Workers at Nancy Pelosi Federal Building Told to Go Home - It's Not Safe for Them Anymore
Squalor has given the city of San Francisco a new distinction.
On the same day that President Biden’s chief of staff urged White House cabinet officers to end word-from-home regimes still left over from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services had a different message for workers in the City by the Bay.
If COVID can’t keep them from coming in, fear of crime will.
According to a San Francisco Chronicle report Friday, HHS employees in the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building (yes, it appears the viciously destructive former House speaker actually has an 18-story federal building named in her honor) were formally advised in an Aug. 4 memo to stay out of the office because of crime in the streets surrounding the building.
“In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future,” HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl R. Campbell wrote, according to the Chronicle.
Campbell’s use of the word “conditions” comes across as an oh-so-delicate euphemism compared to how the Chronicle chronicles the neighborhood.
“The area is also home to one of the city’s most brazen open-air drug markets, where dozens of dealers and users congregate on a daily basis …
“Dozens of dealers routinely plant themselves on, next to or across the street from the property, operating in shifts as users smoke, snort or shoot up their recent purchases. The property’s concrete benches are an especially popular site for users to get high, socialize or pass out.”
That might sound like par for the course in a Democrat-run city, whether it’s San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, Chicago, or New York City, where a leftist ideology has left law enforcement debilitated and civil order deteriorating.
But there’s a special poignancy in the fact that the building is named for Pelosi, a woman who has been a national architect of the Democratic Party’s disastrous “triumphs” over the past decade and a half.
As House speaker for two years during President Barack Obama’s first time, she strong-armed leftist legislation like Obamacare through the House and into law, with the help of the loathsome then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, now deceased. (It might not be good to speak ill of the dead as a general rule, but in the case of the malignantly dishonest Reid, it’s a matter of conscience.)
And while she sacrificed her own party’s majority on the altar of Obama’s ambition, she returned to the House speakership for the second two years of President Donald Trump’s term, bedeviling him with investigations, juvenile antics, and flimsy-beyond-description impeachment efforts.
She also led her party into its grotesque submission to the Black Lives Matter movement and the lawlessness that accompanied its protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. That in turn led Democratic-run cities, including San Francisco, to join the mania to cut funding for police, which even some Democrats are now regretting.
But here her city is. And here is the building that bears her name — in a neighborhood so defiled by criminals that a major federal department doesn’t want its employees there for fear they might be victimized by the kind of crime Democrats have unleashed on American communities from coast to coast.
(According to the Chronicle, it wasn’t clear of other federal agencies with workers in the Pelosi Federal Building would follow the DHS lead, but it’s disgraceful enough that DHS has felt forced to take the step.)
The Chronicle piece is full of spin to make the situation not sound as bad as it appears from the report on the DHS memo.
A spokeswoman for Pelosi said the former speaker — who has staffers who work in the building — makes a “priority” of the safety of federal employees, in the building or on their commutes.”
A spokesman for the General Services Administration, which administers the building, is quoted saying it’s a “a safe and secure space for federal employees and the visiting public.”
And a tenant of the building said the Department of Homeland Security and the GSA have increased security in the building, including a “BART Buddy” program that makes escorts available from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. for employees who use the public Bay Area Rapid Transit system.
And all that sounds just great — except it doesn’t change the fact that the Pelosi Federal Building is clearly an island in the middle of a sea of squalor — exactly the kind of squalor Democrats have been fostering nationwide in recent years, especially in San Francisco.
The ugly irony isn’t limited to the fact that the DHS order relates to a building that literally has the name of one of the most important Democrats of the 21st century.
It also came right when the Biden White House is making a cabinet-level push, reported by Axios, to return the federal government’s workforce to its pre-COVID rules regarding working in the office rather than remotely.
What COVID can’t do anymore in San Francisco, crime can.
And Democrats will try to blame anyone but themselves.
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