A new report from the White House Office of Management and Budget says that half of federal employees are currently engaged in telework. The other half are not eligible and perform their duties onsite each day.

Of the telework eligible federal employees, OMB says that 60% of their work is being done at agency assigned job sites. This is actually higher than what the report says is the ultimate goal which is that telework eligible teams spend half of their time in the office. It states:

Federal agencies are moving towards a posture where, on average, telework-eligible teams are working in-person at the office at least half of the time—in addition to the roughly half of federal employees that work entirely in person already. This enables agencies to tailor approaches based on their diverse operational needs while ensuring agencies achieve the benefits of meaningful in-person work for strong teams and organizations. This approach aligns the federal government’s posture to industry while allowing agencies to remaining competitive in the marketplace for talent.

The report also states that agencies are taking into consideration the impact that increased telework has on their real estate holdings and are working to dispose of unneeded property. It says, “Agencies have undertaken considerable work to dispose of unneeded
property, reduce costs, and improve overall utilization of real estate.”

The report also contains telework policies and collective bargaining agreements as they relate to telework for each of the 24 agencies included in the report. The agencies are:

1. Department of Agriculture
2. Department of Commerce
3. Department of Defense
4. Department of Education
5. Department of Energy
6. Department of Health and Human Services
7. Department of Homeland Security
8. Department of Housing and Urban Development
9. Department of Justice
10. Department of Labor
11. Department of State
12. Department of the Interior
13. Department of the Treasury
14. Department of Transportation
15. Department of Veterans Affairs
16. Environmental Protection Agency
17. General Services Administration
18. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
19. National Science Foundation
20. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
21. Office of Personnel Management
22. Small Business Administration
23. Social Security Administration
24. U.S. Agency for International Development

Other key data points as of May 2024 that OMB shared are:

• The federal government employed 2.28 million civilian personnel.
• Of these 2.28 million personnel, the majority – 1.2 million or 54% – worked fully on-site,
  as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours.
• The remaining 1.1 million or 46.4% of civilian personnel were telework-eligible.
• Of the total 2.28 million personnel, 228,000 (10%) of civilian personnel were in
  remote positions where there was no expectation that they worked in-person on any
  regular or recurring basis.
• Among all federal employees, excluding remote workers that do not have a work-site to
  report to, 79.4% of regular, working hours were spent in-person.
• Among the subset of federal workers that are telework-eligible, excluding remote
  workers, 61.2% of regular, working hours were spent in-person.

Part of what drove this report is OMB guidance issued last year which was to “help ensure that agency decisions about their work environments continually improve their organization’s health and performance, including substantially increasing in-person work."

The Biden administration has also faced pressure from Congress to get federal employees back to work in greater numbers now that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. As far back as 2022, lawmakers were asking the administration why so many federal employees were still working from home since President Biden had said during his 2022 State of the Union, “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”

Lawmakers have also raised questions about the number of empty offices in agency buildings resulting from telework. A GAO report found that half of agency headquarters buildings it reviewed for a three-month period in 2023 were using less than half of their capacities.

In addition, abuses of telework have been uncovered by investigations which found that some federal employees were living in areas with a lower locality pay rate while collecting higher locality pay from urban areas.

It now appears that Congress will have much of the telework related data it has been seeking in this report. It will be interesting to see what it will mean for telework in the future.