Fedweek

OPM director Kiran Ahuja, testifies before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Committee on March 9, on OPM the nation's largest employer. Image: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/Shutterstock

A supplemental book released this week in support of the Biden administration’s fiscal 2024 budget proposal makes an argument for keeping telework by federal employees at levels higher than before the pandemic.

“During 2022, federal agencies engaged in evaluating lessons learned through the pandemic that will serve to position ongoing dialogue and future decision making relating to human capital management, facilities, and the very nature of work. Like employers around the world and across the nation, agencies are confronting the changing nature of work, technologies, and society, and the administration is taking steps to ensure federal leaders are informed by evidence-based evaluation of what work will look like, what the workforce will look like, and what workplaces will look like in the years to come,” it says.

The statement comes just a week after OPM director Kiran Ahuja appeared at a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing where Republicans peppered her with questions about the current state of teleworking and its impact on agency operations. That was the latest sign of skepticism about telework from the House Republican majority, which earlier passed a bill to return telework to the levels of 2019 and require that agencies make a business case for increasing it—a bill that however is not expected to clear the Senate.

Ahuja said during the hearing that higher levels of telework have improved productivity although she did not offer the kind of direct evidence that the questioners were looking for. However, she did push back against suggestions that federal employees who are offsite are not working—or at least not working as efficiently as they would onsite—and pointed out that even at the peak of the pandemic about half of the workforce worked onsite every day.

A supplemental budget book also hits those themes, saying that “Like workers across the nation, federal employees have continued to perform their duties, no matter the location . . . The federal government has a wide range of occupations delivering an array of missions, including work that must be performed on the work-site, with a substantial portion of the federal workforce delivering critical services at the work site throughout the pandemic.

“Going forward, agencies need to be strategically prepared for evolving work environments, where teams are likely to be more distributed on a continual basis than in the past. This shift will lead to increased reliance upon enhanced technological tools, cross-collaboration, and new methods of worker engagement.”

It adds: “Given widely available COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and treatments, as well as robust and responsive COVID-19 safety protocols in place across federal agencies, COVID-19 is not driving agency decisions about their work environments. Now and on an ongoing basis, agencies must base decisions about their work environments on how they can most effectively achieve their respective missions while strengthening their organizations to be resilient for the future, especially relating to the delivery of federal services and programs for the people and communities we serve.”

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