“It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns with people again,” said President Biden. With the worst of the pandemic over, “people who are working from home feel safe and are starting to return to the office.” We will be working face-to-face.” he added.
It was from the President’s 2016 State of the Union address. January 2022. It’s now June 2023 and it still hasn’t. Remote work seems to have become a remote operation, causing great damage to taxpayers.
Two months ago, the Biden administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued guidelines to “encourage” government agencies to return workers to full-time offices. However, according to The Hill, Guidance “We have not set a specific date or target for the transition to office work.”And we encourage remote work where it is most efficient, and perhaps some remote work will become a standard part of federal agencies in the future. ”
Clearly, there is no sense of urgency in repopulating federal agencies. To some extent it is understandable.April federal news network A survey of 4,700 federal employees found that two-thirds would look for a new job if they were ordered to work full-time, or at least more than they currently do. Whether or not so many people actually apply for jobs, much less find better conditions, it makes sense that agencies aren’t rushing morale issues.
But when it comes to maintaining “most efficient remote work,” currently available evidence says it wasn’t efficient at all.
When I was an OPM director testified Prior to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in March, it emerged that OPM was not adequately tracking telework levels and performance data. In May 2023, Chairman Cummer and nearly 20 Commission members letter 25 federal agencies are requesting information about telework and remote work fees and policies.and press release The commission, announced in the same month, announced that it would study the impact of federal agency work-from-home and telecommuting policies on employee performance and service delivery.
The transition to remote and telework made sense in the early stages of the pandemic. However, there were still many voices of concern that federal agencies lacked mechanisms to adequately oversee this transition. Unfortunately, as an internal division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), these concerns were not unfounded. report VPN login data obtained by the Functional Government Initiative (FGI) found that 25% of HHS employees did not log in to work on a given day.
in one of them, reportThe FGI compared the leave-taking status of employees at 24 federal agencies before and after pandemic work-from-home policies were implemented. An increase in telework was directly correlated with a dramatic decline in both annual leave and sick leave taken. Compared to pre-pandemic 2018 leave-taking, leave-taking rates for these federal agencies declined by 15-40 percent in 2020. This horrifying fact could mean that federal officials may have fudged their hours and attendance to the equivalent of $1.4 billion in taxpayer funds. .
Government agencies themselves also point to problems with telework. In September 2021, the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration (SSA) will review “employee computer logs and telephone records for the purpose of ensuring that employees are engaged in work activities at appropriate times.” The government said it had inspected them. Executive. “According to SSA IG staff, the investigation resulted in disciplinary action, including termination, of the employee.”
There are countless other federal policies enacted as a result of the pandemic that can be addressed. Indeed, many of the decisions made were understandable given the information available at the time, such as encouraging the use of masks.
But a new light after the pandemic shows that many policies were clearly harmful and abused by some federal officials. For some reason, the Biden administration continues to defend these policies, even wanting to perpetuate some without presenting data to support their effectiveness.
With so much taxpayer money at stake, it is natural for the public to expect greater transparency and accountability. Unfortunately, the federal government wasn’t keen on making it happen.
Pete McGinnis is Communications Director for the Functional Government Initiative (FGI), a watchdog group dedicated to shining a light on government dysfunction.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
