After more than a year of probing, lawmakers have finally received agency data from the White House on Federal telework numbers.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) presented Congress with a report on Friday detailing each of the 24 CFO Act agencies’ telework and real property utilization numbers – finding that “Federal employees returned to in-person work at rates comparable to the private sector by 2022.”
Notably, the report finds that 54 percent of the Federal government’s 2.28 million employees work fully on-site as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours, providing healthcare to veterans, inspecting food supply, and managing Federal natural resources.
The remaining 46 percent of the Federal workforce is telework eligible, with only 10 percent of Federal employees – 228,000 – in fully remote positions. The OMB report found that among the subset of Federal workers that are telework-eligible – excluding remote workers – they spent 61 percent of their time in-person.
The data that makes up OMB’s new report was collected from all 24 CFO Act agencies in April and May 2024. OMB averaged two pay periods during those two months to provide an overview of in-person work across government.
OMB called on Federal agencies to increase their teleworking employees’ in-office work to at least 50 percent – about two and a half days per week – but the report notes that “there is significant variation agency-to-agency in their progress towards OMB’s goal of 50% of time spent in-person among teleworkers.”
Ten of the 24 agencies – nearly half – reported that their telework employees spent less than OMB’s expected 50 percent of working hours in-person.
The Treasury Department reported the lowest number of hours spent in-person: 35.7 percent. OMB’s report highlights that the nine other agencies that failed to hit the 50 percent mark are the Departments of Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Labor, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, National Science Foundation, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Social Security Administration.
The Department of Agriculture had the highest number of in-person working hours amongst its telework employees, reporting 81 percent.
Republican lawmakers have led the effort to get Federal employees back into the office, with the House passing the SHOW UP Act last year that would roll back Federal agency telework policies to their year-end 2019 levels.
However, OMB has held strong in its belief that the ability to telework is critical for growing the Federal workforce. OMB Deputy Director Jason Miller told lawmakers in April that OMB landed on the 50 percent target “because it’s consistent with where the private sector is [and] we think given where the market is, that’s the right answer.”
“In crafting our governmentwide guidance, we have followed very closely the research and actions by the private sector,” Miller said. “Ultimately, we need to compete for talent. Right now, we have a major effort underway in trying to implement AI and strengthen our use of AI in the Federal government. That’s going to require competing with the private sector for talent.”
In May, the Senate introduced legislation that would limit remote work by Federal employees to 40 percent.
OMB Finds Underutilized Fed Office Space Costs $81M
The report also notes that there is 24.046 million square feet of underutilized owned and leased office space.
The total cost of owned and leased office space designated as “underutilized” is $81.346 million – approximately 1 percent of the total cost of owned and leased office space, according to OMB.
All 24 CFO Act agencies provided a description of their efforts to reduce their office portfolio and discussed their utilization rate included in OMB’s new report. The Government Accountability Office called on OMB late last year to measure Federal office building use and get rid of unneeded space.
“It is important to note that ‘underutilized’ office space is often a required asset in a specific location by one or more agencies,” the report says. “The cost of maintaining an owned asset that has become underutilized due to staff reduction, for example, may be a more cost-effective solution than constructing a smaller building that would be fully utilized or leasing commercial office space.”
