A year after President Biden officially ended the pandemic, his agencies have struggled mightily to get employees back into their offices — and some of them are still trying to figure out how to monitor them when they’re at home.
The White House has set a goal of 50-50, which means that employees with office jobs are expected to spend at least five days out of every 10-day work period in the office. Agency chiefs say they’re striving mightily to meet that goal, though anecdotal reports suggest attendance is still sparse, and independent studies agree.
The Public Buildings Reform Board used cell phone location data to gauge the occupancy rates of agency headquarters buildings in the D.C. area between January and September of last year and found agencies were running at just 30% of their prepandemic occupancy.
Department and agency heads are getting an earful from lawmakers as they parade through hearing rooms on Capitol Hill this spring to defend their budget requests for 2025.
“What’s taking so long?” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, challenged a senior official from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. “Is this a weak president? I mean, if the president says for them to come back to work and they don’t come back to work, I mean, why are the civil servants disobeying the orders of the president?”
Rep. Michael Waltz said there are lives on the line.
He pointed to the Food and Drug Administration, where he said telework issues are leaving the pharmaceutical industry struggling to get innovative new medications approved.
“These are like, people are dying,” the Florida Republican said.
Commissioner Robert Califf rejected that nation, saying approvals are at record levels and timelines are being met. But he said one sticking point is conference rooms at the agency’s suburban Maryland campus.
“There are limited number of meeting rooms that are completely up to speed,” he said, though he said he doubted that was actually delaying any drug evaluations. “The place is pretty darn efficient right now.
“I’m just telling you what we’re consistently hearing,” Mr. Waltz said.
Some agencies said telework has been easy.
The Government Accountability Office said it’s been deep into remote work for decades, dating back to the anthrax attack on the Capitol in 2001. When the House shut down its office building lawmakers took over GAO’s space, forcing them to adapt.
So even before the pandemic, GAO allowed employees to work 66 hours out of every 80-hour work period remotely.
“I’ve done evaluations all along, very strict evaluations to make sure it doesn’t affect the quality of our work,” said Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general.
But other departments are struggling with those kinds of evaluations.
Heath and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told lawmakers his employees are working the standard 50-50, with five days in the office and five teleworking for every 10-day work period.
But he acknowledged they don’t have a good handle on levels of productivity for employees at home.
“Yeah, we could use your help because the systems we’re using to monitor [are] like from back in the 1970s and ‘80s. So it’s been difficult to really get the dots connected,” the secretary told senators.
Republicans said that’s their problem with telework. They expressed general beliefs that in-person is better when it comes to government workers, but they were willing to be convinced — as long as there is data.
They also were nonplussed by the idea that the offices are empty, but taxpayers are still paying for the space.
The PBRB calculated that the Agriculture Department had space for nearly 7,500 employees in its offices at the southern tip of the District of Columbia, but averaged just 456 workers last year. Veterans Affairs had space for more than 2,400 employees but averaged just 172.
Then there was the Energy Department, which has space, according to the PBRB, for more than 4,800 workers — but averaged just eight employees on-site daily.
The watchdog said in its report that it couldn’t believe that number and figured there must be some methodological glitch, but the department didn’t provide an explanation before the report was published.
Sen. Joni Ernst earlier this month demanded answers, questioning why the department was pushing for spending on energy efficiency upgrades to federal buildings when it was wasting so much energy keeping its building open and empty.
“If the administration is serious about practicing what it preaches on energy conservation, instead of spending more money, you could instead stop paying to heat, cool, light, and operate the ghost town of vacant buildings all around Washington, D.C.,” the Iowa Republican said.
The Energy Department didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Washington Times for this story but last month it disputed the findings and said it is meeting the White House’s 50-50 goal.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission head Christopher Hanson said telework turned into a spiral for his agency.
He said the NRC was among the first to return to work in 2021, albeit for just two days a week.
Employees found themselves sitting in empty offices doing the same Zoom meetings with people who weren’t there.
“It generated a lot of frustration on the part of the staff,” he said.
His answer was to delegate telework decisions down to lower-level managers.
“I didn’t want the commission to be in a position of having to negotiate with the union, for example,” he told senators.
Unions are a sticking point for lawmakers, too.
Rep. Bob Good, Virginia Republican, was miffed by the scene outside a Labor Department office in Boston this spring when union employees showed up in person to protest having to return to work in person.
“I don’t know why they didn’t protest remotely,” Mr. Good told acting Labor Secretary Julie Su. “Do you see the irony in that?”
Ms. Su accused him of trying to “ridicule the hard work of federal employees.”
She said the department is getting its work done and excelling at its metrics, including reducing timelines for processing compensation claims.
The IRS, GAO and other agencies said high-quality employees are demanding telework as a condition for employment and the private sector is willing to offer it, so the government must as well.
“We’re able to get people from the private sector that we couldn’t get without flexible work arrangements because we can’t compete on salaries,” GAO’s Mr. Dodaro told lawmakers.
Rep. Mark Alford, Missouri Republican, said lawmakers are having difficulty verifying agencies’ claims about their progress on returning to work.
He complained to Small Business Administration head Isabella Casillas Guzman that when he visited the SBA in December, he saw empty offices. After he left, he was told even the desks that were occupied that day were manufactured.
“I was told that SBA employees were directed to consolidate their desks to mask the fact that only 10% of the 295,000 square foot SBA headquarters was being used,” he said.
Ms. Guzman denied any staging.
The issue of access irks Mr. Alford so much that he has proposed legislation to guarantee congressional access to federal offices.
In the Senate, meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans have linked arms on back-to-work legislation.
Ms. Ernst and Sen. Gary Peters, Michigan Democrat and chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote a bill to force agencies to gather and report data on their telework practices so Congress can figure out what’s working.
Sen. Joe Manchin III, West Virginia Democrat, and Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah Republican, announced another bill last week requiring employees to work in-person at least 60% of the time.
“It has been nearly a year since President Biden formally ended COVID-19 public health emergency declarations, yet most of our federal office buildings remain empty — wasting millions of taxpayer dollars every day,” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Comer, chair of the House oversight panel, took his concerns over telework to Jason Miller, deputy director for management at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. OMB serves as the president’s chief office for sailing the ship of state.
Mr. Miller said the White House’s “expectation” is that agencies are following through.
“Do you have data to support that?” Mr. Comer asked. “Because I don’t think they’re coming to work, and that’s what our sources tell us. … If you talk to any caseworkers, the people on our staff that do the work, they have had a significant difficulty getting people on the phone at the VA, at the IRS, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the agencies go on and on.”