OPM canceled Biden administration-era guidance that agencies assess remote work’s effects on their mission, recruitment, and retention - but has said it now plans to issue similar guidance. Image: sebra/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe Trump administration’s return-to-office directive greatly cut back remote work by federal employees but did not eliminate it, GAO has said, adding that the directive further made it harder to gauge the impact on employee productivity by canceling a prior method of assessing it.
The GAO said that as of a year ago, the two dozen Cabinet departments and largest independent agencies, which employ all but a few percent of the federal workforce, had some 208,000 remote workers, about 9 percent of their workforces—a figure consistent with data reported last summer by OMB. By agency, that varied from 57 percent at Education and 50 percent at GSA to only about 1 percent at SSA and Justice.
In contrast to telework, where there is an expectation of reporting to an agency site on a regular basis, there is no such requirement for remote work. Both surged during the pandemic and remained at higher levels afterward, spurring criticisms from Republicans that resulted a law ordering the GAO report and then the executive order generally canceling both.
Follow-up guidance from OPM allowed remote work to continue for military and Foreign Service spouses, those with qualifying medical conditions, and for other “compelling reasons,” GAO said.
Twenty of the 24 agencies said they have identified the categories of employees who fall under those exceptions. Each allows military spouses to work remotely while several “reported that they will also allow exemptions in other limited circumstances, such as to retain staff with highly specialized skills or in hard-to-fill, mission-critical positions,” said the report, which did not quantify how many fall under those exceptions.
In its guidance on the executive order, OPM meanwhile canceled Biden administration-era guidance that agencies assess remote work’s effects on their mission, recruitment, and retention, making it “less likely that agencies that continue to have remote work will understand its effects on their outcomes and operations. Conducting such assessments would provide agencies with important insights into how their use of remote work could be improved,” the GAO said.
It added that through 2024, three of the four agencies it studied in detail “took actions to reduce their office space holdings as telework and remote work led to fewer employees.” However, they said those actions were paused “as they reassessed the amount of office space needed given return-to-office requirements, ongoing agency reorganization and workforce reduction efforts, and other current administration priorities.”
In replying to GAO’s recommendations, OPM said it plans to issue new guidance telling agencies to assess the effects of remote work on agency missions, recruitment and retention, and operational costs.
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