Teleworking feds are spending 60% of their time working in person, OMB says

A new report from the Office of Management and Budget found that as of May 2024, telework-eligible federal employees spent 61.2% of their work hours at traditional federal work sites, a rate that closely aligns with telework usage across all industries.

Over the last several years, congressional Republicans have become increasingly agitated by the perception that federal employees’ use of telework and remote work has been negatively impacting agencies’ productivity.

Administration officials and Democrats have argued that continued usage of telework and the creation of hybrid work environments are necessary following the COVID-19 pandemic, both to protect the continuity of operations and to compete with private sector employers for talent, instead blaming chronic underfunding of agencies for many backlogs. But they have often lacked the data to prove it, owing in part to the fact that the Office of Personnel Management’s annual telework reports are published more than a year removed from when the underlying data are collected.

When Congress enacted appropriations legislation for fiscal 2024 earlier this year, it included a requirement that the White House produce a slew of data on federal agency telework and how agencies aim to reduce their physical footprint if they are using less than 60% of their office space.

OMB sent the result of that provision—a nearly 3,000-page report including both government-wide telework data and a snapshot of each of the 24 CFO Act agencies’ telework programs—to Congress last week. The document measures telework usage across two consecutive biweekly pay periods in May 2024.

In May 2024, the federal government employed 2.3 million civilian workers, of whom 54% worked entirely in-person due to their jobs not being conducive to telework, leaving a telework-eligible population of 1.1 million workers. Remote work, a practice by which an employee may work entirely from their home or agency-approved alternative work site, accounted for 228,000 employees, or 10% of the civilian workforce.

Measuring the 1.1 million telework-eligible workers, 61.2% of their work hours were spent in person—that is, at their traditional office or working in the field. Including telework-ineligible jobs, 79.4% of work hours were spent in person in May 2024.

“This administration’s north star is ensuring that federal agencies are centering organizational and operational decisions on delivering results for the American people,” OMB wrote. “[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 remain competitive in the marketplace for talent.”

A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office examining the compensation gap between federal workers and their private sector counterparts concluded that in 2022, federal workers actually returned to traditional work sites faster than employees in other industries.

OMB cross-referenced its own data with nationwide telework rates as measured in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly Current Population Survey, which found that Americans who “teleworked or worked at home for pay” spent 27.1 hours of their 40-hour work week on average teleworking, or 68% of their work hours.

The administration also defended its approach to bringing employees back into traditional work sites, noting the many logistical challenges that involve prepping for the return of in-person work for more than 1 million employees.

“Over the course of 2023, OMB hosted a bi-weekly working group for senior agency leaders tasked with implementation to work through areas of common concern,” OMB wrote. “Topics included managing reenrollment in [Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority] commuter benefits, reopening cafeterias, modernizing workspaces, best practices for tracking implementation of workplace postures and human capital data standards. OMB has committed to helping agencies make the necessary changes to strike the right balance and providing support where needed to remove barriers in implementation.”

The report also sought to justify its deliberate pace in reducing the federal government’s physical footprint to reflect the new hybrid work environment at many agencies, in the face of increasing calls to offload unneeded real estate and leased facilities. And it blamed those lawmakers, who OMB said redirected more than $13 billion over the last decade out of the GSA Federal Buildings Fund.

“It is important to note that the average age of federal facilities is more than 50 years, and older buildings are not efficient or optimally configured for modern work and often require significant modification,” the document states. “Many agencies recognized that they had more office space than needed prior to the pandemic and face continued challenges in right-sizing their real property portfolio, including specifically lack of funding from Congress to reconfigure and consolidate office space to support mission needs.”