Only one of every three federal employees shows up at their office to perform their work duties, even though President Joe Biden declared an end to the COVID-19 pandemic more than a year ago, according to House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
“Three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of America has returned to in-person work.
“However, while the Capitol and congressional office buildings have reopened to the public and are back to in-person work, the same cannot be said for large portions of the federal government,” Comer told a March 9 hearing of the panel that focused on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
OPM manages the federal government’s 2.1 million civil service workers.
OPM Director Kiran Ahuja was appointed in 2021 by Biden.
“The president himself said during his 2022 State of the Union address—yes, last year—‘It’s time for America to get back to work. People working from home can feel safe again and begin to return to their offices,’” Comer stated.
“Clearly, the president has at least stated that this is a priority for the administration, and it is a priority of this committee as well.
“And yet, reports have shown that only 1 in 3 federal employees has returned to the workplace since the start of the pandemic.”
Negative Feedback Damaging
“In the private sector, negative feedback is damaging to a company’s brand and often leads to sweeping reforms to ensure that issues like these do not persist,” Comer said.“When customer service plummets in the federal agencies, where can the American people go for redress? That’s why we are holding this hearing today.”
In her prepared testimony, Ahuja told the committee that the federal workforce has been allowing teleworking for more than a decade and has found that it improves productivity and morale.
She pointed to an evaluation by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that showed that “from 2008 to 2019, the overall attrition rate for full-time remote workers was an average of 1.5 percent lower than that of non-teleworkers.
“The USPTO has also highlighted improved productivity, showing that patent examiners in the remote work program produced an average of 81.07 Patent Production Units (PPUs), compared to 76.28 PPUs produced by non-teleworking employees” in 2019.
Requirements Changed
The committee’s ranking Democrat member, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), whose district is home to more federal workers than any other in the country, told the OPM director, “When the president is saying the emergency is over, I assure you my friends on the other side of the aisle, probably joined by a fair number on this side of the aisle, are going to expect that the workplace requirements changed with that change.”Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), for example, declared: “The federal government is not at work, the federal government is not producing the results that we think would be necessary. Forget going to the passport office and what a disaster that is.
“Try doing business with the State Department overseas, try doing business with the IRS, try doing business with day-to-day people who may be at the Small Business Administration.”
Sessions told Ahuja that “more people are teleworking than are allowed” by current OPM guidelines.
Teleworking ‘Improves’ Productivity: Survey
She said an OPM survey also found that “more than 60 percent reported ’significant in-person time.'”“We have seen in a number of cases that teleworking actually improved productivity, improved performance,” the OPM director said. “Employment engagement scores are actually tied to and have much higher scores for teleworking.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) asked Ahuja, “Is that 52 percent or what?” about her “more than 50 percent” estimate for how many federal workers are now working from their offices.
“I don’t know, I know it’s more than 50,” she responded.
Similarly, when asked by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) what would be an acceptable amount of time for federal workers to spend “on their own stuff” while teleworking, Ahuja hesitated.
Perry then pointed out that at the Department of Defense, “527,000 hours—that’s the equivalent of 60 years—were spent in [2019] working on their own stuff. Is that acceptable?” The figure for the Department of Veterans Affairs was 500,000 hours.
Ahuja responded, “Congressman, I am not familiar with those data points,” but she noted that much of the time Perry referred to was devoted to union representation activities governed by the collective bargaining agreements negotiated with federal agencies by federal employee unions.
The OPM director also was unable to say, when asked by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), how many sex-change operations were paid for last year by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which her agency administers.
She also acknowledged that she was unaware of the ill health effects of some of the drugs used in such procedures.
Later in the hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) described Gosar’s question as “a shameful attack on trans kids and families.”
Another Arizona Republican, Rep. Andy Biggs, said he was told by one constituent who retired from the federal workforce in 2021 that he didn’t begin receiving retirement benefits for 13 months and another constituent told him that the OPM telephone helpline is “a black box.”
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