It's a bunch of crap, as stated, not matching even what's claimed by the less-reputable sources I could find. Here's an OK-ish source that uses the same numbers as even worse sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa...

However, the story is 1) old, 2) overblown crap, and 3) I can't find any other angles on this to fill in gaps—I'm wondering in particular whether some of their choices of vendors are due to requirements to spend X% of their non-wage budget with US companies, or other, similar pressure.

Regarding #2, once you work your way past the deliberately-bad use of math required to make this look like "news", it amounts to, "the EPA spent ~$600 per worker per year on office furniture and expenses related to office furniture like storage and moving fees"—which seems... entirely normal? Even low? The story only looks like a story at a glance because they intentionally misrepresent what's going on. All the pieces are there to figure it out, to their credit, but once you work through it it's not newsworthy whatsoever.

This is, as they say, fake news.

[EDIT] the piece also seems to rely on people not generally knowing what it costs to buy furniture that'll last 10+ years under heavy use. Even cheap large conference room tables are not cheap, actually. Now, if they're buying these then throwing them out after a couple years, and it's not just the political appointees at the top doing this, then there's reason to complain about the agency itself.

I'm assuming the "source" is something they saw on a Facebook group

How is your assumption anything better than a FB group?

I Ducked 'epa expensive office chairs' and got this : https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa...

Story's crap, see my post about the exact same piece, above. TL;DR the actual story is "EPA spent about $600 per employee per year on office furniture and moving and storage expenses related to office furniture, over 10 years" which is... not a story.

Well, as far as I glanced it, it did cover multiple chairs of 4k+. Which is admittedly not 5k, but is not crap either.

The fact you are spreading it over 10 years does not make the 4k chair suddenly cheap.

The piece: "ZOMG that's a $6,000 office furnishing budget per employee!"; Also the piece: "Over 10 years, and that includes various moving and storage costs including things like emptying a building of all furniture before renovations begin, and that includes stuff like conference room tables and who knows what else, so it's not like employees personally got the benefit of anywhere near that $600/yr" (and yes, I checked, the $6,000 is the over-10-years figure, not per year, which would be way too much, plus they're dividing by a number of employees that's significantly lower than what they had for some of those years)

Yes, some furniture pieces are very expensive. No, that's not always unjustifiable. Nice furniture that works well and will last continues to cost actual money—compare it to Ikea or Ashley Furniture or whatever, and it'll always look expensive. It's also possible they're under restrictions, explicit or implicit, about where they can spend that money—your budget-tier options are going to be limited or nonexistent if you're restricted to American companies, for instance. Given these figures, what they were not doing was giving any significant percentage of their employees insanely-nice furniture.

I'm also curious how many of the top-end items the piece singles out were for political appointees' offices. That could be corruption, sure, but it's a very different kind of issue from the EPA itself having a spending problem.

Meanwhile, $600/employee/yr seems well within the bounds of normal.

Piece is bullshit.

[EDIT] it's also—and this was the most credible-looking source I could find for this, mind you—some guy "reporting" on figures that an organization he heads came up with. Check the about-the-author bit at the bottom. So. There's that.

[EDIT EDIT] I just checked Herman Miller's price book. That $15,000 conference room table the article calls out (inattentive reader: "Oh my god, my dining room table only cost $300 at Ikea, that's insane!")? Based on what I'm seeing, it must have been enormous. Think "20 feet long" enormous. Tables that big are expensive. Are there cheaper ones? Yes. Are 100% of tables that size—which are in limited demand—going to seem absurdly expensive when presented this way? Also yes.

So first you assume it is a FB group, and when you get called out on it with the Forbes article, the piece is bullshit.

You sure do need a lot of characters though.

> So first you assume it is a FB group,

Who's "you"? Not me.

> and when you get called out on it with the Forbes article

I posted the Forbes opinion piece on my own, elsewhere, before spotting that someone else had also posted it. I was not "called out".

> You sure do need a lot of characters though.

So does the (bad, i.e. intentionally misleading) Forbes piece.

It's plainly shit judging just from what's in the piece itself, and it's written by an explicitly, as noted in the piece biased author. Is there a better piece on this? Everything else I could find was on very sketchy sites and repeated the same stuff. Of course since the numbers themselves, as gathered by an organization run by the person writing the piece, don't tell the story the article wants you to think it's telling, I think it's a fair guess that no such "good version" of this piece exists.