Turning out the lights in Pelosi’s haunted house
An abandoned tower looms 18-stories into the sky. Zombie-like bodies with blank stares shake and stumble about aimlessly as a corpse lies on the cold, blood-stained pavement. Dangerous criminals wielding weapons indiscriminately shoot firearms and swing knives and machetes. Deadly potions are passed around, and sharp needles poke up from the ground. Armed guards patrol the premises as surveillance cameras watch every move.
This morbid scene isn’t the backdrop of a Halloween haunted house. It’s a real life scary situation outside of the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco.
The conditions are so frightening, federal employees have been warned to stay away indefinitely.
In fact, the same day President Biden’s White House called for federal employees to return to their offices, his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) advised hundreds of employees working at the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building to stop coming to the office “for the foreseeable future” due to safety concerns with crime and violence outside.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the property, spent $3 million redesigning the building’s public plaza “in order to maximize its use by the community and employees.” When the new plaza opened less than two years ago, GSA stated it would “create a new safe space for public gatherings and education.”
The exact opposite is occurring. The plaza is a dangerous, open-air drug market, with addicts shooting up, snorting, and smoking drugs in plain view. Overdosing is “a commonplace horror,” with nearly 150 suspected overdoses– including more than 30 deaths–on the block surrounding the Federal Building reported in the first half of this year. Those who do dare to enter the premises are being escorted into the building. And a protective fence has been put up outside the building whose namesake with an office inside calls it “immoral” to build barriers to protect our nation’s border.
According to its designer, the building was set up to represent “the way government should be and how the workplace should be.” Ironically, the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is instead a symbol of the way government doesn’t work, with offices and workplaces largely empty due to misguided policies of the federal, state, and city governments.
“The building has long been a locus of some of the city’s most intractable problems,” reports The San Franscisco Chronicle. Security around the building has long been a concern of employees and neighbors. “Almost since day one, they’ve complained that the plaza conceived as a community hub was uninviting at best, squalid and dangerous at worse.”
Federal employees who work in the building have been threatened with knives, and one was chased with a hammer.
Folks, working at a Department of Health and Human Services building shouldn’t be a risk to your health, or life! And if it’s not safe for the federal employees to work here, it certainly can’t be safe for businesses to operate and families to live here.
That is why I am giving my October 2023 Squeal Award to former Speaker Pelosi and the other liberal San Francisco politicians who have allowed criminal chaos to overtake the streets of the city.
With at least five other federal facilities within the San Francisco area where taxpayers and government employees could interact face-to-face without fearing for their lives, I am calling for the offices and workers within the Speaker Pelosi Federal Building to be relocated and the building shut down until it is no longer a threat to public safety.
As your Senator, I’ll keep fighting to prevent our tax dollars from keeping the lights on and funding failed projects.
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Joni Ernst, a native of Red Oak and a combat veteran, represents Iowa in the United States Senate.