Axios (“Scoop: Biden pushes to end remote work era for feds“):
President Biden is calling for his Cabinet to “aggressively execute” plans for federal employees to work more in their offices this fall after years of working remotely, according to an email sent Friday to every Cabinet member and obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: It’s Biden’s most overt push yet to get federal employees to return to their offices — a dynamic many businesses also have struggled with as Americans continue to embrace remote work despite the pandemic waning.
Driving the news: In an email to the Cabinet on Friday, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients wrote: “We are returning to in-person work because it is critical to the well-being of our teams and will enable us to deliver better results for the American people.”
- He added: “As we look towards the fall, and with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, your agencies will be implementing increases in the amount of in-person work for your team. This is a priority of the President — and I am looking to each of you to aggressively execute this shift in September and October.”
- Zients wrote that the changes will not eliminate working remotely but rather combine that flexibility “while ensuring we have the in-person time we need to build a strong culture, trust, and interpersonal connections.”
- A Government Accountability Office report published last month found that “17 of the 24 federal agencies used on average an estimated 25 percent or less of the capacity of their headquarters buildings.”
Much of the report centers on the White House itself, which is not particularly interesting to me. It is, after all, a unique workplace and, honestly, I’m surprised that it didn’t return to full-time in person long before now.
My wife and I both work for the Federal government, so I’ve got more than a passing interest in this.
She was already teleworking with some regularity before the pandemic and went full-time remote during it and for a long time thereafter. She switched to a different position about a year ago and now has to go in two days a week for, frankly, no good reason. It’s done on a rotating basis, so there’s no improvement in collegiality or collaboration as the team is essentially never together at one time. Regardless, not only is saving roughly two hours a day in commuting time to the Pentagon the other three days welcome, it’s definitely a boon in terms of managing school activities and the like.
The staff college where I work reluctantly went remote in mid-March 2020 and finished out the academic year (through early June) that way. Because we’re a resident school with a huge non-resident alternative, there was extreme pressure to get back rolling. We delayed the start of the 2021-22 academic year by about a month but we’ve been more-or-less fully in-person since August 2021. (We were aggressive in having faculty and staff with COVID symptoms or even close contacts go remote—often at the conference group level—until pretty recently.)
With regard to the larger Federal workforce, there have certainly been strong signals that this move was coming. But it seems to be driven by external concerns rather than the needs of the workplace.
Zoom out: Biden has been talking about bringing federal workers back to the office since the spring of 2022 with limited success.
- In his State of the Union in March 2022, Biden pledged that “the vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
- […]
- In April, the Office of Management and Budget ended maximum telework and sent out further instructions for agencies to develop plans to increase in-person work. Zients’ letter aims to speed up that move.
[…]
The big picture: The political pressure on the White House to curb remote work has included demands from Republicans in Congress, who have blamed telework for delays and backlogs in agencies’ work.
- Democrats, advocacy groups and some unions have largely blamed lack of funding for such issues and cite telework as a key tool in recruiting staff.
- Some senior administration officials never fully moved to D.C., including former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh.
What they’re saying: In her third inaugural address in January, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser raised alarm bells about the city’s rising number of vacant office spaces.
- “We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by nonprofits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it,” she said.
- Telework’s economic impact has been significant for many cities, including Washington, D.C., where local businesses and politicians have been pressuring the White House to demand more in-person work.
- This week, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg penned an op-ed in The Washington Post on the topic:
- “The federal government should lead by example, and the president should keep his promise,” Bloomberg wrote. “Taxpayers deserve immediate action and hard deadlines — and the better service and stronger capital city that will result.”
It seems obvious to me that cabinet officers and other senior officials should live in DC and go into the office. It’s hard to lead remotely. For others, it seems to me that it should be decided on an office-by-office, if not job-by-job, basis. If the job requires routine collaboration, being in person is likely of considerable benefit. If it requires a lot of quiet reflection to produce written products, do data entry, or the like then remote is likely more efficient.
The move seems to be inspired by ancillary concerns, especially local businesses who benefit from having office workers pay for lunch, dry cleaning, and the like. Or retail rents. I understand why mayors and others who benefit from these businesses are pushing for a return to work. But it makes little sense for the President to be doing so.
Democratic Presidents going back to Jimmy Carter have been pushing for telework, both to conserve energy and to reduce pollution and traffic congestion. The Federal government employs more than 2 million civilians. The most recent figures I have, from 2022, showed 14% were working fully remotely while 42% teleworked between one and three days a week. That’s pretty significant in and of itself; to the extent this is supposed to set an example for other industries, even moreso.
Politically, this seems against the President’s interests. There’s no obvious upside for him in that I can’t imagine the voter who will be swayed in his direction by this move—assuming they even have any idea he’s made it. Yet, it’ll be unpopular with a fairly significant piece of the Democratic base—the government workers directly affected by it. And it’ll make it harder for agencies, who compete with a private sector that’s still offering maximum telework for talent, to recruit.
