The U.S. Congress on Monday Jan. 6, 2025 confirmed Donald Trump as the winner of the 2024 presidential election, and continued to organize ahead of the 119th Congress, with the federal government and its workforce in focus. Image: Xinhua/Shutterstock
By: FEDweek StaffTelework by federal employees became one of the early points of focus as Congress organizes for 2025-2026, with one of the first-introduced bills in the House, HR-107, seeking to require agencies to return to pre-pandemic practices.
A similar bill was one of the first items of legislation that the prior House passed and under continued Republican leadership there—and now with a pending change in the White House and support from its “department of government efficiency” commission—the bill could again get early attention.
The Senate under Democratic control in the prior Congress never took up that bill, although there was bipartisan support there for several less sweeping measures aimed at the impact of telework on underused office space.
Federal employee unions meanwhile are preparing to bring legal challenges to any changes that they see as violating provisions in labor-management contracts.
Other bills offered as the House organized included HR-201, to create a pilot program for linking federal employee more closely to productivity and HR-202, to set up a commission to “study the relocation of certain agencies outside of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.” All of those bills have been referred to the Oversight and Accountability Committee, which already has created a new subcommittee to deal with those and other priorities of the “DOGE” commission.
As announced earlier, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., will remain chairman of that panel, but Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., will take over as ranking Democrat, with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., moving to that position in the Judiciary Committee. Connolly has been perhaps the most active member of the House on federal employee issues in recent years.
As one of his first actions in the position, Connolly denounced the intention of House Republicans to keep in place for this Congress the “Holman Rule,” which allows Congress to reduce the salary of a federal official to as little as $1 a year. While that has not occurred for many years, Republicans have threatened its use several times in recent years, in what Connolly called a “mindless and vindictive fashion to target federal employees not for legitimate wrongdoing, but for personal grievances and targeted political attacks.”
On the Senate side, as expected Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan has become the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. With the change in control of that chamber to Republicans, that essentially is a swap with former ranking Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who as previously announced, is now chairman.
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