Fedweek

The panel - which sometimes updates its name to signal slant - says its focus on telework helped nudge the Biden Administration to push for more in-person work. Image: Katherine Welles/Shutterstock.com

The Republican leadership of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has highlighted its focus on telework—including what it called the resulting “delays and inefficiencies” in agency operations—as a major initiative of the panel in 2023, indicating that it will remain so in 2024.

A summary of 2023 activities included “a broad investigation to obtain information about federal agencies’ telework policies and levels and then held hearings with government agency witnesses whose responses lacked sufficient detail to justify the Administration’s earlier claims about widespread post-pandemic telework.

It said the panel “drove” the Biden administration “to attempt to improve data collection around telework and remote work and to better assess their impact on federal agencies. It also drove Biden Administration to increase in-person work at federal agencies.”

Among the bills it highlighted as having passed through the committee was HR-139, to roll back telework to 2019 levels and require agencies to make a business case to increase it again. That bill later passed the House but has not moved in the Senate.

Other federal workforce-related bills it highlighted include measures to: downplay the role of educational credentials in job qualifications and the role of self-evaluations in assessing candidates; expand training of federal managers on the benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence; and to generally prohibit the use minimum education requirements for cybersecurity professional positions.

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