“It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people,” President Biden announced. With the worst of the pandemic over, “People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices.” “We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person,” he added.
That was from the president’s State of the Union address in January 2022. It is now June 2023, and that has not yet happened. Remote work seems to have gone on remote control, with costly consequences for taxpayers.
Two months ago, Biden’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued guidance “urging” agencies to bring workers back to the office full-time. But, according to The Hill, the guidance “does not set concrete dates or targets for moving to in-office work, and does encourage remote work where it has been most efficient, perhaps making some telework a standard part of federal agencies going forward.”
Clearly, there’s been no sense of urgency about repopulating federal offices. To some degree, that’s understandable. An April Federal News Network survey of 4,700 federal employees found that two thirds would look for a new job if they were ordered to return to the office full-time, or at least more than they currently do. Whether or not that many actually would go job-hunting, let alone find better situations, it makes sense that agencies wouldn’t be in a hurry to create morale problems.
But as for keeping “remote work where it has been most efficient,” the evidence currently available says it hasn’t been very efficient at all.
When the director of OPM testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Committee in March, it became clear that the OPM was not properly tracking levels of telework or performance data. In May 2023, Chairman Comer and nearly two dozen members of the committee sent letters to 25 federal agencies requesting information into their telework and remote work rates and policies. In a press release published the same month, the committee announced a probe into federal agencies’ telework and remote work policies to determine their impacts on employee performances and service deliveries.
The move to remote and telework in the early stages of the pandemic made sense. However, even then, many raised concerns that the federal agencies lacked mechanisms with which to properly monitor this transition. Unfortunately, these fears were not unfounded, as an internal Health and Human Services (HHS) report obtained by the Functional Government Initiative (FGI) showed that 25 percent of HHS employees were not logging in to work on any given day, according to VPN login data.
In one of its reports, FGI compared employee leave usage from 24 federal agencies before and since the pandemic telework policies were implemented. The increase in telework directly correlated with a dramatic decline in the use of both annual and sick leave. Compared to leave usage in 2018 pre-pandemic, leave usage dropped between 15-40 percent amongst these federal agencies in 2020. This frightening revelation could mean that federal employees may have fudged their time and attendance numbers to the tune of $1.4 billion in taxpayer funds.
Government agencies themselves have cited problems with telework. In September 2021, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Inspector General inspected “computer logs and telephone records of its employees, aiming to ensure its employees were engaging in work activities at the proper times,” reported the Government Executive. “The probes have resulted in employee discipline, including firings, according to SSA IG staff.”
There are countless more federal policies enacted as a result of the pandemic that we could highlight. Admittedly, many of the decisions made were understandable given the information available at the time, such as encouraging the use of masks, for example.
Yet, post-pandemic, new light shows many policies were outright detrimental and abused by some federal employees. For some reason, the Biden Administration continues to defend these policies – and even wants to make some of them permanent – without producing data supporting their effectiveness.
With so much taxpayer money on the line, the public is right to expect some greater transparency and accountability. Unfortunately, the federal government has not been eager to deliver it.
Pete McGinnis is the communications director for the Functional Government Initiative (FGI), a watchdog group dedicated to shining a light on government dysfunction.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.