according to the State of Global Hiring Report from Deel, an HR platform that specializes in global hiring. The report is based on 300,000 contracts between Deel customers and workers for both contractors and full-time employees, and roughly 85% of those contracts are for remote positions. American workers are most likely to be hired by companies in the U.K., Canada, France, Singapore and Australia. The spike in U.S. workers vying for remote jobs headquartered overseas “feels correlated with the elimination of remote roles” stateside, says Deel CEO...

After three years of haphazard plans for getting workers back at their desks, the return-to-office movement has entered a phase of remorse. A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of employees' office attendance, their usage of office amenities and other related factors, according to new research from Envoy. "Many companies are realizing they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives' opinions rather than employee data," Larry Gadea, Envoy's...

Roughly two-thirds (66%) of 700 financial executives who worked remotely part time said they would quit their jobs if they were forced to return to the office five days a week, according to a survey published Tuesday by Deloitte.“Professionals — men and women alike — whose work and personal lives have been reshaped by remote work largely want to maintain flexibility even if it comes at a personal cost,” the accounting firm said in its report.That cost may be corporate advancement, the survey suggests. More than half of respondents (52%) said they thought in-office workers were paid more. Likewise, 63%...

The media, Biden, and other Democrats keep bragging how great Bidenomics is and how good the job market is. That would especially make it good for kids who went to college because they make more than people who didn't. Yet we get these sob stories, that essentially are campaigning for other people to pay off student loan debt, whining that after three years of letting people skip paying their loans, they are all of a sudden are going to have to pay. What a concept! Paying off your own debt. Somehow, only half are going to be required to pay...

Working from home is killing office buildings’ worth. As remote and hybrid work prove to be enduring trends, researchers are predicting grim fates for the future value of New York City’s commercial workplaces. New York University and Columbia University researchers have updated a 2022 study to reflect new findings that offices will be even more impacted by remote work than they previously calculated. “We now estimate a more persistent work-from-home regime, which has more of an impairment of office values even in the long run,” Arpit Gupta, co-author of the study, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse,”...

In June 2022, Apple CEO Tim Cook sounded pretty philosophical about remote work. "We're running the mother of all experiments,” he said at the TIME 100 symposium in New York, “because we don't know," he trailed off. Just a couple months later, though, he ordered staff back three days a week. And now he’s reportedly threatening to discipline the holdouts. In other words, the experiment may be losing steam. Apple is threatening to level disciplinary action against workers who fail to come into the office for three-fifths of the working week, Zoë Schiffer, managing editor of tech newsletter Platformer, tweeted...